UTEP coach Scotty Walden knows what his team faces, and what the outside buzz is going to be, as the Miners head to Lincoln as a four-touchdown underdog to begin his era at Nebraska.
The school jumped at this opportunity because it comes with a $1.65 million paycheck, the most UTEP has ever made for playing a game of any kind. When this was scheduled years ago, there was no idea it would be the opener for a new coach.
More: Where to watch UTEP football vs. Nebraska Cornhuskers football: Schedule, channel
None of that matters to the people inside the UTEP locker room.
“From the outside-in people look at this, ‘Oh this is just a money game, get out healthy,'” Walden said. “I despise comments like that with all my heart and soul. We’re the ones, the coaches and players, giving it all on the field.
“I’m not going to invest all of this time and effort to prepare to lose. We’re going to expect to win.”
Win or lose — and outside of people in UTEP orange everyone thinks it will be the latter — the Miners will dutifully come out next week and say they are preparing for the Southern Utah home opener the same way they prepared to play this Saturday in front of 85,000 people on national TV against a program that was a powerhouse when these players were children.
‘What you dreamed about’
On some level that will be true, some are already saying it. But Southern Utah on ESPN+ wasn’t who these players dreamed of playing against when they were growing up. Nebraska on a network was.
“Eighty-five thousand on the middle of Saturday, on Fox, I don’t know how you get any better than that,” said quarterback Cade McConnell, who was named backup on Thursday. “That’s the type of stuff, when I was 5 years old and I could finally start understanding a little bit of what the heck football was, that’s what you watched. That’s what you dreamed about. That’s what Dad would yell at the TV about all Saturday.
“The fact I’m going to get a chance to go out there on Saturday with my teammates, my family, my brothers, my coaches — to go out and live that dream, it’s indescribable, a speechless feeling.”
Walden has already transformed the roster into his team — there are 31 returning lettermen, all of whom passed Walden’s muster, and 65 newcomers ― and they are dialed in on the messaging.
More: Nebraska football defensive coordinator Tony White cherishes El Paso roots
‘Not preparing to lose’
“We’re never going to prepare to lose,” said Skyler Locklear, who was named starter on Thursday. “We don’t care who it is — Nebraska is a great team — but our culture, we’re never going to be, ‘We’re going there just to go there and it’s going to be a cool experience.’
“It will be a cool experience, but we’re not preparing to lose. We’re preparing like we have to go in there and show who we are. It’s not just a cool trip. It’s a game where we’re going to give it all we’ve got.”
As for what this means, “It’s another opponent, but, of course, it’s Nebraska, there is going to be more than 80,000 people there,” Locklear said. “Coming from FCS, we’d have 5,000 to 15,000 people at max. I think this is going to be an awesome experience, the fans there are crazy. I’m super excited for how crazy it’s going to be. That mentality we’re going to have going in there, there are 150 of us versus 85,000 in the stadium.”
Big-time experience
Virtually ever player on the roster who isn’t a true freshman or first-year junior college transfer has experienced something like this. In the past two years, Walden and his 11 Peay transfer players had games at Alabama and at Tennessee.
UTEP played at Northwestern and at Arizona last season, plays at Tennessee in late November and heads to Texas next year. These games are how mid-major and FCS programs keep the lights on, which on many levels is largely irrelevant to the coaching staff and on just about every level irrelevant to the players.
For them, this is a chance to play in front of the biggest crowd they’ve seen, under the biggest microscope they’ve experienced, against a team they’ve known all their life. Many of them dream of playing in the pros and this is preparation for that.
“It’s extremely exciting,” said offensive lineman Brennan Smith, a transfer from Peay. “In 2022 and 2023 we played Alabama and Tennessee. Atmospheres like that are unbelievable, stuff like that you can’t take for granted. If you want to play football at the next level, that’s what it is. You have to be poised and be ready for it.”
Underdogs
Where coach and player thoughts in the UTEP locker room begin to diverge is on the predicted four-touchdown spread.
“I’ve been an underdog my whole life,” Walden said. “This is not a new mentality at all. Why not us?”
Said bandit Maurice Westmoreland: “We don’t really care about the underdog thing. … (The game) means everything. It’s our first one, it’s the one that’s guaranteed. The next one is the only guarantee you have. Play football. Most of us have been playing it our whole life, since we were 4 or 5 years old. At the end of the day, it’s just football.”
“That’s just noise,” McConnell said of the spread.
Once the teams take the field, as Westmoreland said, it’s just football.
More: ‘Maurice was my five star’: Westmoreland shows loyalty to UTEP as Nebraska looms
How they match up
Whoever plays at quarterback for UTEP, and Walden is open to playing both Locklear and McConnell, will be playing behind a new offensive line that is facing a Nebraska front that returns all three starters. The Miners have to minimize that matchup disparity to give their quarterback, and thus their offense, a chance.
“We have five new starters, but I honestly forget that sometimes because they have a good grasp of what we are doing and they believe in themselves,” Walden said. “They get out there with live bullets, they have to stay true to that, but that’s also on us as coaches to make sure we’re giving them a chance to succeed from a game-plan standpoint.
“That’s something I want to assess: Do we have too much on them. I don’t want them thinking, I want them playing. With the defense we’re going against, the last thing we want to do is to be thinking. Even if that means we have to limit some plays, that’s OK. We have to know what we’re doing first before we can think about attacking a defense.”
As for quarterback, McConnell put it like this: “No. 1, I know I’m ready to play. No. 2 I know Skyler Locklear is a great quarterback. No. 3, Coach Walden is an amazing coach. With those three things, I feel good about rolling into Saturday no matter what happens.”
On the other side of the ball, UTEP’s worst matchup is the Miner run defense, which statistically wasn’t strong last year and now has a new linebacker corps, going up against a Nebraska offense that has one of the most experienced lines in the country and was effective running the ball in 2023.
The Miners’ best chance is to rattle true freshman quarterback Danny Raiola with a strong pass rush, though that will start, and is contingent on, slowing down the run.
“That run game, with tight ends they are really high on, helps a freshman quarterback,” Walden said. “That’s going to allow them to try to establish the run, get our eyes in the backfield, then allow him to take an easy shot in man-to-man coverage. We have to do a great job staying on top of the cut.”
As for getting after Raiola, “With a freshman quarterback, he’s still trying to get the ropes of college,” said defensive tackle Sione Tonga’uiha. “If we can get after him in the first quarter, it will help the rest of the game.”
UTEP has prepared for all of that, in one sense starting when fall camp began a month ago, in others ever since Walden was hired in December.
As for everything else that’s going on around Saturday’s game, to a person UTEP can’t wait to take the field and take their swing at something special.
“It’s so good for us to get this test now,” Walden said. “I’d rather get this test now rather than later so we can work out the kinks, see where we’re at. See who rose to the challenge and who didn’t, where we need to make adjustments as a coaching staff.
“We’ll find out a lot about this football team in this first challenge of the season.”
The challenge for UTEP is as big as it comes and the Miners couldn’t be more excited.
Bret Bloomquist can be reached at bbloomquist@elpasotimes.com; @Bretbloomquist on X.
This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Four-touchdown underdog UTEP not daunted by playing at Nebraska Huskers
You must be logged in to post a comment Login