PISCATAWAY, N.J. — The fact that this most unusual of college football seasons delivered this night at all will go down in the books as something like a bizarre footnote.
In an empty SHI Stadium, somewhere between the swamps of Jersey and the gas fires of the refineries, where the bleachers were packed with snow instead of people because it is 2020, Nebraska and Rutgers played a Big Ten game under the lights on a Friday night, seven days before Christmas, as part of a package the conference dubbed “Champions Week.”
It wasn’t tongue-in-cheek when the folks in Rosemont, Illinois, dreamed it up, but there wasn’t much champion-caliber material to be found on the eastern edge of the league’s footprint on this night.
This was a kind of circus sideshow, a game played for the television money on a night where most college football fans probably watched something else.
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It was a game on a date, in a place, between two teams to create a setup the league may literally never have to revisit again.
And boy, oh boy, did Nebraska fight its demons. You know the ones. Turnovers, penalties, special-teams gaffes.
They also somehow, eventually, earned a 28-21 victory, their third of the season.
Actually, it wasn't rocket science. The Huskers just got out of their own way enough to mount their three longest scoring drives of the season against a defense far too beleaguered to do much about it.
Nebraska got 365 rushing yards behind an offensive line playing a true freshman and a pair of redshirt freshmen. It finished with 620 offensive yards overall.
"I wanted to see a team that was out there having fun, playing for each other and that didn't make any dumb mistakes," head coach Scott Frost said. "We failed miserably on that in the first half, made way too many mistakes. That's just been too common in our program. We've got to get all that fixed, but it was better in the second half. They played smarter in the second half.
"I was really impressed with the fight."
Senior running back Dedrick Mills rolled to 191 rushing yards and added six catches for 45 yards, while junior quarterback Adrian Martinez's 412 yards of offense helped offset four turnovers.
The second-half scoring marches of 90, 96 and 92 yards helped cover up enough of the miscues that plagued the Huskers for much of the first three quarters.
“I think if we didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot, specifically myself shooting the offense in the foot, we would have had even more success on offense tonight," Martinez said, who complemented an offensive line that started a freshmen, two redshirt freshmen and a sophomore. "It speaks to their physicality and their mindset and I just had to follow suit.”
The credit, largely, goes to the Nebraska defense, which scratched and clawed for the first two-plus quarters until the offense could stop shooting itself in the foot, then put the clamps on the Scarlet Knights down the stretch. Rutgers had 50 yards on its first play of the game and finished the night with just 252. Junior Cam Taylor-Britt made the biggest play of the night with a fourth-quarter interception to get the offense the ball back. NU ran out the final 7:35 against a flat-gassed Scarlet Knights defense.
“I’m proud for our defense and proud for our team,” sophomore outside linebacker Garrett Nelson said. “It was a good team win and a good time.”
It wasn't easy, though.
For instance, after the first of those three long drives, the Blackshirts didn’t even get to take the field because the Big Ten’s return specialist of the year, Aron Cruickshank — yes, the same guy who ran a kickoff back for a touchdown for Wisconsin last year when NU inexplicably kicked it to him — took a high, floating kick to his right 1-yard line hash mark and raced 99 yards for a touchdown.
"It starts with me as the head coach," Frost said. "The details in special teams, the ball security, the dumb penalties have cost us all year. We'd have a better record right now if we weren't doing that to ourselves. It's hard to overcome those things in any game, much less the Big Ten.
"We're a good enough football team to win a lot of games if we don't do those things, and we've got to get them stopped."
Martinez turned the ball over for the fourth time — his second interception, which came on a too-high throw over the middle for sophomore receiver Wan’Dale Robinson — on Nebraska’s next possession, though the defense once again stood tall to help keep the Huskers in the game.
On NU's next drive, Martinez found Robinson, this time for a 14-yard dart in traffic for a touchdown at the end of another drive in which Martinez, Mills and the Huskers ran all over the Scarlet Knights.
Robinson writhed into the end zone and Martinez fist-pumped behind the play and the Huskers had some life.
"I wasn't going to quit on this team," Martinez said. "I had obviously made a couple big-time mistakes, but I was going to go out there and keep slinging it, knowing that I was capable and the guys had my back."
Up until that point, Nebraska had got in its own way more than it had been in the scoring column.
The Huskers’ first seven offensive possessions ended in three turnovers, three punts and a touchdown.
They had 255 offensive yards in the first half and found itself losing to a bad team without its starting quarterback because of a toxic cocktail of three turnovers, a special-teams blunder in which the Scarlet Knights punter waltzed for a first down just like Illinois did last month at Memorial Stadium, seven first-half penalties for 41 yards and a couple of untimely mistakes from a defense that gets hung out to dry by its offense more often than it gets put in advantageous situations.
In the end, though, Nebraska got to experience that good feeling that only comes after a win.
From here, it’s unclear what will happen next.
What else is new, right?
This whole thing has been taxing: From the time spring football was shut down in mid-March — Noah Vedral (who didn't play for Rutgers due to injury Friday) was fresh off an appearance for the Husker men’s basketball team in the Big Ten Tournament in Indianapolis, just for reference on how long ago that feels — through Martinez being the first to return to campus in April; to NU pushing the envelope and getting players into organized workouts on June 1; to nonconference play being scrapped in early July; a modified schedule in early August; a full postponement six days later; and a season spent waking up the day after a game without full confidence that you'd would play another the next week.
Might Nebraska be in Arizona playing in the Guaranteed Rate Bowl on Dec. 26? Or In Charlotte for the Duke’s Mayo Bowl on Dec. 30? Maybe. There will be other bowl games looking for teams, too.
But those bowls will be looking for teams not just because of COVID-19 outbreaks in programs, but because many programs have decided that this is enough.
Frost said that he would ask his players if they want to play again and that will weigh heavily into the decision. So, too, will the timing of the game. Nebraska just came off a short week to travel a long way. It might be a lot to ask to think that they’d leave for Arizona four days after getting back to Lincoln in the middle of the night.
“I have to talk to our guys about that and then see if we have that opportunity,” Frost said.
In 2020, eight games might be good enough. Not much else about Nebraska’s 2020 season will be filed under that descriptor.
But for now, NU will either ramp it up one more time and hit the road and play sometime shortly after Christmas, or their players will head home and face the same kind of strain this holiday season is putting on so many people around the country in terms of group size, social distancing and all the rest.
Maybe one more game would be a welcome distraction from that reality. Or maybe the reality of the past several months is more than enough to say, you know what, that was pretty darned good that we got any games in at all.
“I’m really excited about the future, but I’m worn out, too,” Frost said.