With a win this weekend, Nebraska football finally has something to feel good about during what has been a most-difficult season for the program. And with an important game on the schedule this Friday night at Rutgers, will the real Nebraska stand up?
In preseason, Nebraska was getting lots of hype, with the Cornhuskers being a popular pick to make it to the Big Ten Championship Game. It was thought that the close, tough and hard-fought losses of last year would fade away.
But Nebraska (2-3, 1-1 Big Ten) has had similar struggles this season, leading to the firing of Scott Frost three weeks ago. Interim head coach Mickey Joseph got his first win with the program with a 35-21 win over Indiana on Saturday night.
On Tuesday, the Big Ten Network’s Howard Griffith said that he finally saw things coming together for Nebraska.
“This was the first time in a long time that we’ve seen a Nebraska team facing adversity, right in the middle of the game, and be able to overcome said adversity,” Griffith said on the Big Ten Network.
“Normally, we’d sit in the green room and its like ‘Here we go again! Right? Here we go!’ But the players – like players are – they are resilient. Because it is a new coaching staff, really, to some degree, because they’re being led by a new head coach. But they believed and that is kind of what we were talking about really going back to last year.
“They needed some good things to happen for them, the ball to bounce the right way, to be able to make plays when their backs were against the wall. And that’s what we saw happen and we hadn’t see that in previous years.”
Griffith is a former fullback at Illinois who went on to spend over a decade in the NFL. He is now with the Big Ten Network as an analyst.
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