The route to Travis Fisher’s heart — or, more pertinently if you happen to play for him at the University of Nebraska, to playing time in the Husker secondary — runs through special teams.
Fisher, the veteran secondary coach who is entering his fifth season at NU and will run out a revamped group this fall, reiterated that reality earlier this week.
Not every starter is going to play all four units — though first-year special teams coordinator Bill Busch did say at the outset of spring ball that he thinks more starters will play more special teams than in the past — but Fisher made his expectations clear anyhow.
“If you ain’t playing special teams, we probably aren’t talking too much about defense,†he said. “That’s just the culture in the room. If you’re not playing special teams, if you’re not contributing on special teams, it’s going to be very hard for you to play defense for me or for these coaches here that I work for. Let me just tell you, it would have to take our special teams coach to say, ‘Hey, we don’t need you on this right here,’ in order for those guys not to be on special teams and I don’t know that that’s going to happen any time soon.â€
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It will take more than that to win a starting job in a wide competition that features four transfers and, by this summer, seven new scholarship players, but the conversation about special teams is particularly pertinent for returning players like cornerback Braxton Clark and safety Noa Pola-Gates, who are looking to earn extensive time for the first time in their careers.
Clark has outstanding length at 6-foot-4 and has been trusted to start in the past, including a game at Purdue in 2019. By the end of 2021, he was listed as a co-starter with Quinton Newsome and earned some rotational work, though Newsome actually started all 12 games and played the majority of snaps.
What will it take in his fifth season to win a starting job over the likes of Arizona State transfer Tommi Hill, Northern Iowa transfer Omar Brown (when healthy) and others?
“What’s inside of him? That’s the next thing. Knows the playbook, knows the technique, what’s inside of him? What’s inside of him?†Fisher said when asked about Clark specifically. “Are you that guy that sprints out there when it’s time for kickoff? Or are you the guy that just wants to wait until defense? I’m not saying that this is Braxton Clark, but that’s what I mean by, what’s inside of him? Make sense? What’s inside of him will have to come out of him before we can use him on this football team. That’s not Braxton Clark, that’s everybody. That’s every single last one of these guys.
“That’s Cam Taylor-Britt running down on punt and you saw him starting on defense. That’s Deontai Williams running down on kickoff and you saw him starting on defense. That’s Marquel (Dismuke), who played every special teams and you saw him starting on defense. It’s the same thing.â€
According to Pro Football Focus tallies of special teams snaps in 2021, NU’s starting group looked like this: Taylor-Britt (94), Newsome (79) Dismuke (64), rotational safety Myles Farmer (63) and Williams (59 in eight games). Not only that, but reserves Isaac Gifford (197), Marques Buford (189) and walk-on Phalen Sanford (185) were three of the top four on the roster in special teams work.
Pola-Gates played 44 snaps of special teams and Clark just 18, according to PFF.
Clark was more heavily involved (94 special teams snaps) in 2019, then missed all of 2020 with a shoulder injury.
Defensive backs and special teams always tend to go hand-in-hand. In 2020, four of the top five in snaps were DBs (Gifford, Williams, Dicaprio Bootle and Farmer). In 2019? Four reserve DBs led the way in Jeramiah Stovall, Eli Sullivan, Isaiah Stalbird and Reid Karel.
So, winning jobs in Fisher’s secondary will be about coverage and play-making ability and scheme and all of that. But it will also be about the willingness and ability to play in the third phase of the game, too.
“You can be a special teams player and not be willing to play special teams, make sense? You can go out there and line up and play special teams but the individual player doesn’t really have the same effort that you would see in him if you saw him playing a position on defense or offense,†Fisher said. “For the most part, those guys need to be the guys that, when special teams is called, they’re pushing each other out the way to be the one that coach needs to get in there on special teams.
“That’s when we’re really rolling.â€