Zac Lee showed us, didn’t he? He stuck a week’s worth of our chatter, stinky socks and all, right back in our mouths.

We reporters drooled over Cody Green’s 49-yard, fourth-quarter run vs. Florida Atlantic. The talk even got NU offensive coordinator Shawn Watson to admit Friday at a Big Red Breakfast that Green might get some first-half snaps if he earns them.

But Lee’s first-half stat line – 15-19 for 183 yards and two touchdowns – threw water on that fire.

Then check out his whole stat line: 27-of-35 for 340 yards, four touchdowns and nary a pick. You’ll take that with a side of ranch, won’t you? Two 80-yard drives to put ASU in the hole. Another long drive before half. Two more scoring drives in the second half for good measure. A 69-yard touchdown pass to Niles Paul that was called back because of a holding penalty.

Lee dazzled Husker fans with every tool in his box. The arm strength. The sixth sense of when to scramble. Ball-handling skills. The touch on deep throws to Curenski Gilleylen and Mike McNeill. Moving the huddle along. Nabbing some crappy snaps from center Jacob Hickman. Taking a couple hard sacks when NU’s protection fell apart.

Watson couldn’t stop gushing.

“He was unbelievable,” Watson said. “He’s a great student. The kid’s really good. Really good.”

Even when Lee made a mistake – such as an ill-advised toss over defensive end Alex Carrington early in the third quarter – Carrington was only able to tip the ball into the waiting hands of Niles Paul, who hauled it in for a 20-yard gain.

Hey – when it goes right, it goes right.

Lee said offensive coordinator Shawn Watson often asks his him: Which passes will get you in a rhythm?

The quarterback answer: “Whatever you want to call. Hopefully I’ll kind of wake up on a rhythm on game day.”

Saturday, Lee woke up to a moveable feast.

Watson dialed up the deep balls. And Lee took his shots. Corner routes. Fades. Stop-and-go routes. Play-action.You name them, Lee threw them. Maybe too many of them; NU wasted some second-half scoring chances by trying to hit home runs on second-and-short, instead of putting drives together like it did in the first half.

“We just took what they gave us,” Watson said. “If they were going to play a run defense – it’s pretty easy when you just sit up there and see it. You just go past them. They’re challenging you – you go past them. We were able to do that.”

You’d better believe NU will be packing the same gameplan when it heads to Virginia Tech. The Hokies make a living off daring quarterbacks to beat them. Defensive coordinator Bud Foster will throw his eight men in the box, lunch pails in tow, and trust his skilled secondary to win more battles than it loses.

Week in and week out, that’s the Foster way. In Tech’s season’s opening game, Alabama beat it with the help of a vicious defense that kept allowing the Tide’s offense opportunities to chip away. Bama quarterback Greg McElroy got thrown to the synthetic turf of the Georgia Dome for a half. He looked bad. But he got tough, and made just enough deep completions to sink the Hokies.

So you hope NU packs the Zac Lee we all saw on Saturday and takes him in Blacksburg, too. For let’s face it: Beyond acknowledging Lee’s work, we have to be done with it. He has to be done with it. The toughest road test a brand new quarterback could ever want to face awaits him.

And Lee will need a little more help than he got Saturday.

Yes, there were cracks and fissures. Nebraska’s offensive line failed to consistently protect Lee; he was sacked twice and flushed out of the pocket three or four more times. The running game plodded along as Roy Helu struggled to find some holes. Some other holes, he overran. Helu is a mixmaster of moves, but he made a couple too many on Saturday.

The defense – facing an offense quite similar to Virginia Tech’s – tackled poorly. At times very poorly. When the secondary does the best job of hitting and wrapping up, that’s a recipe for trouble on the road, especially when the Hokies have a redshirt freshman running back, Ryan Williams, that’s as good as any on the East Coast.

“We’ve just got to be more physical,” said defensive coordinator Carl Pelini, who seemed like he wanted to start preparing for Tech that very second. “I’d like to see how many yards after contact they had. We didn’t tackle real well today. That’s something we’re going to get fixed.

Penalties cropped up again. Negated one touchdown, and help set up ASU with oceanfront properity for its only score. Defensive calls from the sideline were either late, or poorly communicated. Four or five times I saw NU’s defensive line standing up just seconds before the ball was snapped. Hard to play low from that position, isn’t it?

