In last week’s recap of the Illinois game, I wrote that the defeat was less meaningful than how the team ended up responding to it. Every team loses, but so much of Nebraska’s struggles in recent years had been underpinned by the program letting one bad moment snowball into more.
After a scoreless first half Saturday against Purdue on the road, the scoreboard would tell you that response wasn’t happening. The defense had played well to pitch a shut out, and the offense had moved the ball, but mistakes and special teams blunders had left Nebraska 0-0 with arguably the worst team among the two top conferences. More of the same from the previous season seemed likely.
But after the half, NU showed something new: a response. It cleaned up the mistakes on offense, scoring touchdowns on its next three drives with long, sustained marches, and the defense cashed in a touchdown of its own late to turn a potential disaster into a 28-3 laugher. It was a smaller response in a game that was a larger response from this Husker team.
For as ugly as it looked, that’s progress. There’s an understandably fan fatalism to fixate on the sloppy first half, but so many of NU’s past teams wouldn’t have mustered that second half effort. The advanced stats from the game ended up indicating a pretty dominant performance: Nebraska’s glitchy offense in the first half would go on to finish with a solid success rate and a final production of 7.13 yards per play, its best this season against FBS teams. The defense more-or-less returned to its dominant statistical profile after a dip vs. Illinois. On the overview, the performance of the team from the whole game did show a strong bounce-back performance.
The next step is to keep it up. Nebraska is a slight advanced stat favorite over Rutgers this Saturday, with a lot of the numbers saying the ranked, 4-0 Scarlet Knights are a bit over their skis. Win that, and you’re 5-1 with a bye to prepare for a moonshot Indiana team in one of the season’s biggest games. Not a bad place to be at all.
I wrote long last week and it came out late, and there’s also a lot of overlap between Illinois’ and Purdue’s schematics, so I’d recommend reading that post first if you haven’t. I also stopped charting after Nebraska went up 28-3, as I considered the rest of the game garbage time, so any statistics here don’t include Nebraska’s or Purdue’s final offensive drives.
This week’s sections are:
Dagger
More Man, More Surface, More Press
“Walters Defense” Tendencies
Is The Running Game Broken?
Singleton Alignment
Perimeter Blocking, Part II
Unsung Play Of The Week
Turnover Margin Tracker
Dagger
One thing that was clearly a priority in Nebraska’s offensive gameplan Saturday against Purdue was attacking the intermediate space behind the linebackers in the middle of the field. One of the concepts it had success with was a passing design known as “Dagger.”
Dagger is a downfield-attacking play that’s come into vogue across football, largely by disciples of the “Shanahan” offenses and by Ben Johnson with the Detroit Lions. It’s a design meant to create a high-low read on linebackers, that when paired with those Shanahan teams’ and Lions’ running games creates an impossible bind.
The basic design of Dagger is to have an inside receiver run a clearout route — either a fly straight down the field or a post — hopefully to occupy the deep safety to the play-side. With the safety removed from the picture, the play then tries to high-low the linebackers, with some type of underneath route at 5 yards in front of the LBs, and then a big, deep in-breaking route coming behind them:
In zone coverage, the linebackers are put in a no-win position by Dagger: Cover the short route, and the ball is going to the in-breaker over the top. Cover the deep in-breaker, and the underneath route is an easy completion with room to run. Paired with a play-action fake, it’s a concept that can really make second-level players’ heads spin.
Entering the Purdue game, Nebraska had run Dagger just once this season, an unsuccessful play against UTEP. It ran it three times against Purdue, twice for massive gains.
This was Nebraska’s first rep of Dagger comes early in the second quarter, with Nebraska in the high redzone:
Nebraska starts in a wide trips closed look, before Jacory Barney Jr. motions from the No. 2 spot to the No. 3 spot just before the snap to change the defensive assignments. Now the No. 2 Jaylen Lloyd runs the deep clearout vertical (blue arrow), while attached tight end Thomas Fidone comes from the other side on a drag route (green arrow). Isaiah Neyor, on the outside, comes on the deep Dig route (orange arrow):
Fidone takes his route a little deep, and all the receivers are affected by the press man coverage, slowing down the action. The man coverage clouds the look, but the locks work as designed, with Lloyd running off the safety, Neyor breaking to the middle of the field with inside leverage on the corner defending him, and the underneath defender occupied by the drag route.
Purdue has man coverage on and a six-player read pressure, and Nebraska doesn’t block it up well, with quarterback Dylan Raiola getting rushed and throwing the ball to an outlet crosser on the backside of the Dagger action for an incompletion.
