Huskers Stay Physical in Week Three

Lincoln? The Nebraska football team got back to hard-hitting in full pads on Tuesday with a three-hour practice under ideal weather conditions in Memorial Stadium.

The Huskers practice included a quick-paced string of plays, pitting the number one and two defenses against each other, respectively, designed to mimic game-like situations. Offensive coordinator Jay Norvell pointed out the notable improvements the offensive line has shown due to scrimmaging.

“Because we’ve become more physical, we’re much more coordinated than we’ve ever been,” Norvell said. “Guys have worked together and that really shows. We’re more of a unit than we’ve ever been. Everyone is really working, and they understand what the concepts are. We communicate better, and they’re just much more comfortable playing together. And we’re starting to gather a much more physical mentality, so that’s exciting to see.”

The increase in the physicality in practice has brought improvement to all facets of the squad, including the I-Back position, where both newcomer and junior college transfer Kenny Wilson and sophomore Cody Glenn have shown sparks throughout training camp, including finding holes for long-yardage bursts.

“(Improvement) just comes from running the ball in practice,” Norvell said. “We’ve been emphasizing that, and our guys know we expect them to do certain things, and we’ve been really pounding that on them and scrimmaging a lot in the last few days, and we’ll scrimmage more. We’ve told them it’s going to be a physical camp and it has been. They’re going to be tired and they’re going to be sore.”

Despite bumps and bruises throughout the squad, Coach Callahan plans to continue to scrimmage through the week until the team’s break on Saturday for fan day in Memorial Stadium.

“We’ll be a couple weeks in (with scrimmaging) this Saturday, so I think Coach wants to bang them pretty good this week so they have some time to heal up (over the weekend),” Norvell said. “But we need the scrimmage, we need to tackle on defense, we need to block, we need to find out what we’ve got from these backs and see them in full contact. We can’t really find that out if (the defense) is tagging off on them. So we need to find out what we have before we get out there and play a ballgame.”

Joe Ganz wore the yellow jersey for the offense, while Corey McKeon wore the yellow jersey on the defensive side and Jordan Congdon represented special teams.

The Huskers return to the practice field on Wednesday morning for their third day of two-a-day practices.