Dennis Wagner played along, as if he expected Ashton Kutcher and his MTV Punk’d crew would pounce out of their hiding spot just as soon as he lost his composure.

You still the offensive line coach at Nebraska?

“Why wouldn’t I be,” the big man barked. “We gave up two sacks in 40 plays.”

Yeah, but … Well, how about that running game? One-hundred twenty-one yards on 42 attempts? You’ve got to admit, that’s pretty abysmal against a Division I-AA program like Maine. Right?

At this, Wagner curled his upper lip enough to bare his teeth, hardening the effect of his tough-persona fu-manchu look. But then, instead of growling and lashing out, he flashed the kind of grin that would have told Kutcher there’d be no punking this dawg.

“Oh,” Wagner said, as if he’d forgotten. “No question. We’re very disappointed. This group of guys had a great fall camp. We felt like we were taking steps forward, even more so than last year, and went into the game and it didn’t show up.”

Against a retooled defense that a year ago ranked 69th against the run in Division I-AA, Nebraska managed to crack off two — that’s right, two — runs of longer than 10 yards. Of their remaining 40 carries, the Huskers got no more than 3 yards 26 times.

Granted, two of those were sacks and another was a 1-yard TD. But that’s still not enough to erase the manner in which Wagner’s bunch performed — downright embarrassing, if not almost unforgivable.

“It wasn’t what you wanted to see with the way our defense played,” Bo Ruud said.

The sophomore linebacker was referring to Maine being in a one-possession game with NU during the fourth quarter. If you read between the lines, you could have easily thought the comment also was intended for the O-line.

Obviously, the Huskers’ opening-game struggle was caused by more than the problems up front. You didn’t see any of Wagner’s boys cause NU’s five turnovers. They also had very little to do with quarterback Zac Taylor’s fading accuracy.

But there were enough examples of breakdowns on the line — and a strange disregard for smashball at the goal line late in the first half — to create an overwhelming feeling that Big Red could face as tough a row to hoe as 2004.

Maybe worse. At least last year’s team showed, more often than not, that it could get things rolling with I-back Cory Ross.

The fact Ross got bottled up for most of last week’s game did nothing for Taylor’s cause, either.

“If you run the ball 40 times, you would hope that you’d have 150 to 200 yards rushing,” Wagner said. “We have to be able to do both. We can’t just line up and throw it, and we can’t just line up and run it. We’re not that kind of team. We’re not dominant in one area over the other. We’re going to have to play 50-50 football and keep people missing.”

In order for that to start occurring, Nebraska’s linemen are going to have to stop missing so much on communication.

Too many times when quick decisions were called for, the Huskers clammed up. In football, silence can be equated to confusion.

“As long as they’re not going to communicate, there’s going to continue to be errors,” Wagner noted. “They’ve got to talk about how they’re going to block things and, in particular, on the run, because people aren’t just going to stand there and let us pound on them. They’re going to move around and jump around and bring blitzes.”

Taylor can handle that, too, as long as he’s certain of where he’ll get pressure. In a “hot” situation, he knows his linemen will be in an overload mode trying to handle more people than have been left in to block. But those plays still have good chances of working if the right people are picked up.

According to Wagner, because the Huskers had issues getting the who’s-on-who part down pat, they also let their blocking techniques slip.

“If we were blocking the right people, our techniques were poor,” he said. “We were high or we didn’t shoot our hands. If we didn’t hit movement because we’d step to a guy here and he’d slant back there, we didn’t recover.

“It’s all about things that we teach — but it’s one thing to do it in drills. We’ve got to do it (in games).”

When Nebraska plays Wake Forest tonight, Wagner will use practically the same group he rotated against Maine. The only line change on the two-deep chart from last week is at left tackle, where sophomore Chris Patrick replaced Jordan Picou as the backup to Cornealius Fuamatu-Thomas.

While there’s nothing like game experience, unless Maine turns out to be a I-AA iron curtain, it would seem unrealistic to expect the Huskers to look dramatically better on offense against the Demon Deacons.

“I think what you use to gauge is just: Do you run the ball more effectively?” Wagner said. “I thought, overall, the (pass) protection was OK (against Maine). I don’t think it was great. But the running game — we didn’t establish any running game and put all the pressure on the passing game.”

You would think that might make a guy who works under the watchful eyes of Bill Callahan a little nervous. After all, before becoming a head coach, Callahan buttered his bread by developing sturdy NFL offensive lines in Oakland and Philadelphia, and also at the college level at Wisconsin and Illinois.

But this Wagner guy is cool to it all — and maybe if that attitude catches, his group can avoid getting Punk’d again.

“You just keep grinding and pounding on people to get them to do it right,” Wagner said. “They will. They’ll respond. But there’s got to be an urgency about it. It’s got to start happening now.”

Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.