The energy that Mickey Joseph brought to the Nebraska football program evaporated at halftime Saturday.
A game that set up nicely for the Cornhuskers to find some redemption against a heavily favored Minnesota team instead turned into a decisive vote of no confidence for Joseph, who lost for the fourth time in six tries since becoming interim head coach.
The intangibles — the main thing that Joseph had going for him in what frankly has always been an uphill fight to be the permanent replacement for Scott Frost as head coach — abandoned the Big Red at the worst possible time. With a 10-point halftime lead in their pocket, the Huskers did nothing to keep momentum on their side. There were no takeaways by the defense, no big plays by Trey Palmer, no boost from the kick return game.
Energy, fight, determination, all went AWOL in the second half. The tank ran dry like a propane bottle that expires when a promising steak dinner was half cooked. Joseph and his team served Husker Nation tasteless crumbs from their Halfhearted Menu at crunch time.
It was a recipe for disaster in a typical Big Ten slugfest — the type of game that Frost-coached teams always found a way to lose, but Joseph had twice found a way to win against Indiana and Rutgers. This time, against a Minnesota team that played one of its worst first halves of football in the P.J. Fleck era, with a Nebraska victory entirely plausible, the battling spirit Joseph brought to the program never made it out of the halftime locker room. The Huskers could not get a three-score lead that would have forced the Gophers to depend on their passing attack.
The 3-6 Huskers mailed in their second consecutive weak second-half effort, which is a strange way to show support for a coach who’s making his case to keep running the program for years to come. But two months into his audition, evidence is mounting that although Joseph is a great recruiter and a worthy wide receiver coach, he is not a closer. Trev Alberts’ search for a head coach continues. Meanwhile, Kirk Ferentz at Iowa and interim head coach Jim Leonhard at Wisconsin are battling through their early-season problems and gaining momentum.
Despite a roster that includes enough talent to win seven or eight games, the Huskers are grinding toward another dismal season. Hopefully, Joseph will be retained by a new head coach, but he should not run the program.
It could have been vastly different. It was an auspicious start for the Big Red, who drove for a touchdown on the game’s first possession. The offensive line looked as good as it has all season, opening holes for Anthony Grant, who rushed for 60 of his 115 yards on that drive alone. Chubba Purdy made the start at quarter for the injured Casey Thompson, and scored on a 2-yard run, ending a run-heavy 75-yard drive.
Purdy made good decisions on the next drive, pulling down the ball and running for a pair of first downs before the drive stalled and Timmy Bleekrode kicked a 24-yard field goal. The rest of the first half was a showcase for the Husker defense, which held the Gophers to 31 total yards and four first downs while sacking quarterback Tanner Morgan three times, including one on the final play of the half. Husker fans gave the team a rousing ovation as it ran to the locker room with a 10-0 lead.
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A very different team came out in the second half. The pass rush was discontinued. The Husker defensive line — a powerful force in the first half — suddenly was a doormat that Mohammed Ibrahim used to wipe his feet in the second. Defensive linemen began losing man-to-man battles they won decisively in the first and second quarters. And Purdy started to unravel as Minnesota defensive coordinator Joe Rossi dialed up pressure packages that baffled Mark Whipple and the Husker offensive line, which reverted to its usual form.
It’s a mystery why Joseph took so long to pull Purdy from the game, but it took a devastating interception that set up Minnesota for a game-clinching 33-yard touchdown drive with 9:22 left in the game before Joseph (or Whipple, who seems to make personnel decision on offense) belatedly put Logan Smothers in.
Fleck changed quarterbacks at halftime but stuck with his basic game plan, which was to unleash Ibrahim on the Husker defense. Nebraska responded well in the first half, holding Ibrahim to 18 yards on eight attempts, but lost their appetite for tackling him in the second half, when he trampled the Huskers for 110 yards on 24 more carries and scored on a pair of 3-yard runs.
After halftime, the Gophers outyarded Nebraska 269-116 and had a two-to-one advantage in time of possession.
The legacy of Zach Duval’s failed strength and conditioning program was on full display. The same old images return week after week; Nebraska loses momentum as the game goes along. In 2018, Duval was supposedly bringing back the Boyd Epley-influenced “Husker Power” style of strength training, but he never came close to restoring the days when the Huskers wore down their opponents in the fourth quarter. Nebraska fans are quite used to seeing their team weaken in the second half, but the abrupt dropoff in physicality on this day was unsettling.
A man who prioritizes a physical run game and has the ability to find assistant coaches with a propensity for developing linemen should be the goal of Alberts’ ongoing search. He owes this to the Husker fan base, whose patience seemingly never runs out, and continues to fill Memorial Stadium week after week despite years of inferior football.
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