The second rep worked better:
A couple key differences here: Instead of having the tight end Fidone aligned to the backside of the play and running a drag route to the playside, Fidone aligns to the play side and runs a short inside hitch to occupy the underneath defender. The rest of the action is largely the same, with Barney at the No. 2 running the clearout and Jahmal Banks at the No. 1 running the dig route. Purdue drops into a variation of Cover 2 called Tampa 2, a zone look with three underneath defenders. This is a play Dagger should work against:
Banks gets knocked off path and runs a sloppy route with a bad in-break, making this take longer to develop than it should, but Raiola has drifted backward out of structure and the line is holding off the rush, so this still hits. The three underneath defenders (green arrows) are all eyeing Fidone and being tied down by his sit route, while the Tampa player in the Tampa 2 look, safety Dillon Thieneman, No. 31, has turned to run with Barney (blue arrow). That gives Banks (orange arrow) an open release to the middle of the field, and the underneath defenders don’t clock that there’s a deep route running behind them.
Nebraska would run this same concept with the tie-down again to open the fourth quarter, generating another explosive play in the MOF space vacated by the linebackers prioritizing the sit route:
This one gets off more on-schedule, with a sharper route and the ball being delivered at the hash right after the break. These two completions off Dagger generated 44 yards and two of NU’s seven explosive plays on the day.
One final play: While this wasn’t a rep of Dagger, NU also took advantage of a tie-down, high-low concept to score the game’s first touchdown.
While there’s no deep clearout route because this is the redzone and there’s no vertical space to work with, this concept functions similarly to Dagger by generating a high-low on the underneath defenders. Purdue has everyone down near the line to defend in the short-yardage situation. The No. 3 and No. 2 receivers both run short hitches to tie-down those defenders, who all bite, and the deep Over from the outside No. 1 has no one dropping to defend it. Just like on those Dagger reps.
More Man, More Surface, More Press
Though some of the advanced stats were more forgiving, the Illinois game represented arguably the Blackshirts’ worst performance under Tony White.1 NU got picked apart by Illinois’ RPO-heavy attack, gave up uncharacteristic big runs, and generated few of its signature chaos plays.
It needed a strong performance to prove the Illinois game was a blip, and it largely delivered. In non-garbage time, it gave up a season-best 3.52 yards per play, had a 64.3% success rate (only slightly trailing the UTEP and Colorado performances), and generated a Havoc play on 14.3% of its snaps, double its rate against Illinois. The average Purdue third down required 7.9 yards to convert, the season’s second-best figure (behind the 11.3 against UTEP, not likely to be topped this year). Nebraska’s defense had a 71.4% success rate against Purdue’s true runs a week after logging just a 53.3% rate against those plays vs. Illinois. By all appearances, the D was pretty much back to the standard.
How did White do it? Largely by upping a couple of rates: man coverage and four-player fronts.
Entering Saturday’s game, NU had run zone coverage on about 83% of its snaps, one of the highest rates in the nation. White had largely sat in a deep coverage shell in a Tampa 2 look, with a little bit of Cover 3 and Cover 4/6 mixed in. I had charted just 31 snaps of man coverage on the year for the NU defense entering Saturday.
But the Illinois’ offensive performance may have shifted some elements of how Nebraska wants to play coverage. NU’s rate of zone fell to 59.5% against Purdue, with 17 snaps of man coverage and Cover 1 — a man coverage across the board with one safety deep — was White’s most utilized coverage on the day, at 40.5%.
Illinois seemed to have a lot of success — especially on run-pass option plays — at finding holes in the middle of the field behind Nebraska’s linebackers. NU’s use of zone had been pretty predictable, with NU’s rate of Cover 2 at 44% of all snaps entering the game against Illinois. The adjustment by White, then, would seem to be to play a little stickier, with fewer zone holes and a bit more tight one-on-one coverage to take out those windows. Nu’s zone-to-man rate was still 60-40, but that’s a change from 80-20.
Playing more Cover 1 and less Cover 2 also had the benefit of bringing another safety into the box on more snaps. Cover 2 requires two players deep, and teams will often align in a “two-high” shell pre-snap to play it. But Cover 1 is a “single-high” defense, which lets you bring another player in tight to the line to stop the run, a need against what was a solid Purdue running game entering. NU’s rate of single-high shells was at 40.5% on Saturday and had been at about 32% entering.
White’s second big adjustment was to just align more players on the line of scrimmage against the run. NU entered the Purdue game using a three-player front on 42.3% of its plays, and, largely, those had worked — NU had a 69.0% success rate out of those Odd or Tite fronts, and they worked at a similar isolated level vs. Illinois.
