2024 BOWL RECAP: New York Noise

It's hard to tell what to take away from a bowl game in 2025. Let's try!

Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

It’s increasingly hard to tell what is real about bowl games in this new era of college football.

Professional opt-outs and transfer portal exoduses leave rosters without their very best players or the depth they’ve relied on across the regular season, sometimes to extreme extents. Long layoffs between the final regular-season games and the bowls raise questions of rustiness. Weird stadiums or December/January weather can lead to poor field or playing conditions. Motivation for teams who came up short of their season goals is always a factor.

All of this is to say that it’s probably best to treat bowl games now as exhibitions that might offer some slight forward-looking previews to the next season. There are just too many different variables at play to treat this as a 13th data point comparable to the other 12 from the regular season. And big takeaways from bowl season in recent years have often proven wildly incorrect: After Missouri beat Ohio State last season in a marquee Cotton Bowl matchup, the popular narrative was that the Tigers were a program on the rise while Ohio State was freefalling. Drawing real conclusions from bowls in recent years has, more or less, proven pointless.

But that doesn’t mean bowl games are useless. They have clear value for the program, with extra practices and good vibes/springboard potential within the building for the next season. Bowls aren’t useless to evaluate, either, especially for a team like Nebraska that’s in flux in so many ways. The Husker program is breaking in two new coordinators, so the late December Pinstripe Bowl was a chance to evaluate what might have changed from a scheme perspective after a long stretch of developmental practices. Nebraska, too, got a chance to show off much of its new defensive front seven ahead of the bevy of departures it will face in 2025.

I’ve tried to draw what I could from the charting to separate what are actual, real takeaways and what is bowl game noise. There was at least some interesting things happening with Nebraska’s new offensive and defensive leaders and new personnel.

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This week’s sections are:

• An Aggressive Debut

• Small Holgorsen Formational Takeaways

• The Pass Defense Wasn’t As Bad As You Think

• What’s An Offensive Line Win?

• Dragging Everything To The Middle Is The Problem

• Haarberg’s Role

• Programming Note And Future Posting Schedule

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An Aggressive Debut

The Pinstripe Bowl functioned as sort of a preview of sorts for new defensive coordinator John Butler to show how he might run things differently. I want to write something longer in the offseason about real differences we may have seen between Butler and White when I have the chance to look at things more in depth and maybe learn a bit more about Butler, but looking at his general tendencies during the bowl was fairly instructive.

On the whole, what was deployed from the former Buffalo Bills secondary coach was not much of a change from what NU ran under now-departed Tony White for the last two seasons. NU still majored in primarily four-player even looks up front with occasional odd-front multiplicity, and utilized its three safeties in amoeba ways on the back end to fill in on the box and disguise coverage. NU still ran more zone coverage than man but also got into Cover 1 a healthy amount on money downs or for pressures. The overarching picture was unchanged.

One big difference, though, came in the general posture of aggressiveness from the defense, both from the amount of blitzing and coverage rotation on the back-end.

Butler blitzed or brought an extra rusher on 49.3% of Nebraska’s overall plays, almost 15 percentage points higher than White’s average blitz rate for the whole season. White had a blitz-happy stretch in the middle of the year, bringing a pressure on 54.72% of plays against Colorado, 48.9% against Northern Iowa, and 50% against Illinois, but otherwise rarely got above a 35% blitz rate at any other part of the season. Butler, for one game, was well above that, and it started pretty much right away from the first drive:

When Butler brought the pressure was a bit of a departure, as well. Butler brought a blitz on 53.4% of all first down plays vs. Boston College, a very high amount and far more than White. But then Butler would back off on third and fourth down, with just a 29.4% blitz rate on those. White was about split even in his pressure rate on first down vs. money downs for the season, so that would be a big departure if it’s a trend continuing as he remains DC.

Butler also showed more of an aggressiveness in coverage rotation. White was not afraid of rotating coverages, but his were pretty generic or easy to contour into, like starting with three deep safeties and bringing the middle one down to run a two-high coverage. Basic stuff.

But Butler asked the DBs to pull off harder assignments. One he frequently deployed against BC was a drop from a single-safety high shell into a Cover 2 coverage with two deep safeties:

In both of the clips above, NU aligns with just one of its safeties deep over the middle of the field, with the Rover and nickel player shifted down offset just off the box over receivers, as if they were playing man coverage. But at the snap, the nickel, drops back into a deep half, while the closed-middle safety rolls to the other hash:

That’s a long way to ask an over-the-top player to run from, and it opens you up to busts if they can’t get over the top in time. But it also can provide an element of disguise or confusion to QBs that’s vital in modern football. White utilized this rotation or something similar probably a handful of times throughout the season, but Butler used it five times vs. BC.

Overall, I’m very hesitant to take away any big, overarching data points from one game on what we’ll see from Butler. It’s a single data point. He could actually be a very conservative blitzer, but he and the defensive staff saw the condition of the field at Yankee Stadium and said, “Nobody’s beating us down the field in this swamp; let’s get after them.” We can’t know. But for the single data point that it is, it was a more aggressive one.