Cornhuskers Don’t Have It : Nebraska Team That Shows Up to Play UCLA This Time Doesn’t Look Like Its Old, Powerful Self

Mark Blazek, a Nebraska safety, focused his eyes on the wall. He looked straight ahead. He didn’t blink.

Does this make him a stare-oid? Quick, call Terry Donahue.

The semi-great steroid controversy, an entertaining topic before UCLA’s meeting with Nebraska, got lost early Saturday night, swallowed in the first quarter of the Bruins’ 41-28 victory.

Cornhusker football players may or may not have ever downed a few steroids, and Donahue may or may not have meant to say they did. But pretend they do.

Then the way Nebraska played in the first quarter may be the best argument against using steroids..

Here was the score at the end of the first quarter: UCLA 28, Nebraska 0.

Here is what Blazek said about it: “It was a nightmare.”

Steroids? For one quarter, Bruin points were lighting up the scoreboard like asteroids.

The first three UCLA possessions produced three touchdowns. Tight end Charles Arbuckle caught a 57-yard touchdown pass from Troy Aikman;, tailback Shawn Wills ran 50 yards for another, and then Arbuckle caught a 3-yard touchdown pass from Aikman.

UCLA proved it could be versatile. The Bruins scored again on a play that began when they didn’t even have the football. Darryl Henley returned a punt 75 yards for a fourth first-quarter touchdown and a 28-0 UCLA lead.

By then, the Cornhuskers were wondering about alternative employment possibilities.

“It was a big shock,” linebacker Jeff Mills said.

Henley, who broke several tackles on his way to the end zone, refused to believe it broke anything else.

“Somebody told me the punt return broke their backs,” Henley said. “It didn’t. You can’t break their back until the game is over. It could be 63-0 and they’d still be coming back, and that’s scary.

“At halftime, I was nervous.”

At halftime, UCLA led, 38-13. Nebraska came back as expected in the second half, but the Cornhuskers just didn’t have, you know, well, it.

What was it? Enough points.

What quarterback Steve Taylor didn’t have was a sense of humor about Donahue’s inferences about Nebraska not being a “normal” team in times past.

Taylor, like many others, thought Donahue was talking about steroids.

“It wasn’t humorous, it was a dig,” Taylor said. “I guess what you could say after this is that we’re being more normal now.

“We used that whole thing as a motivational factor,” he said. “But the whole (steroid) thing had no place in our performance.”

Said Mills: “Myself, personally, I never touch the drug. It was very unsportsmanlike and unfair to talk about it.”

Even more unfair was how the Bruins treated Nebraska for the first 12 minutes of the game, right after the kickoff. UCLA had 209 yards to just 52 for Nebraska.

Eric Ball, who ran long and short for 148 yards in 35 carries during the game, had one 54-yard touchdown run called back in the first quarter because of a penalty. Three plays later, Wills spurted 50 yards for a touchdown to make up for it.

Donahue said it was as good a first quarter as he had ever seen at UCLA.

“It was one of those things you experience in athletics where everything clicks and everything works,” he said.

“The fans were on fire . . . the team was on fire,” he said.

Somebody should have called the fire department.

“It was super to look up and see 28-0,” Ball said. “This was a payback for what they did to us before.”

If Nebraska intended to pay back Donahue for hinting about steroids among its players, how do you explain what happened?

Coach Tom Osborne, in a murky statement on the steroid controversy after the game, had this to say: ‘If we had any advantage in the past that wasn’t right, I’m sorry for it. We obviously didn’t have an advantage tonight.”