What Mike Riley said after Nebraska’s 27-14 win over Purdue

LINCOLN, Neb. — Nebraska coach Mike Riley is 7-0 for the first time in his career. Here’s what he had to say about Nebraska’s win on Saturday.

• “This will sound like a broken record; we are extremely happy to win the game. Purdue came here here and played hard. Their quarterback is a real good player, he made plays. So did their team.”
• “We struggled in a lot of ways and we kind of just had to stay with it. I thought that we did, after the first quarter, settle down defensively.”
• “Offensively it was hit or miss all day. Not enough consistency. But enough plays to score and win the game.”
• Riley said the decision to start OT Nick Gates came as early as this morning.
• “We’re pretty thin there right now but we’re not going to talk about that too much because we … expect to be a lot better than that and play better than that and have some more consistency. I’m hoping we’ll feel better and get healthier as we go.”
• “I think that it really, it hurts what has been kind of the formula, the recipe for this team is when we gain one or none on first down. We were doing so well on third-down conversions, and as we all know, it’s a great stat but a product of doing pretty good on first-and-10. If you can gain 5 or 6 yards on first down that changes the opportunity a lot more to be a better third-down team.”
• “We were always just struggling today, it felt like to me. I appreciated how we do struggle and have enough in us to make some plays to win the game. It’s just glimpses of how good we could be, in the run game primarily. We can do the rest of it , we just have to be better. And we have been disrupted there to the injuries to that group.”
•  On if Nebraska intended to run: “Well you know we, yes, we did want to run the ball, I don’t know about more. What it appears the best way to describe is what we are, there’s no rhythm to saying ‘OK, this is going to be a good play on first down, this is how we’ll accompany it.’ And it just, things went better as things went along but those came late, there was no consistency. There was nothing we could say, ‘OK, this is what we can rely on.'”
• Riley said he was really bothered by the final blocked punt.
• On the Wisconsin game next week: “It’ll be great for our team, great for our league. All those pieces we get to when you play when there’s a little more definition of who the teams are. We’re headed into the third-quarter area of the season. It’s kind of one of those games in that part of the season that is between two teams that have done well. And it’ll be good.”