BYU Spoils Mike Riley's Debut with Hail Mary
Randy York N-Sider
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Take it straight from Matt Davison and Steve Taylor: Nebraska’s football team is young and resilient and has the heart and chemistry to rebound from the Huskers’ 33-28 loss to BYU, which completed a 42-yard fourth-down Hail Mary touchdown pass to end NU’s nation-leading 29 straight season-opening wins.
The loss broke a three-decade winning streak, plus the hearts of Husker fans who remember the positive side of a similar 2013 ending when Ron Kellogg III and Jordan Westerkamp combined to deliver the first Hail Mary completion in Memorial Stadium history.
Talk about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Westerkamp caught seven passes for 107 yards and a touchdown Saturday, and one can only imagine how he and his roommate, quarterback Tommy Armstrong Jr., processed a loss that negated Tommy’s 24-of-41 pass completions for 319 yards and three touchdowns – the second-highest total of his career, trailing only the 381 passing yards against USC in the 2014 Holiday Bowl.
Davison Knows All About Plays You Don’t Expect to Happen
Crushed would be one way to describe the turnabout. Eager to bounce back would be the emotional antidote for turbo-charged Tommy, pictured above, and his teammates.
“I know the elation that comes after a play like that Hail Mary pass,” said Davison, who once caught a flying football off a teammate’s foot in the end zone to force a miracle at Missouri into overtime. The Huskers went on to win that memorable thriller before going on to cap Tom Osborne’s final 1997 season with a national championship.
Now a color analyst on the Husker Sports Network, Davison works in tandem with play-by-play announcer Greg Sharpe and Taylor, a Husker All-America quarterback, who was on the sideline with a bird’s-eye view of the improbable catch. Even though the result depressed Husker coaches, players and fans, it had to impress an ABC national television audience that would find it difficult to change the channel.
“I know exactly how Tommy and his teammates feel right now,” Taylor said. “I remember losing to Oklahoma in a game that had the same kind of drama, and I’ll never forget how we lost to Florida State in the Fiesta Bowl after we had the game won and let it slip away.”
Teams, Players Can Grow After Experiencing a Tough Loss
That’s the bad news. The good news is “when you lose a game like that, you grow from it,” Taylor said. “I was in the locker room after the game. It was a tough loss, a heart-breaking loss, but the young guys in that locker room are going to learn from it, and they’re going to move on.”
A negative finish can transform itself into a positive lesson. Fortunately, while Husker football fans were shaking their heads driving home from the game and others, who were glued to their television sets, became unglued before supper, there’s hope.
No one is panicking. “We can correct some of things that happened today,” an even-keeled Mike Riley said following his Husker coaching debut. “One thing we have, and I know we can build on after watching this team today, is that this is a competitive, fighting football team. I love that.”
Riley Likes the Way His Team Fights; Corrections Will Be Made
Riley received a warm welcome from Husker fans during the unity walk into the stadium. He praised the way his sputtering team re-energized, kept fighting and took control before relinquishing in the game’s final second. “We made some plays and just kept fighting right down to the very end,” he said. “We can correct some of this stuff. We’re going to be all right.”
Offensive lineman Alex Lewis and Armstrong Jr. set the tone in the postgame locker room. The captains reinforced the way the Huskers fought. Riley’s seasoned voice in the same room was equally motivating, according to Mark Philipp, Nebraska’s head football strength coach. “Alex talked about what’s ahead,” Phillip said. “He talked about learning, growing and improving. We have 11 more games ahead of us. This will make us better.”
Nate Gerry agrees. In Nebraska’s postgame locker room, the junior safety diagnosed his momentum-shifting third quarter interception, then analyzed the vantage point he had before the clock struck midnight five hours too early. "We had a plan where I was the jumper and we had some other guys up front that were supposed to kind of jam them and not let their receivers run down the field,” Gerry said. “Another guy came on the back side, ran a deep post and went up and got it."
Davison Had a Premonition about Hail Mary Pass in South End
"From my vantage point, I didn't see him until the last second,” Gerry (No. 25 above) said. “Our defense as a whole didn't execute on that type of play. Those are things we worked on in fall camp. You just don't think it's going to happen until it actually happens, so it was a tough play."
As tough as it was, Davison pointed out to his radio listeners that BYU would be attempting its Hail Mary into the same south end zone that connected Kellogg III with Westerkamp.
Gerry didn’t think about the Northwestern Hail Mary until he reached the locker room. “It was in the same spot Westy (Jordan Westerkamp) caught his with a backup quarterback to launch it in like we did with Ron (Kellogg), so it's kind of like a good and bad memory."
Taylor was on the sideline and heard Davison share his clairvoyant thought with a national audience of his own during the timeout before the play. “Matt actually said it twice,” Taylor said. “I thought, ‘oh, man’, that can’t happen. I was right there. We had guys in position, just like they’re taught. The excitement felt like slow motion. It was surreal when he caught the ball.”
Every Team Practices to Prevent Completing a Hail Mary Pass
Davison said every team practices for Hail Mary possibilities. “People practice and practice in different slots,” he said. “For this particular one, I think the ball was underthrown and all the defenders were behind him. It became a basketball play, where they just go up to see who ends up with the ball. It was bread-basket catch that fell into the end zone. You can talk all you want about Hail Mary passes, but every play is different.”
Down on the field, a colleague shared a thought about how tall BYU receivers are and how they like to battle for the football like they were in a jump ball for basketball. Less than 30 seconds before the play, Nebraska football writer/analyst Sean Callahan made the same intuitive, telepathic observation Davison did. “You know BYU will be throwing into the same end zone Ron Kellogg did,” Callahan told me, shaking his head before the play started.”
The unlikely catch reflects the fine line that separates the beauty and the bane of college football. Whichever team feels the pain has only one choice. When Gerry, pictured above on his interception return, was asked about the process to move on, he acknowledged the only thing that matters right now. “We got to come back to practice Monday and practice better,” he said before exiting.
For Nebraska football, Labor Day will be a day of labor and the first step for the Huskers to rewrite the script for the rest of the season. If you’re looking for a dramatic primer on what can happen when you change the direction of the season, exactly one year and one day ago, Virginia Tech upset Ohio State, 35-21, in Columbus.
You know the rest of the story.
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