Nebraska football defensive coordinator John Butler knows he needs to see more out of his Blackshirt defense after a disappointing performance against Minnesota on Friday.
Nebraska lost 24-6 to the Golden Gophers, allowing junior running back Darius Taylor to rush for 148 yards. As a team, they ran for 186 total yards, a season-high against FBS competition.
“Every week is going to be a fight, where it’s going to be about who plays better, and who comes and plays more physical, and is more aggressive, and executes harder, and plays harder,” Butler said Tuesday afternoon. “That’s the identity of this league; it always has been. When you used to say, ‘What’s Big Ten football?’ It’s lining up and stopping the run, defending the run, running the football in these types of environments. So, I think whether it’s this week against Northwestern, next week against our next opponent, they’re all going to be the same and they’re all going to be, I think, tightly contested battles.”
In Monday’s press conference, Coach Matt Rhule described the defensive game plan as “vanilla.” The unit struggled to stop the run and didn’t fare much better against the pass. Minnesota freshman quarterback Drake Lindsey went 16-of-20 for 153 yards with one touchdown through the air and another on the ground.
“I think he’s referencing the fact that I didn’t call the game as aggressively as I had planned,” Butler said in response to Rhule’s comments. “We started off pretty strong the first two drives, got into a decent rhythm, and then after that explosive run, that probably affected me more than it should, and it shouldn’t. Every play has its own life, so what’s going to happen on the next play is not about what has happened on the previous play, so kind of a ‘What’s next?’ mentality.”
Junior corner Andrew Marshall said that the defense met after the game to talk about their attitude going into the contest against Minnesota.
“We just kind of felt like we took our foot off the gas after that W against Maryland,” Marshall said. “It was a hard-fought battle. I felt like we got just slightly comfortable. So, going into the Minnesota game, I felt like we didn’t stick to our process as much as we needed to, which affected us overall on the field.”
Senior linebacker Marques Watson-Trent acknowledged the struggles as well.
“I feel like we kind of relaxed a little bit, and I think it’s difficult when you’re winning to hone in on the details,” Watson-Trent said. “Sometimes, Coach talked about the creep, of like we let little things slip, little details slip, and little things lead to big things. So entitlement might be a word, but I just think it was just a little relaxed.”
Another area the Husker defense has struggled with thus far is the turnover battle. Coming into the game against Minnesota, the Blackshirts only had three interceptions, with their last one coming against Michigan State on Oct. 4.
“You get takeaways two ways,” Butler said. “First, through dominant contact on the body to the ball carrier. So, whether that’s a running back, a receiver, a tight end, knocking the hell out of them with dominant contact at or around the ball. The second way is affecting and hitting the quarterback. So, I have to do a better job of designing things, and calling things, that are going to do that, and I think the takeaways will come as we get that accomplished.”
Now, the Nebraska defense is looking to bounce back against Northwestern on Saturday.
“It’s been a well response,” Watson-Trent said of the team’s answers in practice this week. “If a loss like that doesn’t hurt a team, you can tell what kind of season they’re going to have. I’ve been a part of teams where losing really didn’t matter. Here, it matters to an extreme. We’re sitting at five wins. There’s a lot of great in the season, and the season is not over yet, but we take everything so seriously, and that’s the most important thing.”
The Wildcats will be no easy task coming into Saturday’s game with a 5-2 record. Offensively, they’re ranked sixth in the Big Ten in rushing, averaging 190 yards per game. They’re only 16th in passing offense at 174.3 yards per game, but senior quarterback Preston Stone has a reliable option out wide in junior Griffin Wilde, who has 36 receptions for 516 yards and four touchdowns on the season.
“When they want to throw it, they’re throwing it to him,” Butler said. “He lines up every position on the field. He’s strong, he’s competitive as hell, his quarterback knows where he is. He doesn’t shrink in big moments on big stages, whether he’s playing at Penn State or whether he’s playing whoever else they’ve played. So, he’s a really good player. He reminds me a lot of Eric Decker when I coached at Minnesota years ago.”
Saturday’s game at Memorial Stadium is set for an 11 a.m. CT kickoff on Big Ten Network.
“We just got to freaking play every play like our hair’s on fire and let somebody else worry about the score,” Butler said.
