By Brian Rosenthal / Huskers.com
Downtrodden Purdue came to Lincoln only six days after its head coach had been fired, meaning No. 8 Nebraska certainly expected the nothing-to-lose Boilermakers to try anything and everything.
Sure enough, interim coach Gerad Parker, the team’s wide receivers coach, tried silencing 90,546 fans at Memorial Stadium with a trick play on the game’s first play from scrimmage.
Problem was, it didn’t work.
“We knew that was coming, and that’s what came the very first play,” said Nebraska safety Kieron Williams, who intercepted a halfback pass. “Coach (Mark) Banker did well this week with getting us prepared for the trick plays.”
Williams, who collected another interception in the fourth quarter to push his season total to a team-leading four, had set up Nebraska at the Purdue 22-yard line after he saw running back Markel Jones pull up on the perimeter.
“If I were to say I was disciplined, I’d be wrong,” Williams said with a chuckle. “I actually thought it was a toss play, because that’s the play we had looked at. We saw I-toss all week, so I was coming down and I saw him put his arm up and I was able to break on the ball.
“Coach Banker was like, ‘Did you notice that, or what?’ I was like, ‘Uhhhh, yeah, let’s just go with that.”
Quarterback Tommy Armstrong Jr. scored untouched on Nebraska’s first play from scrimmage, and the touchdown, only 16 seconds into the game, was the Huskers’ quickest since 1999 against Colorado.
If only the rest of the game had gone that easy.
Once again, Nebraska, forever grateful these football games aren’t judged like beauty pageants, sputtered in the second quarter, and then found another gear in the fourth quarter to defeat Purdue 27-14.
Nebraska (7-0, 4-0 Big Ten Conference) takes an unblemished record and eight-game winning streak into next week’s game at Top 10 Wisconsin, a meeting that will weigh heavily in determining the Big Ten West Division champion.
“I just love the attitude and kind of the will to win we’ve shown,” said senior linebacker Josh Banderas, who led Nebraska with 13 tackles. “It might not have been pretty every game, but somehow we’ve found a way to win.”
Which is more than can be said for last year’s 6-7 team that lost all games by a combined 31 points, or a margin that’s still slimmer than Nebraska’ last defeat at Camp Randall Stadium in 2014,
“It’s just a feel of confidence to know we’ve done this,” Banderas said. “We’ve turned the page from last year and we know who we are and we know this is our time to close and finish this.”
Purdue (3-4, 1-3) rebounded from its inauspicious beginning by riding the arm of quarterback David Blough and two big passing plays to go ahead 14-7 in the second quarter. De’Angelo Yancey scored both touchdowns, his second on an 88-yard catch-and-run, and some were wondering what’d happened to Nebraska’s self-labeled Lockdown U secondary.
Well, it returned in the second half.
The Huskers had six pass breakups, and Blough finished 25-of-43 passing after, at one point, throwing completions at a rate of nearly 80 percent.
Banker, the Huskers’ defensive coordinator, said Nebraska began the game like it practiced early last week – “lethargic” – but regrouped.
“The players were talking positive to each other, telling each other what had just transpired wasn’t acceptable,” Banker said, “then we ended up playing much better as the game progressed.”
Purdue, the Big Ten’s top passing offense, finished with 309 passing yards but only 25 rushing yards.
“Our D-line played great today,” Williams said. “Our linebackers played great, and everybody was able to come up and make plays.”
Banderas had double-digit tackles for the second straight game after finishing with 11 at Indiana. He had that many in the first half Saturday.
“It’s a whole team thing, everybody doing their assignment and making it easier for me to get places,” Banderas said. “I don’t have to do anything extra or worry about getting out-run to the sideline because I’ve got somebody leveraging me. I think it’s a team thing and I’m the benefactor of it.”
Offensively, Nebraska simply couldn’t produce rushing yards consistently against a team that had been giving them up in bunches in previous games.
Thanks against to a strong fourth quarter, the Huskers finished with a respectable 157 rushing yards while averaging 4.2 per carry.
The first three quarters weren’t so productive.
“It was a struggle for a lot of the game. That is a concern,” Nebraska offensive coordinator Danny Langsdorf said. “We’ve found a way to win games, which is great, but we have to be more productive and more consistent in the run game, for sure.
“That fourth quarter for us has been good all year, but we make it hard on ourselves by the first, second and third quarters.”
Lack of production on first and second down forced Nebraska “to play in a bad way,” Langsdorf said. The Huskers are playing with a banged-up offensive line; tackles Nick Gates and David Knevel are battling ankle injuries, and Knevel, for a third straight game, didn’t finish.
“We’re fighting through some stuff and guys are dinged, a little bit banged up, but that’s just an excuse,” Langsdorf said. “We have to play better. We have to do a better job finishing blocks and handling run pressures.
“That’s how people are playing us. It’s not a surprise. It’s not hard to see. We got to put it on our guys to continue to fight and get healthy and get ready to play.”
Certainly, it’s not an ideal situation as Nebraska prepares for a stingy Wisconsin defense that held Iowa to three field goals on Saturday.
“We’re pretty thin there right now,” Nebraska coach Mike Riley said, “but we’re not going to talk about that too much because when we go out there we expect to look better than that and play better than that as a group, have some more consistency. I’m hoping that we will feel better and get healthier as we go. We’ll have to look at it closely.”
Despite lack of production on first and second downs, Nebraska was 7-of-15 on third-down, and Armstrong and his receiving corps made Purdue play with one-on-one matchups on the perimeter.
Senior receiver Brandon Reilly caught four passes for 73 yards, and De’Mornay Pierson-El had three catches for 69 yards, including a big 40-yard catch-and-run touchdown on a quick slant.
That was just enough for Nebraska to exhale, yet again.
“We didn’t have our best game out there,” Reilly said, “but any time you can start a season out 7-0, that was our goal coming into it, and we’re still moving forward.”
Reach Brian at brosenthal@huskers.com or follow him on Twitter @GBRosenthal.