But White elected to cut way back on those against Purdue; NU’s use of those three-player fronts fell to 18.9% against Purdue, and its use of four-player fronts went from 55.4% to 78.4%.
Perhaps counterintuitively after an opponent’s big rushing day, he brought fewer total rusher on most plays and fewer blitzes than the season averages; he largely just relied on this extra safety down and four-player surface to try to plug Nebraska’s run leakiness. We saw a similar move last season, as NU more than doubled its rate of four-player surfaces in Big Ten play, to the point it was running, in essence, a 4-2-5 shell on the vast majority of its snaps. Is that happening again? Tough to tell after one singular game, but it’s something to watch. Rutgers tailback Kyle Monangai was my No. 2 back on Nebraska’s schedule in the preseason, and will be another test for this run defense.
Also worth noting is that White used more outside press coverage on Purdue’s receivers than he did the previous week. NU had been heavily pressing opponents — even Colorado — but backed way off against Illinois, dropping down to 28%. This was probably a function of needing to get more bodies in the box to stop Illinois’ run game and not wanting to put his corners in spots to give up explosive plays. But the Illinois wideouts also, at times, ate up those free cushions. Against Purdue, the press coverage rate bumped back up to 66.7%.
“Walters Defense” Tendencies
With Purdue employing largely the same defensive structure/strategy as Illinois last week, it was a pretty similar offensive gameplan: Cutback/misdirection runs into the five-player front, and downfield throws into one-on-one coverage.
There were a couple other tendencies I wanted to discuss about how Nebraska played these “Walters” defenses.
Most notably, we saw a huge increase in the use of pre-snap motion in both games. NU used motion on about 52% of its snaps vs. Illinois and about 48% of its snaps Saturday, about 20 percentage points higher than its season average of 32.3% entering the Illinois game. With the defense playing so much man coverage, NU made it a point to manipulate that tendency with increased motion to (A) give the quarterback pre-snap tells on coverage and (B) move defenders around to change box counts for running plays.
This was in last week’s post, but with man coverage, the defender responsible for guarding a receiver in that man coverage will often just follow them back-and-forth wherever they go in motion. If they run to the other side of the formation, that defender is responsible for following them all the way over. Some upper-level or experienced teams will roll and change responsibilities, but most at the college level won’t to avoid confusion. So if you see a defender following their receiver back and forth before the snap, it’s a good tell that you’re about to get man coverage.
NU used motion before pass plays to try to get this pre-snap ID on 40% of its dropbacks vs. Illinois and 37.5% against Purdue; it’s season average entering those two games had been around 25%. This was a clear thing the staff incorporated just for this defensive alignment.
One thing they did against Purdue that they didn’t against Illinois was using stop-and-start or double motion, with either a motion player coming to a complete stop and then starting again, or one player going in motion, getting set, and then a different player doing a different motion. Here’s an example of the stop motion:
NU also used motion more for run plays, using it on 64.5% of its run or RPO plays against Illinois and 46.7% vs. Purdue, compared to a 35.3% usage entering. The idea is the same, but less for ID than for execution: If you know you can run a certain defender out of the box by sending a receiver in motion, then you can manipulate the defensive structure, box count, and angles to get yourself in juicier run looks.
We also saw an increased use of Jet Sweep plays (14.3% use among NU’s run concepts Saturday, compared to a season average 4.3%) and several reps of the End Around motion — both to give the ball and as eye candy before a straight handoff — for this same reason: If you know you’re getting man coverage, you can make the defender have to run through the traffic of the box and leave them out of position when you hand the ball off on the sweep.
The other big tendency against the “Walters” defenses was an increased use of condensed formations. Condensed formations are alignments by the offense where receivers are in tight to the body of the formation instead of spread out wide. NU had already used condensed looks at a pretty high rate entering this two-game stretch, about 40%, but went to 53.7% against Purdue. This was another play to make defenders have to run through more traffic and chaos to chase crossing routes.
Is The Running Game Broken?
Nebraska’s rushing attack has looked powerful in early spots this year, but it struggled in the last two games, with its running backs generating just 89 yards on 24 carries vs. Illinois and 84 yards on 23 carries vs. Purdue. Is this a blip, or a sign the ground attack can’t move the ball against Big Ten teams?
Per my eye: No, the struggles of the running game have largely been about two unlucky matchups to defenses that play a style that’s difficult for Nebraska — and most other teams — to run on.
Illinois’ and Purdue’s five-down lineman scheme is a tough matchup for Nebraska because the majority of Nebraska’s most-favored run concepts early in the year require strong double-team blocks. NU’s most used run concepts entering these two games had been Duo (28.2%), Inside Zone (21.2%) and Counter (16.5%.) Those are the plays Nebraska wants to use in the running game, and each requires a strong double-team block — in the case of Duo, it requires two double-team blocks.
