Husker in WI
New member
Kaliakmanis has a strong arm and looks a lot better and more accurate than he was with Minnesota. Plus he has wheels to scramble a bit.
I really didn't see anything different - he manages to get good zip on the ball some of the time, but the ball tends to take a long time to get from his hand to the receiver on out routes. He's avoiding mistakes well (something he did not do at Minnesota), but otherwise he's the same guy. Washington did well against Monangai to be honest - he had two explosive runs (28 and 40), but otherwise carried 23 times for 64 yards. He's really good, and if you give a really good RB 25 carries he's going to get his yards. Just can't let him get yards on every drive.
They'll take shots if you let them, but I think our gameplan will be similar to Washington's. Focus on slowing down Monangai, secondary focus on not letting receivers get deep, and make Kaliakmanis keep hitting the short routes all the way down the field. He will probably end up with a higher completion percentage than any of us like to see, but for relatively low yards. It's really hard to shut down everything an offense wants to do, and our goals are to not give up explosives and stuff the run. We'll kind of let teams take the short pass options on RPOs, and then tighten down on those situationally or when they get near the red zone and there's just less ground for the defense to cover.