Nebraska Too Much in the End

A chance at the national championship had been wrested from their grasp when they lost to Texas in the Big 12 championship game, but the sixth-ranked Nebraska Cornhuskers didn’t have to look far to find motivation in Tuesday’s Orange Bowl against the 10th-ranked Virginia Tech Hokies.

All they had to do was look to each other and to Coach Tom Osborne, who told them if they would only persevere, they could wear the Hokies down in the second half. Playing with the hearts of champions, if not for a championship, Nebraska overwhelmed Virginia Tech, 41-21, before a sparse crowd of 51,212 at Pro Player Stadium.

“You come from the type of program we come from and the coach we play for and it’s not tough to get up,” said I-back Damon Benning, who rushed for 95 yards and two third-quarter touchdowns and was named Nebraska’s most valuable player.

“We could have been playing anybody out there and we would have played hard. We wanted to make amends for what happened in St. Louis [in the Big 12 title game].”

Osborne acknowledged he wasn’t sure his players would react this well without the ultimate prize at stake, as it has been for the Cornhuskers (11-2) the past three seasons.

“I was very apprehensive,” Osborne said after Nebraska’s third consecutive bowl victory and fourth successive 11-win season. “At times this almost felt like a non-game in terms of intensity and in terms of interest and I was sorry for that.”

Said Virginia Tech Coach Frank Beamer: “I leave here with a great appreciation for Nebraska. They are an extremely good football team. We needed to make some plays offensively and defensively and we couldn’t, which probably goes back to Nebraska being good enough to keep us from making them.”

If the pre-game intensity was lacking, old habits took over for Nebraska and made for a close game for three quarters.

The would-be giant-killers of Virginia Tech kept it interesting at the beginning, with agile quarterback Jim Druckenmiller scrambling and wriggling away from Nebraska defenders long enough to engineer an eight-play, 72-yard touchdown drive that he completed with a 19-yard pass to Marcus Parker for a 7-0 Hokie lead with 3:14 left in the first quarter.

A field goal and a five-yard keeper by Nebraska quarterback Scott Frost put the Cornhuskers ahead, 10-7, a lead that grew to 17-7 when Druckenmiller was jolted into a fumble by Mike Rucker and defensive tackle Jason Peter rumbled 31 yards for a touchdown.

Druckenmiller finished an 80-yard, eight-play drive with a six-yard pass to Shawn Scales, cutting Nebraska’s lead to 17-14, which is how it remained at the half. Osborne, however, was no longer apprehensive.

“I told our players if they played physical football and used the additional depth I thought we had, we could wear them down in the second half,” he said.

That proved to be the case. Nebraska stopped the Hokies on their first possession of the third quarter and then scored on its first possession on a 33-yard run by Benning up the middle. Virginia Tech had one more response left: Druckenmiller, who completed 16 of 33 attempts for 214 yards, hit for one of his three touchdowns with a 33-yard toss to Cornelius White, who beat cornerback Ralph Brown II down the left sideline and into the end zone with 4:58 left in the third quarter.

The Hokies’ fading hopes disappeared early in the fourth quarter. With the ball at Nebraska’s 41-yard line, tailback Ken Oxendine was muscled back for a loss of 15 yards. A penalty against the Hokies put them back on their 41. When Nebraska got a 37-yard field goal out of its next possession, the game was, for all purposes, over.

“We just got stuffed,” Beamer said of Oxendine’s big loss. “I thought we were in good shape at halftime and I was looking forward to the second half.”

Said Oxendine, who rushed for 150 yards on 20 carries and caught three passes for 60 more yards: “We played a heck of a game, but they played an error-free game.”

The Cornhuskers can at least take away a closing victory in a season that was a disappointment for them but by almost anyone else’s standards would be a success.

“It’s the end I wanted,” said Benning, a senior. “We skipped a few chapters in between. . . . It was important for the young guys because people said we couldn’t get up for this game and we showed them how to do that.”