On the challenge of facing Lincoln Riley’s offense
“They’re a handful. They average 530 yards a game, 7.89 yards per play, and they’re scoring over 40 points a game. They can run it, they can throw it, they have a good quarterback, they have good wide outs, they have an athletic offensive line, so it’s a huge challenge. It’s a great opportunity though. You either look at things as challenges or threats, and this is a great challenge for us and our young defense to go out and play in a great environment against a great offense that has a system in place that is a system you can watch from way back when he was at East Carolina all the way until now. He clearly knows what he wants to do in terms of when he wants to run it and how he wants to throw it so it’s a great challenge.” 

On USC in the road game atmosphere
“I would ask every single Husker fan at the game to be as loud and as crazy and as disruptive as they can be and we’re going to try and do the same with how we play and how I call the game, but we need every bit of help we can get. Obviously when you play at home in front of our crowd in front of our people in a night game we want to take advantage of that opportunity. At the end of the day it’s going to come down to how our defense plays and how our defense executed against a really good offense and a really good play caller.”

On Lincoln Riley using two tight ends
“The thing with his 12 personnel set is he has tight ends that can play wide out and tight ends that can play tight end. A lot of times when you see that, it’s a popular thing that people do in the NFL, but a lot of times you can decipher this is the U tight end, or maybe the more finesse tight end, and this is their blocking tight end, you can kind of put your pieces of the puzzle together that way, but when you look at their guys the ball is equally distributed to them, they’re equally used as blockers, they snipe back across the line of scrimmage, they counter and come back. When you’re looking at players in general, defense or offense, you want them to be as complete as they can be because you’re not wanting to say, okay this guy can only do this and now you have to sub and then people can get a tell for you. Their 12 personnel grouping is a threat because they can get together and block you and they can spread out and throw it on you. I think that’s always a challenge.”