As Taylor Martinez walked off the Hawks Championship Center practice field last Friday following a brief session with reporters, a young boy approached him and had something he needed to say.
“Hey buddy,” he offered timidly. Martinez turned to look at the smiling kid.
“How are you?”
Then the boy said his peace.
“You need to step it up, or else you out.”
Martinez chuckled and grinned. “Oh really?”
A year ago, the average Husker fan had heard the name Taylor Martinez but had yet to see him play a single snap. He gave them a sampling of his abilities in the Red-White Spring Game, throwing for 79 yards and two scores and rushing for 60. Suddenly Zac Lee’s job wasn’t as safe as expected.
Today Martinez’s anonymity is gone. Everyone knows who he is. Everyone — no matter the age group — has an opinion on him.
His first season as Nebraska’s starting signal-caller started off far better than anyone could’ve expected. By the end of the year, he’d gone from savior to scapegoat.
“The quarterback is always going to be the biggest name in Nebraska,” Martinez said. “At first a lot of fans started liking me, and later on in the season I had some hate. I don’t really care.”
This spring, he’s starting over. Martinez is running in a new offense led by a new offensive coordinator. He says he’s almost fully healed from the ankle and turf toe injuries that derailed his redshirt freshman season, although they’ve occasionally kept him off the practice field this spring.
How is he different today than he was a year ago?
“I actually know what plays to run this time and know where to go with the ball,” Martinez said. “As a person? I’m just being more confident in myself.”
His teammates say he’s a new man in the huddle, a more vocal presence who doesn’t get down on himself when he makes mistakes and tries to encourage others more. He’s trying to turn into the leader everyone expected him to quickly become last season.
“That’s something you’ve never seen from him,” senior receiver Brandon Kinnie said. “That’s good from a quarterback standpoint. You’ve got to be vocal — you’ve got the ball in your hands every play. It’s giving us confidence as well.”
Despite his calm and quiet demeanor, Martinez can admit today he wasn’t exactly brimming with that confidence when he first took the field against Western Kentucky last September.
He wasn’t fully comfortable with taking over a senior-heavy offense and replacing Lee as a leader. And the 10 other guys in his huddle weren’t the only people he felt he had to impress.
“In the beginning I felt a lot of pressure from the Nebraska fans as a freshman quarterback, since that’s never happened in Nebraska history,” he said. “I felt like there was a lot of pressure on me.”
A couple hours later, he was a veritable superstar. His 421 rushing yards through the first three games of his career put Martinez on the national radar. His play made admirers write songs, print T-shirts and produce SportsCenter pieces.
Martinez said he didn’t pay attention to the hype. He doesn’t read newspapers or care what the media says about him, good or bad, and said he didn’t know he was a rising Heisman Trophy candidate until a teammate told him so.
“But it was pretty cool,” he said.
Then came the Texas loss. A week later, he produced arguably the best game of his career against Oklahoma State. Then the Missouri game and the thigh injury. He sat out a game and a half and didn’t shine in his next one against Kansas.
And then the roller coaster careened off the tracks against Texas A&M. Most point to the first-quarter play in which center Mike Caputo accidentally stepped on his right ankle as the play that did him in. When he looks back on it, Martinez disagrees.
“The very play before that, that’s when I got turf toe,” he said. “Then the next play, that’s when they stepped on my ankle. I was screwed. I didn’t think I was going back in after that play.
“I thought I was done after my ankle injury, but then something inside me … I just knew I had to go out there for my team and try to help them win.”
We still don’t know exactly what else happened that night other than that Bo Pelini had a confrontation with his star passer on the sidelines. Rumors started to swirl. Some began to question his future in the program.
When asked this spring to reflect his whirlwind first year as Nebraska’s quarterback, Martinez’s answers are at times curt and simple like they were all last fall.
Ask him about all those injuries, however, and you’ll get him talking.
“It was very hard,” Martinez said. “Some people don’t know how much behind-the-scenes stuff went on with my ankle and how much treatment I had to do.
“It’s kind of hard with other fans saying I didn’t try so hard on the field and stuff like that. I just kept reinjuring and reinjuring it.”
It showed in his play during Nebraska’s Big 12 Championship game loss to Oklahoma and its stunning Holiday Bowl performance. Those made the offseason even tougher, but Martinez said they’ve shaped the Huskers’ mentality this spring.
“I think everybody is taking it as a lot of motivation to get better,” he said. “Hopefully we do better this year, and hopefully we win a Big Ten title and a national championship.”
Martinez and his father Casey formally killed the rampant transfer rumors with a statement to the media in January. NU sophomore lineman Brent Qvale said he and his teammates didn’t question that their quarterback would be back.
“There’s been all those rumors of him leaving and all that, but that’s not Taylor,” Qvale said. “He’s been battling the whole time. He’s stepping up, and I can’t wait for fall.”
How far his team can go this fall will likely once again depend on how far Martinez can take Nebraska’s offense.
He likes that offensive coordinator Tim Beck’s revamped system will let him audible between passes and run plays based on coverages he can now read. He says he’s calling audibles on nearly every play in scrimmages this spring, he said, and catches the Huskers’ vaunted defense off-guard “all the time.”
Beck has said Martinez is becoming a more confident leader and is impressing with his work ethic and attitude. His teammates see it, too.
“Taylor’s shown a big improvement by paying attention to detail and not just locking in on any one guy,” NU tight end Ben Cotton said. “He’s reading the defense and getting guys the ball.”
Martinez may be a different passer, person and leader this season in his second year at the helm, but Kinnie insists in many ways he’s still the same old Taylor Martinez to his coaches and teammates.
“He’s never changed,” Kinnie said. “From every song that was written about him, every publicity he was getting, he’s never said ‘I’m this’ or ‘I’m that.’ He’s the same person all the time.
“But this year it’s a change: ‘I want to be a better person and a better leader and role model,’ instead of just being … arrogant, or whatever you want to call it. It’s a big change, and we’re excited to see it.”