WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Half the crowd was clad in a familiar red, but that was the extent of similarities between week one's Nevada victory and week two's nail-biter at Wake Forest.
Groves Stadium - home to the Demon Deacons - felt far away from Memorial Stadium.
Maybe it was the open-air press box, equipped with rough wooden tables lined up immediately behind cheering Wake Forest fans. While a new press box is under construction, the visiting press had the luxury of sitting at the edge of the crowd, susceptible to wind, rain and falling objects.
It could have been the vacant corners of the stadium seating, which only managed to fit 32,483 fans, a large percentage of them being Cornhusker fans. In defense of the Deacs, it's tough to fill a stadium when your school enrollment barely cracks 4,000.
Starkly contrasting a Nebraska home game was the postgame press conference, conducted at a folding table set up in the grass next to the Huskers' equipment truck. Fans called in vain for NU Coach Bill Callahan's attention as sweat-soaked reporters strained to hear the interview.
Yeah, Wake Forest was a weird place. And the oddities didn't stay outside the lines.
Nebraska has never proven to be a great road team under Callahan, but many game predictions - perhaps foolishly - figured the game to be more one-sided.
This was a strange game, not because of the stadium or score as much as the play on the field. NU's rushing game, after cracking 400 yards the week before, squeaked out 115 yards. Wake's rushing stats - 236 yards - looked like they belonged to the Huskers.
That discrepancy spilled over onto the other side of the field. It wasn't news to anybody that the Deacs had a good front seven, but did you see the way Nebraska's rush defense played?
By the second quarter, the Blackshirts were consistently biting on play-action and misdirection plays, and Wake Forest was moving it on the ground at will.
That opened up the passing game and a 61-yard pass to Kevin Marion that set up a one-yard touchdown run.
Marion made the big catch after dropping a pass on the same play in the first quarter that hit him in the hands and would have been an easy touchdown. It was badly blown coverage by Nebraska, and the Huskers got lucky. Without that drop, the game result could have flip-flopped.
In fact, if not for Marion's dropped pass and Zackary Bowman's interception, a 20-17 win could have easily become a 24-20 loss. I would call it a very fortunate, breathe-a-sigh-of-relief win. Sam Keller saw it differently.
"Sometimes you're going to have to come away with a character win, and we did that today," Keller said after the game. "Somebody had to step up and we did, and they're not always pretty, but I'm just proud that we came out there with a victory."
I hate to be the one to crash Keller's party, but character wins only take you so far. In Nebraska's case, they only take you to 2-0.
If you want to get to 3-0, you're going to have to drop the diplomacy and moral victory talk. Keller needs to elevate his performance.
His 258 passing yards picked up the slack when the running game struggled, but his three turnovers - two interceptions and a fumble - kept the door open for Wake Forest and nearly cost the Huskers the lead in the fourth quarter.
The Deacs are still a good football team, despite their 0-2 start. But they're not too good for a team like Nebraska to bounce back from a couple costly errors.
USC is a different story. Every mistake the Huskers make will matter much more than anything they do right.
The positive spin for the Huskers? Wake Forest put up a fight that could very well serve as an excellent primer to this weekend's marquee matchup. Nebraska has been hit in the jaw, knocked off balance, threatened, taken down to the wire and persevered through it all.
We won't have to wait long before finding out whether Nebraska's sloppy performance in Winston-Salem was the real deal or simply a product of its environment.
Jonathan Crowl is a senior English major. Reach him at jonathancrowl@dailynebraskan.com