Against a four-player front, you can generate those doubles relatively easily. But by playing five defenders down across the line — one over each linemen — the “Walters” defense eliminates your ability to get to any double teams with your offensive line: Each offensive lineman has to block one defender by themself. To get a double at all, you have to bring on one or more tight ends to increase the size of your offensive surface, a move that will bring more defenders into the box in its own right and make it harder to run.
That shows up in my charting: In the past two games, NU’s combined use of Duo, Inside Zone, and Counter — at 65.9% usage in the first three games — has fallen off to 29%, because the Illinois surface makes it more difficult to get those double-team blocks. NU didn’t run a single snap of Counter against Purdue. Instead, we’ve seen more of the running game focus on either wider zone plays or attempts at backside cutbacks: Outside Zone, Split Zone, and Windback plays have been used on 44% of Nebraska’s run or RPO snaps in the last two games, after being used on just 14% in the first three weeks. We also obviously saw the heavy reliance last week on the Jet Sweep plays.
Second, the “Walters” defense used by Illinois and Purdue also just is a “heavy box” defensive system. A “heavy box” per my charting is any defensive alignment where the defense has one or more defenders than the offense has blockers on a play. If you have five linemen and a tight end on the field (six players), they’ll have five linemen and two linebackers (seven players) near the line of scrimmage:
It essentially creates a situation where you’re minus-one in the run fit on every play. NU faced one of these “heavy” boxes on 50.6% of its snaps in the first two games (mostly in the game against Colorado), but it faced a heavy box on 90.3% of its snaps against Illinois and 74.1% against Purdue. There are few teams that would have rushing success being that outnumbered, that NU had success rates of 45% and 46% on its true-run and RPO plays against these past two respective games of box mismatches is, if anything, promising.
The only real thing I think we’ve learned about the running game is that it’s not one that can dominate no matter what the defense presents. Last year’s Michigan team could run on a defense no matter what it did. These past two games have established the 2024 NU rushing attack is not that.
But that also doesn’t mean it’s bad. There are only a handful of those “doesn’t matter what you do” rushing teams a season, mostly from mega-blue chip programs. NU can still be a good, or even very good, rushing team against mid or bad opponents, but it will likely have to be one that’s more situational with its calls against good or stacked fronts, doing things like the Jet Sweeps we saw Saturday.
That the production fell off the last two weeks and we got two bad performances is little more, to me, than a quirk of scheduling that put these two games agaisnt a weird defensive structure in a row. Better days are ahead: Rutgers has one of the worst efficiency rushing defenses in the Power 4 conferences. If they can’t run on them, feel free to sound the alarm then.
One other opinion on the rushing game: Emmett Johnson needs to touch the ball more. I’m always hesitant to tell coaches which players should play because I don’t see practice or have behind-the-scenes knowledge, but Johnson is averaging 4.86 yards per carry after contact and has forced seven missed tackles in just 21 attempts per Pro Football Focus. That’s a little bit small-sample-size theater, as he’s broken a few big runs, but that YCO/A rate would be sixth nationally if he qualified with enough carries, and he leads the team in that missed tackles forced stat despite being the back with the third-most attempts. His vision also looks like the best on the team from the tape.
Dante Dowdell has also been good this season — 2.72 YCO/A — and obviously has a role as a power back. But this should be closer to a 50-50 carries split with Johnson, and I can’t see any on-field reason Rahmir Johnson should be taking carries from him. Rahmir Johnson is a plus pass-catcher, but his rushing advanced metrics have been poor for most of his career. He’s a quality third-down back and pass-catching specialist, but giving him the ball when you’ve got one of the nation’s most efficient per-touch rushers on the bench is a little baffling? Off my soap box.
Singleton Alignment
Safety DeShon Singleton started the year playing primarily as a deep safety in Nebraska’s two-high shells but has quietly been spending more time in the box in recent weeks as NU has come out of those deep alignments.
In the first three games, Singleton spent about 27% of his snaps aligned down in the box, with three-quarters of his snaps as one of two safeties deep, with Rover Issac Gifford. But Singleton spent about 40% of his snaps in the box against Illinois, and was at 35% again Saturday vs. Purdue as NU has had to devote more resources to stopping the run.
Singleton is a bigger safety at 6’3 and 210 pounds and probably functions better as a box player than as a deep, over-the-top, running-downfield-with-receivers type of guy. He was largely effective in the season’s first three games, but he gave up a couple of deep passes to Illinois in key moments. This could be a couple-game blip, but it appears he’s gravitating to more of a box role again, like he played last year. For what it’s worth, his snaps in the box have just a 58% success rate for Nebraska, and his snaps deep are at 65.0%. So it was working, even with the busts against Illinois.