So we’ll see. But I like Lee’s demeanor through two games. He’s very confident on the field – you can see it in the chances he takes – and tougher than his smallish frame might suggest.

To reporters, he doesn’t say much. His post-game comments lasted all of five minutes. If the “Green chatter” bothered him this week, you didn’t notice. Whether he played this week with something to prove, he didn’t admit. He’s got a good poker face.

When asked what he thought of ESPN announcer Ron Franklin, who mistook Lee for Zac Robinson in a situation too convoluted and pointless to rehash, Lee doused the question properly: “It happens. Not a big deal.”

It happens, yes, but there’s one way to make sure it never does again: Play like this again, next Saturday in Blacksburg.

“That’s the fun of college football,” Lee said. “It’ll be a great atmosphere. Hopefully we play well. I think the team is really, really looking forward to the opportunity, especially after what happened here last year.”

Said Watson: “This dude’s a cool customer. He’s a ballplayer. None of that stuff’s going to bother him…he gets it. He’s been around it his whole life.”

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Quarterback controversy? Not around here.

By the time Nebraska’s defense started to bend Saturday against Arkansas State, NU junior Zac Lee’s right arm had already broken the Red Wolves with series of deep, accurate strikes in the heart of their secondary.

Lee completed 8 of his first 9 passes for 111 yards and two touchdowns to help stake NU to a 21-0 lead early in the second quarter. From that point forward, the run-oriented Arkansas State couldn’t muster enough momentum to get much closer in a 38-9 Nebraska win.

“I really liked the way we came out,” head coach Bo Pelini said. “We attacked. I thought we played really well offensively. To start the game, I loved the energy we came out with.”

While Lee had a fair debut in a 49-3 win over Florida Atlantic, his play was overshadowed, to some extent, by a single 49-yard run from true freshman Cody Green.

No such dilemma on Saturday. Lee completed 27-of-35 passes for 340 yards and four touchdowns. He personally found 11 different receivers, and made every throw in the book – including a couple nifty shovel passes.

“It was a good day,” Lee understated. “Hopefully it’s that way every week. That’s kind of my goal.”

Lee and his teammates have a much stiffer test at Virginia Tech next Saturday. But for one game, he couldn’t have been much more efficient.

Said NU offensive coordinator Shawn Watson: “I loved everything that happened. Zac was just lights out. That’s a great performance.”

A crowd of 85,035 at Memorial Stadium sat thrilled and dazzled by Lee’s first-quarter performance. On Nebraska’s opening drive, he converted an early third down with an 11-yard pass to Mike McNeill, scrambled for 11 yards and threw a perfect 46-yard lob to receiver Curenski Gilleylen before finishing the drive with a three-yard flip to fullback Tyler Legate to cap the 80-yard touchdown march.

On the second drive, Lee hit all five passes for 54 yards, the last of which was another perfectly thrown lob to tight end Mike McNeill for a 13-yard touchdown.

“We had guys get open,” Lee said. “It’s easy to throw to open guys.”

Niles Paul then scored on a 30-yard reverse one minute into the second quarter for a 21-0 lead. Paul took the pitch from Lee and ran back toward NU’s sideline, toeing the chalk for the last ten yards.

“We had it on our script,” Paul said, “and I just blew it off like ‘we’re not going to run that, we have it on script every week since last year. But we finally ran it. And I was happy.”

Those first 16 minutes were NU’s best in recent memory, dating back, possibly, to 2006. Pelini said he challenged his team throughout the week, after another sluggish start vs. Florida Atlantic, to hit the ground running vs. ASU.

Mission accomplished. The Huskers outgained the Red Wolves 206-39 in that span, and left a run-based with little chance for a comeback.

“We came out of the gates well,” center Jacob Hickman said. “That’s something we wanted to make sure we did, to set the tempo of the game.”

Arkansas State then scored on a 32-yard touchdown drive after an NU punt and a 15-yard facemack penalty on safety Rickey Thenarse. The Red Wolves missed the extra point. The Huskers tacked on a 29-yard field goal from Alex Henery right before halftime.

In the second half, Nebraska scored quickly after an ASU punt, as Lee hit McNeill again, this time on a 32-yard fade route for a touchdown. In the fourth quarter, he found Paul for a two-yard score, setting up the touchdown with a 27-yard pass to tight end Dreu Young.

Nebraska had 494 total yards, the 16th time in 20 games, NU went over the 400-yard mark.

