Regardless of Nebraska’s opinion on the matter, it will still be without two starters in the secondary this week at Northwestern following a pair of targeting penalties at Ohio State.
Senior safety Deontai Williams and junior cornerback Cam Taylor-Britt were both ejected for targeting fouls in the second half vs. the Buckeyes. Per NCAA rules, they must sit out the first half of the Huskers’ next game.
Even after NU’s original second game vs. Wisconsin was canceled due to COVID-19, those suspensions still carry over against the Wildcats on Saturday. As a result, Nebraska will be relying on a handful of young defensive backs to grow up in a hurry.
Redshirt freshmen Myles Farmer and Noa Pola-Gates and true freshman Isaac Gifford will all be counted on to fill in for Williams at safety. Redshirt freshman Quinton Newsome and true freshmen Ronald Delancy and Tamon Lynum will be the next up at corner in place of Taylor-Britt.
Defensive coordinator Erik Chinander and defensive backs coach Travis Fisher expressed confidence in those young players to answer the call, though the Huskers don’t have much choice.
“I’ve got a lot of confidence in the guys that we’re going to play…” Fisher said. “We just keep rolling, and whoever is in the game are starters.”
At safety, Farmer looks to be in line to replace Williams in the starting lineup. A former three-star recruit out of Westlake (Ga.), Farmer was rated as one of the top-50 safeties in the country in the 2019 class, and Fisher called him "one of the top guys, I think, on the team" going into the spring.
Pola-Gates is a former four-star who came to Lincoln with lofty expectations, but he only played in two games while redshirting last season. Chinander said he’d seen significant growth in both players over the past year.
“You could always tell when both of those guys got here, they’re both super athletic, and they’re physical,” Chinander said. “Myles is a really long kid, and Noa is as twitchy of a guy as there is on the football team. So it was just knowing where to be and being able to have the coaches trusting that they’re going to do their jobs snap in, snap out.
“I think that they’ve both taken that under their wing and have taken that constructive criticism… They’ve taken it upon themselves to close the gap that they’ve had.”
Chinander also made it clear that Gifford would be a factor in NU’s safety rotation during Williams’ absence. The former Lincoln (Neb.) Southeast standout joined Nebraska as a “blue shirt” early enrollee in January, meaning he paid his own tuition in the spring semester and then went on scholarship this fall.
“Isaac’s more athletic than he gets credit for, and he really understands football,” Chinander said. “He really wants to work at the game. He’s accountable, he’s dependable, and he’s going to work hard on every single snap. He’s a guy that we know whether we throw him out there at nickel or safety or probably even linebacker, he’s going to know what he’s doing, and he’s going to max himself out.”
At cornerback, Fisher said he’d been high on Newsome’s potential at cornerback since the first time he watched him play in person when Newsome was a junior in high school.
“He has very, very quick feet,” Fisher said. “Guys like that who can play safety and at the same time have the feet to play corner, I knew right away that he could play corner here.”
Fisher also seemed very high on the potential of first-year cornerbacks Delancy and Lynum. Both players saw their first college action on special teams last time out at OSU, and Fisher said they immediately made their presence known in practices this fall.
“I look forward to them stepping up in some part of the game, whether it’s defense, whether it’s special teams this week,” Fisher said. “Maturing a whole lot as freshmen and are doing a great job of coming to practice with the right mentality. They’re catching the older guys’ eyes with the way they’re practicing and making plays on footballs out at practice.”