Perimeter Blocking, Part II
I talked last week about how bad the blocking had been from the X and Z positions early in the season and how it was rendering a lot of Nebraska’s sweep and outside flat plays dead on arrival:
How it’s done, courtesy of Alex Bullock:
One of the adjustments from the staff for this week was to take Neyor and Banks, the main culprits in blowing those blocks, off the field when they wanted to run these sweeps/outside plays and insert Bullock. Bullock played 22 snaps against Purdue after playing about 40 in the previous four games combined, a decent chunk of which had come in garbage time with the No. 2s. It’s hard to get a statistical measure of the impact of downfield blocking, but NU’s Jet Sweep plays entering the game had a 60% success rate entering, and their flat RPOs had been at 50%; with Bullock as the primary blocker Saturday, Nebraska went 4-for-4 on Jet Sweeps being successful.2
You can see in the video above how instead of trying to meet the defensive back at the line of scrimmage, Bullock follows them on their path inside and cuts them off closer to the hash. That could have been a blocking scheme change by the staff after the blow-ups by the aggressive Illinois corners.
He also got put in for specialty plays like End-Arounds that required not just a quick perimeter block but also to drive someone downfield:
Bullock got some public love for his block on the game’s final offensive touchdown, when he sprung Barney on a Jet Sweep play, but he was cleaning Purdue defenders out all afternoon. Good coaches work to find uses for their players’ talents and put those players in the best spots for them to succeed. Bullock played big snaps last year but struggled to get open against Big Ten coverage. He has largely been relegated to a bench role this season because better receiving threats came into the program or developed. But he’s still got a skill — quality perimeter blocking and a willingness to do dirty work — and the coaches are getting him on the field in that specialized role.
Unsung Play Of The Week
We haven’t talked much fullback play this season, as Nebraska hasn’t played that often with one on the field: It has only 12 snaps of two-back formations through the Purdue game and has only been in the I-formation for nine snaps. But fullback Barret Liebentritt made an above-and-beyond block Saturday that sprung a touchdown in a key moment of the game:
This was in the second half, with Nebraska only up 7-3, on a fourth-and-goal play that could either result in NU having a two-score lead or ending a nine-play drive with no points and giving Purdue newfound life. Nebraska is in the I and running a basic Power O play, with the backside guard pulling to the two-tight-end side C gap. Liebentritt’s responsibility is to lead-block up to the edge and kickout the first player he sees to seal the hole.
Liebentritt does his nominal job and collapses the end man on the line of scrimmage, the safety Thieneman (probably Purdue’s best player), who’s walked down in a goalline look by Purdue’s defense. But he plows through Theineman and also takes out Purdue edge rusher/linebacker Kydran Jenkins (#4, probably Purdue’s second best player), who’s read the play off the stacked line and is filling the hole as an unblocked player.
With Liebentritt blasting his way through two guys, Dowdell is able to jump over the pile for an easy score. If Liebentritt hadn’t been able to waylay both players, Dowdell is probably meeting Jenkins in the hole and is stuffed for no gain or needing to power into the endzone in a scrum. Had this play failed and the margin of victory been less — or had Nebraska lost — there’s probably more post-game handwringing about NU’s lack of ability to perform in close games. But this one exemplary block by Liebentritt guarantees the narrative doesn’t crop up. Small margins.
Turnover Margin Tracker
After Week 1: +1 (T-20th nationally)
After Week 2: +3 (T-17th nationally)
After Week 3: +3 (T-17th nationally)
After Week 4: +4 (T-17th nationally)
After Week 5: +5 (T-14th nationally)
Steady improvement and staying power in the top 20. A clean game from the offense and a late pick-six moves Nebraska further up in the rankings. For a team that finished 132 out of 133 teams in this same metric last season, to be in the top 15 — and moving up consistently — at nearly the halfway mark of the next season is a major turnaround.
One thing to note is that, so far, Nebraska has gotten slightly lucky on fumbles; you’re generally expected to lose about half of your fumbles, and NU has only lost 1 of 4 so far this season, in the opener against UTEP. Basically, that “slightly lucky” just means Nebraska probably should have lost one more of its fumbles through this point of the year; small potatoes, but just pointing it out.
Rutgers is +3 on the season and not forcing many takeaways but also only has two lost turnovers. This will be another Big Ten ball-control game where the margin will be key against a team that’s also prioritizing staying in the green.
Not counting last year’s Michigan game
Their Arrow RPOs were 1-for-3, to be fair.