LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) – One embarrassing loss won’t shake Bo Pelini’s confidence.
The Cornhuskers’ first-year coach has faith in his plan to rebuild the once-great program, despite Saturday’s 35-point loss at home to Missouri.
“I know how to get the job done,” he said Tuesday. “I know exactly where we want to head and how to get there, and I’m committed to doing it. I’m working day and night to get it done.”
The Cornhuskers (3-2, 0-1 Big 12) go into Saturday’s game at No. 7 Texas Tech off back-to-back losses to Virginia Tech and Missouri.
In last week’s 52-17 beating, Missouri scored on eight of its first nine possessions, with two Nebraska turnovers leading to touchdowns.
The Huskers still are looking to establish a semblance of a running game, and their defense, a huge problem last year, ranks no higher than 50th in any major statistical category.
‘ll never be that way.”
Pelini again offered a mea culpa for the Huskers’ performance against Missouri.
“I look back, and sometimes as a coach you try too hard,” he said. “I regret some of the things we did in our plan, especially defensively.”
Pelini declined to go into specifics about how the plan fell short. Nebraska came out using three down linemen and had defensive end Pierre Allen float behind them, looking for a pass-rush lane. The Huskers also used a number of different blitzes.
Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel threw for 253 yards and three touchdowns and wasn’t sacked.
“I don’t have all the answers,” Pelini said. “You’re going to make some mistakes along the way, but at every turn you have to learn from your mistakes.”
Defensive end Zach Potter said Pelini told the players after the game he had designed a flawed plan.
“He said we might have been trying to get too cute and too advanced,” Potter said. “I thought we had a good plan. It just didn’t work.”
Potter said Pelini and the assistants shouldn’t shoulder all the blame, however.
“We’re the ones going out on the field and making mistakes, missing tackles, missing blocks,” Potter said. “He can take all the blame for it he wants, but really it’s on us.”
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“We’re not in the middle of the game saying, ‘Oh, shoot, here it goes again,”’ Suh said. “We’re not just saying, ‘Oh, we’re down by 30 points, let’s just lay over and die.’ That’s not only preached, but it’s being done.”
Pelini said the situation at Nebraska is similar to the one he faced in his first year as LSU’s defensive coordinator in 2005. LSU won its opener 35-31 at Arizona State but gave up 560 yards, including 461 passing by Sam Keller, who later transferred to Nebraska. LSU lost its second game 30-27 in overtime to Tennessee after blowing a 21-0 halftime lead.
“Believe me, after my first two games at LSU, they wanted to run me out of the state,” Pelini said. “You can ask anybody down there. I was No. 1 on the hate list in Louisiana for a while, and we changed that around.”
Pelini said there is good chemistry and character on the team and that he isn’t letting a blowout loss affect the way he goes about his business.
“At no time do I feel I have to crawl in a hole and separate myself from the world,” he said. “That’s not how I approach things. I’m the same guy I was two weeks ago. We have to stay the course and keep working.”
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