“They played a whole lot faster than we did overall,” ASU coach Steve Roberts said. “I think that was a big difference in the game, their speed advantage.”

The Red Wolves (1-1) averaged more than four yards per carry and amassed total yards, but only converted 2 of 10 third down attempts in the first three quarters.

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Trap game. Tune-up. Upset alert. Afternoon pastry.

You could flip-flop all morning, you know, on just what Saturday’s 1:10 p.m. game vs. Arkansas State represents for Nebraska’s football team.

But, in the state that invented the reuben, we prefer the independent party on this debate: Call the Red Wolves the first of three “sandwich” games. The next is Sept. 26, vs. Louisiana-Lafayette. The third is Oct. 24 vs. Iowa State. All home games. All bridges to and from more important contests. All meant, eventually, to be devoured.

ASU is perched between NU’s season-opening romp over Florida Atlantic – crucial for development and experience – and the game at Virginia Tech. It’s should be a win, but, initially, it probably won’t be easy. Arkansas State is liable to raise more questions about the Cornhuskers than it answers. Consider it a hoagie bun of meat, vinegar, olives – OK, we’ve taken the analogy far enough. On with the keys:

The Buzz Word: Which, over the last week, was “tempo.” Is it college basketball season yet? Did Doc Sadler start coaching the NU offense?

No, it’s still Shawn Watson up in the booth dialing up the touchdowns, and he wants his plays more quickly relayed to quarterback Zac Lee, called in the huddle, and executed. Watson figures – and he’s right – that if Lee scoots to the line of scrimmage with 12-13 seconds left on the play clock, Nebraska can wear out a defense much like a no-huddle offense. Against Florida Atlantic, when Lee and Co. finally got around to establishing optimal “tempo,” some bioengineer got his wings, and the Owls couldn’t stop the run.

That’ll be the same idea against Arkansas State. It’s still humid in September around here. It’s still pretty easy to wear out a smaller-conference team. And it’s still a big, athletic Nebraska offensive line. Even though ASU has two defensive linemen who could play at NU – especially defensive end Alex Carrington – it is, as a whole, is undersized and mashable. It might take a couple quarters, but tempo, eventually, sets in.

Lead Wolf: On ASU’s offense, that’s quarterback Corey Leonard, a scrappy, stocky kid who threw for 2,347 yards last year and ran for 516. He was the team’s second-leading rusher in attempts with 157, or roughly 13 attempts per game. Leonard’s better running north-south than he is east-west, but he’s counted upon for that extra offensive dimension.

“He can run,” NU head coach Bo Pelini said. “He’s a good dual-threat guy. He presents some problems in that way. They’re not afraid to run him, especially when they get down in the red area.”

More of an athlete than a classic quarterback, Leonard runs to set up his passing, and the result isn’t always pretty. He was fairly awful (8-17, 67 yards) at Alabama last year. But Nebraska has to cause him to have a bad day.

Also a boon to Nebraska: ASU is a little vulnerable to the sack monster, giving up 29, 39, 37 and 31 of them in each of the last four years. The Red Wolves may try to play it safe, like FAU did, but look what it earned the Owls. A bag o’ peanuts back to Boca.

Much of the game will be decided on whether NU’s front seven – we’re including blitzers here - can get up close and personal with Leonard.

Lanes: As in keeping them. On punt team, on kickoff, and especially on upfield defensive pursuits. Spread offenses feast on teams with undisciplined defensive lines. The very concept of the sloppy sack, where four defenders just sort loop around aimlessly until one of them reaches the quarterback, doesn’t apply to the spread, which creates lanes so big, and so inviting, that if a player runs through that trap, Leonard, or his running back, Reggie Arnold, are zipping right by.

After a frustrating week against FAU’s timid offense, NU defensive linemen will be tempted to freestyle in order to get to the quarterback. Which is precisely what Arkansas State wants.

The Edges: Nebraska has a subtle, but potentially important, advantage over ASU. NU’s wide receivers will dwarf members of ASU’s secondary. All three starters – 6-foot-4 Menelik Holt, 6-2 Niles Paul and 6-1 Curenski Gilleylen – weigh well north of 200 pounds. None of the Red Wolves’ defensive backs, including strong safety M.D. Jennings, are anywhere near that weight total, or taller than six feet. It’s a fast bunch, but not necessarily a physical one.

