Cornhuskers Save Their Hardest Hits For After The Game

Outside musty Memorial Stadium, kids hawk Cornhusker coloring books, commemorating - and cashing in on - Nebraska’s 1994 national championship.

All right. Perfect for the child who only has red Crayolas.

Yes, college football in the heartland is afflicted with a certain presumptuousness - for instance, that anything and everything can and should be painted scarlet, emblazoned with a block “N” and sold for a 150 percent markup.

There is also the presumption that while Nebraska’s opponents may occupy varying stations on the food chain, all they’ll ever amount to is, well, fodder.

Hey, it’s hard to argue. With Washington State falling to the Huskers 35-21 here Saturday, the Nebraska winning streak is now 18 - 30 in regular-season play. None of Tom Osborne’s 22 previous teams won fewer than nine games in a season, so losing is pretty much unthinkable. Occasionally, it’s OK not to cover the spread, particularly when you’ve been feeding the patrons a steady diet of 64-21, 77-28 and 49-7.

Apparently, though, it’s not OK for the other team to think it might have a chance.

And if it became clear to most of the 77,000-plus noncombatants sometime in the second quarter that Wazzu was going to lose to Nebraska for the first time in history, it never became clear to the Cougars - and that’s a stubbornness you can admire.

For instance, center Marc McCloskey was asked what losing to the nation’s second-ranked team by just two touchdowns says about Wazzu.

“It says we should have scored 15 more points,” McCloskey said.

See? This is just the type of thinking that irritates the red brigade - almost as much if you suggest that their scholarships need a provision for bail in addition to room, board, books, tuition and fees.

The Cougars, it seems, drilled into a nerve with some confident - OK, maybe over-the-line confident - posturing in the wake of their dispatching of UCLA last Saturday. Defensive end Dwayne Sanders flat predicted victory, though he did some backtracking as the week went on. Safety Derek Henderson suggested the Huskers didn’t know what they were in for, having fattened up on “weak teams like Pacific and Arizona State. They’re not really playing teams that are trying to go out there and get after them.”

(That may go up on ASU’s bulletin board, too, but no harm, no foul: the Cougs don’t play ASU this fall.)

Some of the Huskers professed that such frankness was their primary source of inspiration this week.

“I took that personally,” said quarterback Tommie Frazier. “I guess they decided part of their game plan was to intimidate us, but you come to our place and you don’t intimidate us. I guess they found out you should keep comments like that to yourself until after the game.”

Oh, like these? Talking about the lick he laid on Sanders while blocking for Clester Johnson’s reverse on Nebraska’s first drive, Frazier said, “It felt pretty good since it was on the guy who was doing all the talking during the week. He wasn’t doing much talking after - I guess he wore himself out in the papers.”

Said fullback Brian Schuster, “One mistake they made was all the talking they did. They certainly played hard, but I don’t think it’s to a team’s advantage to talk the way they did.”

The obvious question, then, was why the difference was two touchdowns and not 10?

Well, because the Cougars twice burnt blitzes for TDs and because the hosts came up empty a few times - fumbling inside the 10 once, blowing a 20-yard field goal and fumbling again late on the WSU 6-yard line.

Still, whatever breaks the Cougs manage to get in other phases of the game, they’re still crapping out when it comes to field position. The running game, so prominent in the UCLA win, went on vacation again after Frank Madu struck with his 87-yard touchdown run. On nine straight downs in the first half, WSU had either negative or no yardage.

And a final eye-opener. WSU gave up 428 yards rushing - not quite half of the 886 it gave up all last season.

So again: Why was this as close as it was?

Answer: Because the Cougars figured it should be. It was exactly what they didn’t figure in 1993 when they opened the season against an opponent (Michigan) cut from a similar cloth, and played all day with jaws agape.

“It was a different team back then,” said tackle Scott Sanderson. “It might have been (good) for that team, but we’re not after moral victories. We’re after wins and going to a bowl game.”

Added linebacker James Darling, “We’re going to cry when we watch film and see the breakdowns.”

Modest victories like Nebraska’s nowadays cost you votes in the polls, but Osborne says he isn’t worried. He remembers the Huskers struggling to beat Wyoming a year ago, “and we turned out OK.” Like 13-0.

“It just felt good to get in there and play a full game,” said defensive tackle Christian Peter, “not knowing what the outcome was going to be. We needed this.”

What the Huskers really need is a 3-8 season every now and then so the citizenry might sample a life. But then they’d really see red.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review