‘I was really impressed with the fight’: Huskers overcome early gaffes, dominate Rutgers in second half | Football

Robinson writhed into the end zone and Martinez fist-pumped behind the play and the Huskers had some life.

“I wasn’t going to quit on this team,” Martinez said. “I had obviously made a couple big-time mistakes, but I was going to go out there and keep slinging it, knowing that I was capable and the guys had my back.” 

Up until that point, Nebraska had got in its own way more than it had been in the scoring column.

The Huskers’ first seven offensive possessions ended in three turnovers, three punts and a touchdown.

They had 255 offensive yards in the first half and found itself losing to a bad team without its starting quarterback because of a toxic cocktail of three turnovers, a special-teams blunder in which the Scarlet Knights punter waltzed for a first down just like Illinois did last month at Memorial Stadium, seven first-half penalties for 41 yards and a couple of untimely mistakes from a defense that gets hung out to dry by its offense more often than it gets put in advantageous situations.

In the end, though, Nebraska got to experience that good feeling that only comes after a win.

From here, it’s unclear what will happen next.

This whole thing, from the time spring football was shut down in mid-March — Noah Vedral was fresh off an appearance for the Husker men’s basketball team in the Big Ten tournament in Indianapolis, just for reference on how long ago that feels — through Martinez being the first to return to campus in April to NU pushing the envelope and getting players into organized workouts on June 1 to nonconference play being scrapped in early July, a modified schedule in early August, a full postponement six days later, and a season spent waking up the day after a game without full confidence that you’d would play another the next week, all of it, has been taxing.