Husker offense evolving into a success

[HuskerTrucker]

Husker offense evolving into a success

 

By BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star

Monday, Nov 17, 2008 - 01:14:48 pm CST

 

As players began to load a bus for a feel-good ride home on Saturday, Tom Osborne stood outside the Husker locker room, pausing for a few moments to give his attention to the stat sheet.

 

The coach-turned-athletic director must’ve liked what he saw. The numbers read like numbers from the good ol’ days — five Huskers rushing for more than 45 yards with a quarterback leading the way, no less.

 

The numbers of senior quarterback Joe Ganz were so good (270 yards passing, 95 rushing) that he was named Big 12 Offensive Player of the Week on Monday.

 

Aside from penalties bogging down a couple drives in the third quarter, offensive coordinator Shawn Watson’s offense did as it pleased in a 56-28 win over Kansas State — piling up 610 total yards, 340 of those rushing.

 

Since spreading things out and abandoning some of the heavy-set packages in midseason, the Huskers have won four of their last five and ascended up the offensive charts.

 

The Huskers currently rank 10th in the country in total offense, and that multiplicity Husker head coach Bo Pelini said he wanted to have before the season is starting to show.

 

“It’s getting there. You got to evolve. You got to keep moving along, and I knew Wats was a guy that could do that,” Pelini said during Monday’s Big 12 Coaches Teleconference. “You have to play to the strengths and weaknesses of your talent and putting the guys in the best position that they can be successful. And I think that we’re doing that and I think we use our personnel well. I like what I’m seeing on the offensive side.”

 

Pelini said Watson has done “a great job” of keeping defenses off-balance, mixing the run and the pass.

 

Going into the K-State game, Husker coaches saw that they might be able to exploit the Wildcats with the zone-read play.

 

And they did. Big-time.

 

Ganz scored off the zone read twice in the fourth quarter — first on a 27-yard run and then off a 14-yard run. On both plays, K-State defenders bit hard on the fake and Ganz ran basically untouched to the end zone.

 

“We’ve run the zone read a number of times this year. It was open,” Pelini said. “Joe made the right reads and made guys miss. He played real well, ran the ball well, ran the team well.”

 

The 95 rushing yards were a career-high for Ganz and the most by a Nebraska quarterback since Jammal Lord had 109 against Texas A&M in 2003.

 

The 340 yards rushing against K-State was Nebraska’s best rushing performance against a Big 12 team in six years.

 

The going was so good that Nebraska got to rest Ganz most of the fourth quarter. Both Pat Witt and Zac Lee saw action.

 

Witt came in with 10:53 left in the game. Lee came in on Nebraska’s next series, rushing twice for 17 yards.

 

How’s the race going between the two backups?

 

“It’s kind of gone back and forth a little bit,” Pelini said. “We think they’re both capable, very good players. We were kind of in a run mode at the end of the game, kind of run the clock out. It’s kind of hard to evaluate them off of that performance in that situation, but I thought they both did well."”

 

Saturday came with a lot of positives for Nebraska, but Pelini feels his team still needs to clean up some of its mental lapses.

 

“Just being consistent and putting four quarters together,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ve quite done that yet to our potential.”

 

Maybe not, but the head coach of Nebraska’s next foe, Colorado’s Dan Hawkins, has noticed a change in NU’s level of play this season.

 

Asked about Nebraska on Monday, Hawkins said: “I think they’re playing with a lot more confidence, a lot more aggressive, a lot more full-throttle.”