2024 PURDUE RECAP: Responses

Nebraska shows it can bounce back, twice

Tailback Emmett Johnson is averaging 4.86 yards per carry after contact and has forced seven missed tackles in just 21 attempts. His YCO/A rate would be sixth nationally among qualified ball-carriers. Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

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.

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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

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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%.