Freshman quarterback Dylan Raiola shines as the Huskers win their first season opener in five years
A good friend of mine — let’s call him Formerly Enthusiastic Husker Fan — was a very young man when Nebraska football was at its peak, but has become quite guarded in his attitude after he experienced The Slide, NU’s depressing downturn of the past two decades. It had reached the point where he refused to get too excited about much of anything related to Cornhusker football, including the signing of five-star recruit Dylan Raiola.
Will a 40-7 season-opening thrashing of the UTEP Miners, a team that likely will prove to be at least a step above the 2019 South Alabama Jaguars, do the trick? Will Raiola’s 19-for-27 passing performance with two touchdowns and no interceptions in a little over half a game, cure someone like Formerly Enthusiastic Husker Fan? Probably not, and we shouldn’t expect it so quickly.
It would’ve been hard to expect a better debut for Raiola, who except for one lucky bounce on a deflected pass early in the second quarter was never close to throwing an interception. And that play certainly didn’t rattle the true freshman, who turned around and promptly tossed his first career touchdown pass on the next snap — a beautiful 59-yard bomb to Isaiah Neyor, who displayed tremendous balance as he stayed upright after contact and trotted triumphantly into the south end zone.
Raiola appeared to move smoothly through his progressions. On his first drive, he looked at two receivers before throwing to his third option, Janiran Bonner, for a seven-yard reception, setting up a 5-yard touchdown run by Dante Dowdell. He may have been fighting Texas-sized butterflies for all I know, but the youngster looked self-assured from the moment he led the team onto the field during his first regular-season Tunnel Walk.
He is Nebraska’s national story, for better or worse, taking attention away from the Blackshirts, who allowed just 205 total yards and recorded their eighth straight performance allowing 24 or fewer points and less than 400 yards. Those figures will be tested next by Shedeur Sanders, Travis Hunter and the Colorado Buffaloes, a game that Formerly Enthusiastic Husker Fan doubtless will use as a benchmark to judge the progress of Rhule’s rebuild.
“It was a shame that Dante had that fumble, but he was really running well,” Rhule said. “Dante has done such a good job. At the end of the spring, I probably would have put him fourth. He was the second back in the game today. I thought he was really playing well, running the ball well, and then had that fumble.”
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