PG Version: Parker Gabriel’s extra points from Huskers-Spartans | Football

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Nebraska football writer Parker Gabriel offers his extra points from the Husker football team’s 23-20 overtime loss to Michigan State.

It was over when: Matt Coghlin’s 21-yard chip-shot field goal sailed through the uprights on a third-down snap in overtime.

Up until then — or at least, until Kenneth Walker III ripped off 23 yards, his best run of the night, on the Spartans’ first snap of overtime — it was anybody’s game.

Turning point: Easy. Jayden Reed hauled in a wayward Daniel Cerni punt with nobody around him late in the fourth quarter and he raced 62 yards for a game-tying touchdown with 3:47 to go.

Nebraska dominated the second half defensively and offensively. Both sides will say they could have done more — the defense wanted a takeaway, even though 14 yards on 15 snaps is more than good enough, and the offense wanted to avoid going three-and-out before the punt — but simply put, that play changed the outcome of the game.

Quotable: Sophomore outside linebacker Garrett Nelson on what he and his teammates can say regarding Cerni’s bad punt.

“I tried to pick up (Connor) Culp (last week) and the team picked him up and he kicked a lot better in this game. I don’t know if we had any part in that at all. I’d like to think we did. So, (Cerni) is our teammate. We all make mistakes. His mistakes are so obvious because he has one shot. As a defense, we have 60 or something. He has to be perfect, which is a difficult thing to do in football. You can’t just get on up and think that he sucks now. We’ve got to pick him up like we did with Culp and, like I said, hopefully we had some positive mental space with Culp and he did a lot better. So we’ll just do the same thing.”