When Brandon Kinnie and his Husker teammates took the field for the first time Saturday afternoon, they didn’t exactly receive a warm welcome from their Husky opponents.
Washington’s defenders set the tone early, Kinnie said, by talking more than a little smack.
“You know,” he said, “words I can’t say right now.”
A few hours later, Nebraska U. had rolled to 533 total yards and a stunningly easy 56-21 road victory, effectively shutting up the Huskies and anyone else who doubted the tenacity of this new-look Husker offense.
Taylor Martinez led the way with a team-high 137 rushing yards, highlighted by his 80-yard touchdown dash down the sideline to open the second half. He now leads the nation with eight scores on the ground, and his 10.5 yards per carry average is second-best nationally.
But he wasn’t the reason Nebraska took control of the game on Saturday. This time around, the I-backs and offense linemen that surrounded Martinez took center stage.
Roy Helu Jr. ran for 110 yards on just 10 carries, and Rex Burkhead added 104 to power a rushing attack that quickly wore down a weaker-than-expected Husky defense.
“Those guys were on tonight, and I was gonna ride ‘em,” running backs coach Tim Beck said. “I just felt like those guys were seeing it.”
That rushing attack didn’t begin to fully assert itself until Washington trimmed the deficit to 21-14 on a short drive following a Cody Green fumble. That’s when NU guard Keith Williams and his fellow linemen got fed up.
Let us take this game over, he told coaches. Let’s run it right at them.
And that’s exactly what Nebraska did. They pounded the middle with inside zone runs on eight straight plays.
“Same play, over and over,” Williams said. “That’s fun. Nothing better than getting up there, telling the defense, ‘Hey, we’re running right at you’ and smacking them in the mouth.”
Martinez’s 1-yard dive capped a 48-yard drive that Bo Pelini later called “the difference in the game.”
That ability to dominate the line of scrimmage, pound the rock out of the shotgun and move downfield with ease were certainly a far cry from offensive coordinator Shawn Watson’s offense for much of the 2009 season.
“They wouldn’t have done that a year ago,” he said. “Today, no big deal. Our job is to score, and they went right back out and scored.”
A year ago, injuries and inexperience forced Watson to abandon his visions of a multidimensional offense in favor of a run-and-pray-for-results philosophy.
It was a ground game that, from the Oklahoma game on, averaged 42 rushes for 133 yards a game last fall. On Saturday, NU took to the ground 54 times — at one point running the ball on 32 of 33 plays — and gained 383 yards.
Most of the credit for those numbers, Burkhead said, should go to the dominant performance from an offensive line that was ravaged by injuries last season.
“The offense line was the key to the whole game,” he said. “They were opening up some tremendous holes and making our job easy.”
It also didn’t hurt that Washington made limiting Martinez its highest priority on defense. Helu Jr. said UW assigned a defender to stick with the fleet freshman throughout the game, a move that didn’t surprise Watson.
After all, he did watch film of last year’s Washington-Oregon game “at least five times” in preparing his game plan. The Ducks made key in-game adjustments to their rushing attack and left town with a 43-19 victory.
Watson expected blitzes — Washington did so about 75 percent of the time — and he anticipated heavy front to stop the run. So he let his I-backs run wild.
“It just opened everything else up,” Watson said, “and then Taylor was able to hit them with some big runs … You’ve got to decide what you’re going to take away.”
After the game and immediately before talking to reporters, Watson beamed with glee as he reviewed a sheet of paper containing Nebraska’s offensive statistics.
What made him all the more cheerful, however, was the fact Nebraska hardly needed to break out its passing playbook against the Huskies.
Martinez hit on seven of his 11 passes for 125 yards and connected with Mike McNeill for his first career touchdown pass, but NU only went to the air three times — each on third downs — in the second half.
Watson said NU’s refusal to throw the ball had more to do with how easy it was to run it, and he insists Martinez is a more balanced quarterback than most have come to expect.
“This kid’s a really good passer, and we haven’t seen his best yet,” Watson said. “Somewhere along the way, we’re going to need to pass and you’ll see that.”