Where does that advantage matter most? Running plays. If Nebraska can rebuff ASU’s scrappy defensive line, and running backs Roy Helu and Rex Burkhead can hit the corners, Paul, Holt and Gilleylen should be able to hold their blocks. Blocking, in fact, might be what the three of them do best. Paul and Holt earned some of their spurs last year, while Gilleylen shook down the thunder on Holt’s 28-yard touchdown catch in the Florida Atlantic game.

“I want a complete receiver, I do,” wide receivers coach Ted Gilmore said. “And I challenge them like you wouldn’t believe to block and take pride in it…you can fire up a team without making a touchdown.”

Mix tape: The Huskers only showed a portion of their running game vs. FAU, and what they did show was a little different from 2008. I liked what I saw – misdirection, a little veer action, a counter sweep. It wasn’t Florida’s offense, but it was nice blend of power and finesse.

Saturday may require more of the finesse. Option plays. Toss plays – which Nebraska ran well on Saturday. Outside zone runs out of the shotgun.

“We’ve got a lot of toys in the trunk,” running backs coach Tim Beck said. Not that he was dishing about just which toys offensive coordinator Shawn Watson was going to use, of course.

See also: Guess The Score NU-ASU, Five More Keys, Five Players to Watch, Husker Locker's Top 25 Poll

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It's that time of the week again!

1. Guess the score of the game
2. Offensive MVP
3. Defensive MVP.

In our first contest, huskerinaz emerged the winner,picking NU to win 45-7.

Check back later this week ti explore our picks. Last week, we had NU winning 34-7. We had Roy Helu and Barry Turner are out MVPs. Helu certainly was the ofensive MVP.

Who will win this week?

Our prediction for Saturday's game: Nebraska struggles out of the gate on offense, but causes at least two turnovers in a 35-16 victory. Arkansas State adds a late touchdown.
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It was a quick vocabulary lesson in the difference between offensive and defensive coaches.

When Nebraska head coach Bo Pelini critiqued, at length, his defense in Tuesday’s press conference, he used the word “soft” to describe its physical effort in a 49-3 win over Florida Atlantic.

Offensive coordinator Shawn Watson’s word of the day? Tempo. As in the speed with which quarterback Zac Lee received the play from the sideline, communicated it to the offense, and actually ran it.

In a 21-point first half, it wasn’t so good, despite touchdown passes of 28 and 51 yards.

But when Nebraska sped up in the second half, FAU “couldn’t stop us,” Watson said after Tuesday’s two-hour practice on the grass fields north of Memorial Stadium. “We went right down the field on them.”

The difference? Lee himself. The junior from San Francisco was “a little nervous in the service,” Watson said, in the first half, and kept heading to the sidelines to receive the play. That’s not uncommon in some offenses; however, Watson and Co. are making a concerted effort to speed up without ditching the huddle altogether.

At halftime, Watson told Lee to stand by the rest of his teammates on the field.

“That’s step one,” Watson smiled. “Pretty logical.”

Then, NU coaches held Lee “more accountable” for making sure the line hustled to their spots.

“If guys aren’t getting their hand in the dirt, he’s got to get them to get their hand in the dirt so we can play,” Watson said.

Watson called Lee’s second-half tempo “beautiful.” Nebraska needed only four plays on each its first two drives in the third quarter, scoring touchdowns on runs by junior Roy Helu.

“It could have been a little better,” Lee said. “But it’s kind of a first game thing.”

Other than the tempo problems, Watson said Lee “graded out really high” in his initial start. He completed 15 of 22 passes for 213 yards and two touchdowns.

“We didn’t ask him to do a whole lot of stuff, but we asked him to do enough to win the football game,” Watson said. “And as the game wore on I gave him more responsibility. And he really handled it well.”

Concerns about Lee vacating the pocket to run seemed answered by Saturday’s performance. Lee only scrambled once, and that was for a 12-yard gain. Mostly, Lee said, he tried to buy time for receivers to get open downfield by stepping into the pocket and moving away from pressure.

“I’ll run if I have to,” Lee said. “But I’d rather somebody got open downfield and hit them for a big gain…you want to get out and run around and make plays yourself, but I think the best thing, in the big picture, is to let guys get open.”

Notes:

*Both left guard Keith Williams and tight end Dreu Young practiced in full pads Tuesday. Young missed most of fall camp and the first game recovering from back surgery.

“It’s good to have (Dreu) back,” Watson said. “He’ll be in the gameplan. He has a lot of thump on the line of scrimmage and he’s a good pass receiver.”

