Curt McKeever: Huskers’ junior QB earns rave reviews
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Signs that it’s going to be an upside-down afternoon in Memorial Stadium:
On your walk to the game, you hear people who have been offered free tickets asking where the seats are located before deciding whether they consider that a good deal.
Then, you see a purple-clad Kansas State couple carrying Kansas Jayhawks chair-back cushions.
So there you have it. Long before the home team put a 73-31 thumping on the Wildcats, confusion reigned over Huskerville on Saturday.
Leave it to Joe Ganz, a guy who’s spent almost his entire three-year career wearing a visor on the sideline and signaling in plays, to be the one who provided same sanity to the madness.
Nebraska fans might not know, and now may be even more confused about who will be coaching their beloved team next season. But after Saturday, they definitely have a strong hunch about who will be the starting quarterback.
And that should bring them more comfort than anybody Tom Osborne might bring in to run the show in 2008.
“The best performance I’ve ever seen a quarterback have in my coaching career,” raved offensive coordinator Shawn Watson, who, like everyone on the current staff, may be down to his last game at NU.
The review of the junior, who backed up Zac Taylor and Sam Keller, from Kansas State coach Ron Prince was just as glowing.
“You can’t change up the coverages any more than we did today. We did a variety of things, but we were unable to do any of them well enough, and he was absolutely spectacular,” Prince said.
Pick your superlative, it would fit what the 21-year-old from Palos Heights, Ill., did while completing 30 of 40 passes for school records of 510 yards and seven touchdowns.
On second thought, don’t try to convince yourself that what Ganz and the Big Red offense accomplished Saturday was jaw-dropping enough to save Bill Callahan’s job. At this point, I’m not sure anyone’s that good.
But Ganz is providing the Huskers with a poster boy who could fit whatever PR campaign is necessary for next season. You could see him being NU’s “Lightning in a bottle,” as well as featured in a “New coach, new attitude” promotion.
Nebraska’s been without the injured Keller for two games now, and in that time, we’ve discovered Callahan really wasn’t bluffing when he said in August there was a neck-and-neck race for the starting quarterback spot.
Being careful to anoint Ganz as a savior, it’s worthy to note that he’s thrown for 915 yards and 11 touchdowns the past two weeks. Yes, we remember the four interceptions at Kansas. But we also remember how, unlike Saturday, the Huskers were forced to pass nearly the entire game vs. the Jayhawks.
That they did so Saturday was by their choosing.
And, yet, perhaps the most powerful image a Nebraska fan could take from the performance was Ganz scrambling for a 23-yard gain on a fourth-and-20 play late in the third quarter.
(That, or else the fact that he was still firing away on a four-play, all-pass drive that gave the Huskers a 66-17 lead with 10:58 left.
Take your pick. What one would have seen was a Husker quarterback acting way beyond his experience.
. . . Someone waving his arms while directing his unit to hurry to the line of scrimmage following a 31-yard completion so he could spike the ball and have a chance to throw a TD pass in the final seconds of the first half.
And then he did it.
Ganz was so in charge on Senior Day that I’m not sure it was mere coincidence that four of his scoring strikes went to . . . seniors.
That fact wasn’t lost on Watson, either.
He may have been heartbroken when Keller was injured at Texas, but at least he wasn’t worried how the backup would respond.
Ganz might not have had game experience, but his personality showed that he was definitely game.
“Not one sleepless night,” Watson said of the time leading up to Ganz’s start last week, “because Joe was going to come in there and play.
“There’s been other years (with other quarterbacks), man, you just worry to death about it.”
The main thing Ganz was worried about after Saturday’s game was how his friends who’d traveled from Illinois were going to razz him about some throws he missed. Of course, that’d still be better than having them remind him about their last trip to Lincoln, when all they got to do was watch him watch the Huskers lose to Texas A&M.
“I’m not satisfied yet,” Ganz said. “One of my goals when I took over was to get this team to a bowl game. We need to beat Colorado.”
He’d like to think a victory Nov. 23 might give his coaches a chance of being back for his senior year, too. When talking about his love and trust of the current staff, Ganz pointed out that had defensive coordinator Kevin Cosgrove not offered him a chance to be at Nebraska, he’d be playing baseball these days.
Not sure how he’d fit in on Mike Anderson’s club over at Haymarket Park, but I do know this about Ganz the football player: His days as a reliever are over.
“It’ll probably still be open, because that’s unfair to the other guys,” Ganz said of the quarterback situation next season. “But I hope (this) does carry over and it does give me momentum in the spring . . . because it would be sweet to start a whole year.”
Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.
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