Congratulation!: michigan wolverines’ senior inside linebacker, Ernest Hausmann, has officially been recognized as a consensus All-American by the NCAA, cementing his place among college football’s elite players……
Under the lights on a Friday night in Columbus, Neb., Ernest Hausmann and the Columbus High School Discoverers huddled up.
With just 40 seconds left on the clock, Columbus trailed the statewide perennial powerhouse Kearney Bearcats by three points. The Discoverers had one more shot — fourth down on Kearney’s 11-yard line — to tie or take the lead.
Hausmann, then a senior middle linebacker and wide receiver, was Columbus’ go-to guy on both sides of the ball. He had already caught a touchdown pass and recorded multiple tackles that night against the Bearcats.
It was almost three years ago now, but Patrick Clark remembers that huddle like it was yesterday. The Discoverers’ defensive coordinator at the time, Clark and the rest of Columbus’ coaching staff were at a play-calling crossroads. Should the Discoverers attempt a field goal, shooting for a tie and giving Kearney a better chance to storm back, or should they try to jump ahead with a touchdown?
Defensive coach Mark Brown, described by Clark as his co-defensive coordinator, offered an answer.
“Throw the ball to f-ing Ernest, and let’s win this f-ing game.”
Sure enough, that’s exactly what Columbus did. Hausmann ran a fade to the corner of the end zone and hauled in a contested 15-yard pass. He put the Discoverers up 35-31, a lead they took to the final whistle to snap an 18-game losing streak against the Bearcats. Brown was right.
And although Brown sadly died in late August, scenes like those became defining moments for Columbus coaches and players alike. A meaningful mentor on and off the field, Brown left a lasting impression wherever he went.
In that huddle, Brown and the Discoverers’ coaching staff had full trust in Hausmann. On the precipice of a win nearly two decades in the making, Hausmann trusted them too — but it took him some time to get there.
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Born in Uganda and legally adopted at age 2, Hausmann moved to Nebraska when he was 5 years old. His early football memories trace back to fourth grade, the first year he could play tackle football. He remembers putting on pads for the first time and wondering how in the world players on TV could run fast in that heavy uniform.
Flash forward about eight years, and Hausmann had exactly the type of speed his younger self couldn’t quite understand.
“I remember one (play), him coming from the backside — he was playing defensive end for us,” Columbus head coach Craig Williams recalled to The Michigan Daily. “He comes on the backside, runs 47 yards across the field and stops a kid for no gain on a sweep play. Just a relentless effort all the time. And it seems so smooth for him … He’s fast, he covers ground with pads on and he’s just smooth on the field.”
Hausmann dabbled in a variety of sports, but he kept coming back to football. He loved playing on teams that invested so much into a relatively small number of guaranteed games. For him, there was just something special about the level of team-wide commitment.
Growing up, Hausmann was usually the best athlete on the field. It wasn’t until his freshman and sophomore years of high school that he started to consistently encounter bigger and stronger opponents. While that sometimes caused frustrations, it also gave Hausmann just the push he needed to reach the next level.
“As a sophomore, he had to grow mentally and see how much harder he had to work because he couldn’t rely on his athleticism every time,” Williams said. “But he caught onto that very quickly, which is why he was so committed to the weight room and his diet and those things. And I think that changed the way he looked at things and drove him to be the best.”
A credit to both his mental and physical development, Hausmann made a big jump between his sophomore and junior seasons. With renewed confidence, he was ready to fully commit to football.
“In his junior year, that’s when he decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to be a full-blown football player, and I’m going to go after this dream,’ ” Clark said. “So when the mental side of it caught up with the physical God-given talent that he had, all of a sudden, bam, the rest is history.”
It might’ve taken some time, but once Hausmann was in, he was all in.
The “most driven athlete” Clark has ever coached, Hausmann did just about everything he possibly could to set himself up for success. He paid close attention to what he was putting in his body, hydrating constantly and fueling himself with healthy foods. He got up before sunrise to lift by himself, in addition to both his weights class during school and football practice every afternoon.
He also tried to learn anything and everything he could. Hausmann didn’t want to just listen to his coaches blindly. He wanted to know the why. So he asked questions, and he used the answers to continue getting better — and, perhaps even more importantly, to build the mutual trust that culminated in that gutsy fourth-down play call against Kearney.
“What we learned is that Ernest will run through a brick wall for you if he trusts you,” Clark said. “That’s why he wants to know the why. ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?’ Because once he understands why we’re doing it, he’s going to give you every absolute ounce that he has.”
Throughout his last two seasons with the Discoverers, Hausmann played nearly every position on defense. Opposing offenses began calling plays with the intent of avoiding him — so, naturally, Clark and Brown responded by rotating him around. Hausmann would play the SAM linebacker one series before flipping to the WILL linebacker the next, sometimes even slotting in as a defensive end or high safety. Wherever he lined up, he wreaked havoc.
Hausmann started turning heads as an inside linebacker during his junior season, racking up offers from schools around the country. After self-imposing a deadline, electing to commit before the summer of his senior season so he could focus fully on his last year of high school football, Hausmann chose Nebraska.
The decision wasn’t much of a shock to his coaches, given that most homegrown talent historically funnels into the Cornhuskers’ program. Hausmann didn’t even need to visit anywhere — Nebraska just felt right.
And when he got there, despite not coming in with expectations of starting, he kept doing exactly what he was doing in those final two years at Columbus. He prepared like a starter, putting in 100% effort toward each and every aspect of his game.
“What I always remember,” Barrett Ruud, Hausmann’s linebackers coach at Nebraska who now coaches the Atlanta Falcons’ inside linebackers, told The Daily. “One of our starters got hurt in the middle of the Purdue game, so Ernest had to come in and play every snap. … And he didn’t miss a beat. As a young player, when you can stay ready when you don’t know if you’re going to play or not, that’s always a good sign of how somebody prepares, how somebody works.”
Later that season, Hausmann became only the fifth true freshman linebacker to start a game for the Huskers in 30 years.
