Zavier Betts feels he "let everybody down" and is earning trust back

Nebraska’s receiver room is wide-open entering the 2023 season. Last year’s most dangerous weapon, Trey Palmer, is off to the NFL and currently catching passes in a Tampa Bay Buccaneers uniform.

That means someone needs to emerge as a leader from the group. The go-to guy who presumed starting quarterback Jeff Sims will look for on third-and-long. The one offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield tries to free up down the field for an explosive play.

Maybe that player will be Marcus Washington, the leading returning receiver who caught 31 passes for 471 yards and one touchdown. Maybe it’ll be the small but elusive Billy Kemp IV, the transfer from Virginia.

But maybe it’ll be Zavier Betts. That's not a name many would have thought would be in the picture at the end of last season.

The talented athlete from Bellevue West is back on the team after leaving the program — and the sport — during the spring of 2022. A healthy — both in mind and body — and motivated Betts makes Nebraska’s wideout room better. If he plays to his sky-high potential, he’s the best receiver the Huskers have and probably one of the top pass catchers in the Big Ten.

But that’s a big if. Betts recently joined the Huskers Radio Network for a quick in-house interview and touched on why he's once again wearing the scarlet and cream.

Simply put, it's because of Matt Rhule.

“He believed in me. And I honestly couldn’t say no,” Betts said of the Huskers' first-year head coach. “Having somebody like him come in and believe in me after me leaving, I couldn’t say no.”

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Betts is certainly motivated to prove something in 2023. Someone who takes 21 credit hours to be academically eligible for the upcoming season needs to be driven and focused, and that’s exactly what Betts was, all the while juggling spring ball at the same time.

It wasn’t easy, but Betts wasn’t alone. He had a team of tutors, coaches and friends that helped him along the way.

“At times it did get really difficult, but I had everybody pushing me and keeping me going forward,” Betts said of the school workload.

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Rhule told Betts he wanted to help him not only as a football player, but as a human being. Everyone knows Betts is a high-ceiling talent who’s just scratching the surface of what he can become on a football field. Rhule believes his young and energetic receivers coach, Garret McGuire, can pull that potential out and turn it into production.

But before Betts could even think about catching passes and touchdowns in the spring, he needed to prove to his teammates he’s here to stay. He needed to regain trust.

“That was my only goal, was earning their trust,” Betts said. “So I did anything and everything they asked me to and I made sure I did it exactly how they wanted it.”

Betts said Sims and the other scholarship quarterbacks, Chubba Purdy and Heinrich Haarberg, are all texting the receivers daily about Satterfield’s playbook and finding times and dates to meet up and throw routes on air.

“It’s all of them, it’s not just Jeff this week or Chubba this week," Betts said. “All of them are texting constantly, hounding us almost to make sure we know everything.”

Building that chemistry and perfecting the timing with all three quarterbacks is obviously important to everyone, but it’s crucial for Betts, who hasn’t played in a game since Nov. 26, 2021.

“Before fall camp, doing that now, getting our timing down with our routes and their steps, when we get into fall camp that’s one less thing we have to worry about,” Betts said. “We can focus on who we’re going to play in the coming weeks, focus on what we need to fix and just get better from there.”

After taking a year off from the sport, Betts doesn’t think he’s lost any of his trademark break-away speed. He surprised himself by how well he felt once he got back on a football field. Right now, his goals for fall camp are putting on weight — at 6-foot-2 he wants to get up to 220 pounds — and knowing the playbook inside and out.

“It was an easy decision for me to come back and play,” Betts said. “I really did it for my family and for the fans, because I know a lot of people were sad when I left. Honestly, I feel like I let everybody down. So I wanted to come back and show everybody.”

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