*Watson seemed pretty set on using just Helu and true freshman Rex Burkhead at running back.

“We would ride those two horses, to be honest with you, forever,” Watson said. “That’s the way we’d do it. And we need a third guy, it’d be Lester (Ward).”

Expect more of Ward in the Big 12 season, when Nebraska routinely used three running backs in 2008.

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Nebraska wide receiver Niles Paul said he plays football “angry,” anyway, but Saturday’s Florida Atlantic game provided an extra dose of frustration for the junior from Omaha.

After a month of making big plays in fall camp, Paul was the silent partner among the starting wide receivers in NU’s 49-3 win. Menelik Holt and Curenski Gilleylen both scored touchdowns on highlight-worthy receptions. Paul finished with two catches for 13 yards, one decent kickoff return and a personal foul penalty on Rex Burkhead’s eight-yard touchdown run late in the third quarter.

Not exactly the breakout party Paul had wanted.

“Everybody that knows me knows I play angry,” Paul said. “Things weren’t going the way I was hoping, so I was just trying to make a play.”

“I either have the safety or the corner on that play, and I chose to get the safety,” Paul said, smiling. “For whatever reason I chose the safety. A little frustrated. So I went in and took him out. And Rex scored. We exchanged words…and I got caught exchanging words.”

Paul wanted the ball so badly, he said, he made an ill-advised punt return attempt in the first half. Instead of calling for a fair catch, Paul took a running leap into a FAU defender, catching the ball, but getting flipped over in the process. He drew a penalty for his effort – and an earful from return coach Ron Brown.

“He chewed me out for it,” Paul said. “It was a little too risky. He wants me to be fearless, but not that fearless.”

Not that Paul wasn’t happy for his fellow receivers, Holt and Gilleylen, whom he said were “vindicated” by their performance on Saturday. As a whole, Nebraska’s receiving corps had been a question mark heading into 2009. It probably still is.

“They’re like family,” he said. “I was just happy for Curenski and Meno. It was just like I scored when they scored.”

Paul said Holt has been trying his hop-step move throughout fall camp. Not too successfully, either.

“We kind of give him crap about it,” Paul said. “But it finally worked. And he scored on it.”

And if Paul isn’t getting the ball, he knows, at the very least, blocking is a fallback. Younger receivers hold up 6-foot-2, 210-pounder as a role model, said sophomore Brandon Kinnie, who knew little about blocking before heading to Nebraska.

“He just gets after it,” Kinnie said. “Niles is the guy we all watch.”

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Lest any Nebraska football player felt chuffed about NU’s 49-3 win over Florida Atlantic, head coach Bo Pelini arrived Tuesday afternoon to tell the media what he’d already told his team on Sunday.

“Overall, man to man, 11 guys playing, I thought we played soft,” Pelini said at his weekly press conference. “We’ve got to get that fixed…we played too high at times. We didn’t play the way we had practiced. We weren’t coming off the football all the time. We got soft. We didn’t play with great technique.”

Reporters, like fish to chum, seized on Pelini’s series of statements, asking several different questions exploring the definition of “soft.”

“The effort was there, but the passion wasn’t always,” Pelini said. He added that interior defensive linemen Jared Crick and Ndamukong Suh were “average at best.”

“I’m not real patient,” Pelini said of his expectations, explaining the difference between good and great as “taking on a block and destroying the block.”

Suh, who followed Pelini on the podium, said he took the message “personally” but understood it.

“It looks good on paper,” Suh said. “But if you looked back at the film, it wasn’t as great as it looked…the biggest reason we weren’t getting our push is that we were playing high. And you can’t play high and get a push. We need to get underneath their chins.”

NU’s defense had hoped to establish its bulwark two yards behind the original line of scrimmage. Often, however, FAU’s large offensive line neutralized the Huskers’ four-man line, creating a scrum that occasionally left a hole open for Owl running back Alfred Morris.

Junior WILL linebacker Blake Lawrence said the back end could improve its aggression and pursuit, too.

“Stop the offense a little sooner,” Lawrence said. “We need to take on a tackle, try and get the ball out, things like that. We can work on being focused on assignments.”

For the game, NU allowed 358 total yards and 122 on the ground. When asked whether that total bothered him, Pelini said: “You’d better believe it.”

Nebraska responded accordingly in practice Monday, Pelini said, with a spirited, physical workout.

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