Game 'slowing down' for Nebraska sophom*ore receivers Jaylen Lloyd, Malachi Coleman (2024)

LINCOLN — Jaylen Lloyd’s biggest asset on the football field is his speed.

He flashed the ability to take the top off a defense almost immediately after a wave of injuries to Nebraska’s veteran receivers forced him into action as a freshman in 2023. The high school state champion sprinter and jumper also competes for the NU track and field team. Friday, he said he cracked 22 miles per hour in practice.

And yet, as he enters his sophom*ore season, Lloyd sees the game around him at a more deliberate pace.

“A lot of things are slowing down,” Lloyd said. “They’re not as fast. And I know the playbook a lot better than I did last year, so I’m just thinking smooth out here right now.”

The frequency of injuries in the Huskers’ receiver room bordered on disastrous in 2023. Isaiah Garcia-Castaneda tore his ACL in the first game of the year. Marcus Washington did the same in October. Billy Kemp IV was dinged up for much of the season.

The plan wasn’t for Lloyd and Malachi Coleman to play as much as they did. But a year later, Nebraska is ready to reap the benefits of a pair of wideouts that have already seen what it takes to play in the Big Ten and are past the first stage of their development, even if the process wasn’t always pretty.

“You go out there and you’re not physically ready at times to play in the Big Ten, and you gotta go out there and block some grown men and get open versus grown men, and with every rep you’re not gonna win, you have failures during games,” NU offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield said. “I think that we’ve done a nice job of learning from our failures and learning from hard times that we had last year at that position. I think it’s only made us better.”

It wasn’t always pretty when Lloyd and Coleman were thrown into the fire. Neither was especially big by Big Ten standards, neither as polished as receivers with more college experience. But there were moments when the finer things didn’t matter, like when Lloyd zoomed past the Iowa secondary for a 66-yard touchdown in the final game of the season, his sheer speed and athleticism overcoming any roughness around the edges.

The natural step forward is improving in the subtle areas of wide receiver without losing explosiveness. Lloyd bulked up over the offseason, weighing 179 pounds after arriving at 158 as a freshman, which he expects to improve his blocking on the perimeter.

Lloyd and Coleman are still among the younger players in the receiver room, but they have more experience than most their age. Even among a group that returns Garcia-Castaneda and Alex Bullock and added veteran transfers Isaiah Neyor and Jahmal Banks, they’ve become more comfortable speaking up.

“When you play you kinda have to be more vocal,” Bullock said. “You have that experience; you need to help even older guys. If you’re a younger guy, you got something to say, you can’t be afraid to say it. So that’s the biggest thing, probably, for those guys is they’re not used to it because they were freshmen last year, but they’re catching on and being more vocal now.”

There were a variety of reasons for the Huskers’ inability to consistently throw the ball in 2023, shaky quarterback play among them. But NU has better receiver depth than it did a season ago, fortified by the additions of Neyor and Banks.

Lloyd and Coleman aren’t new, but their natural progression can help Nebraska, from skinny freshmen thrown into the mix to the more well-rounded, knowledgeable pass catchers that will take the field Aug. 31.

“Me and Malachi getting in was big for us just because you go in, you don’t know what you’re doing at first, it’s not like we’ve been there before,” Lloyd said. “We feel like we’re vets. We don’t want to be treated like the young guys no more.”