The Longer That Game Goes On, the More Hope Those Guys Get

Husker fans, Nebraska is 2-0, just won a game by 49, and spent Tuesday being told not to feel good about any of it.

Dana Holgorsen, the offensive coordinator, put the danger in one sentence.

“If you relax as a Power Four team, if you relax, then you get yourself in those games that Nebraska was in in ’22 and Kansas State was in last year.”

And then the part worth taping to a locker:

“The longer that game goes on, the more hope those guys get.”

That is the whole week in a line. Nebraska hosts North Dakota on Saturday at 6:15 p.m. on BTN. The Fighting Hawks are 3-0 and ranked No. 6 in the FCS Coaches Poll. They beat Portland State 47-23 last week.

Nobody on this staff is selling a rollover

The defensive side said the same thing in different words.

Rob Aurich, the first-year defensive coordinator, has coached in that part of the country:

“If you know anything about this region of football, you know every Dakota team you play is going to be ready to compete.”

Dwayne McDougle III, the fifth-year defensive back who came to Lincoln after stops at Northern Arizona, Idaho and San Diego State, was blunter about the framing:

“We can’t look at it as, oh, this is just an FCS team. We’re going to just come in and just whoop them 50-0, because this is not a rollover team. This is a North Dakota team, and all North Dakota teams are elite.”

He also described what he expects to see, which is the opposite of finesse:

“They run downhill, A-gap, A-gap to A-gap. They want to bulldoze people. They’re gritty up front. Every North Dakota team has a good O-line.”

His instruction to his group was about approach, not classification: come in like it’s a Big Ten game and execute at an elite level.

Owen Chambliss, the senior linebacker who transferred in from San Diego State, sounded delighted about the matchup:

“When you know someone is gonna try to run the ball and you play middle linebacker, you really get excited.”

What the record actually says

Nebraska has never lost to an FCS opponent: 16-0 all time, per the game notes. It leads this series 2-0, winning 33-0 in 1961 and 38-17 in 2022.

That 2022 game is the one Holgorsen was pointing at, and it is worth being precise: Nebraska won it. His point was not a loss. It was the shape of the night.

My read, and it is a read

Three straight blowout wins tell you North Dakota is good at beating the teams it should beat. Nebraska is the first Power Four opponent on its schedule, so nothing on that record answers Saturday.

What I will be watching is not the final margin. It is the first 15 minutes and the drive out of halftime, because the second one is already a pattern. Nebraska has scored 105 points in two games, and on Tuesday Holgorsen volunteered that his offense’s only third-quarter series against Bowling Green was the worst drive of the day — and that the same thing had happened two weeks earlier against Ohio.

What Saturday tests

Start with finishing early. The question is not whether Nebraska scores, it is whether it scores fast enough that hope never gets a foothold, because a three-score lead at the half is a different night than a one-score lead.

Then the run fits. A-gap to A-gap into Nebraska’s front is exactly the diet Chambliss says he wants, and North Dakota has the offensive line McDougle is expecting, so the Blackshirts get the test they asked for.

And last, not letting it get late. That is Holgorsen’s whole warning. Games like this go wrong in the fourth quarter, not the first.

Husker Nation, the full preview and a score call come Friday. Saturday is about whether a 2-0 team can play a 60-minute game against an FCS opponent that will keep hoping as long as the clock lets them.