DEFENSIVE RECAP: 2023 Michigan State

The general concepts of chance and randomness hurt the Blackshirts

Ty Robinson tries to deflect a pass. Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

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An underrated and underdiscussed part of football is just … sequencing. Are all your good plays grouped together or do they occur when you’re in an advantageous situation, leading to points on the scoreboard? Or are your good plays spread out, bookended by ineffectiveness, or occuring when you’ve got long fields to drive, making it more unlikely you’ll cash them in for the currency that matters?

The Blackshirts fell victim to sequencing Saturday against Michigan State. By all metrics, it was a stronger-than-usual defensive performance. Nebraska had a 69.1% overall success rate (six percentage points higher than the season average), allowed about its usual amount of explosive plays (10.9%), and got slightly more havoc plays than normal (16.4%). It made talented Spartans back Nathan Carter the focal point of its gameplan, then held Carter to one of his worst games of the season. NU forced MSU into the second longest average third down distance of any Nebraska opponent this season (8.64 yards) and then dominated these passing downs, getting a successful play 86.4% of the time.

And, yet, it still allowed 20 points. There’s a pretty obvious caveat about a replay review I’m not going to get into, but when MSU’s good plays occurred was also just a huge part of the point total:

• Michigan State was able to score on 4 of its 13 drives. Those four scoring possessions were composed of 29 plays. Of those 29 snaps, MSU got 4 of its 6 explosive plays in the game, and had 12 successful plays, a rate of 41%. It also started one of those drives on the Nebraska 38.

• Michigan State didn’t score on 9 of its 13 drives. Those nine non-scoring possessions were composed of 27 plays. Of those 27 snaps, the Spartans allowed 7 of their 9 havoc plays in the game, and had five successful plays, a rate of 18.5%.

Someone somewhere’s eyes are rolling out of their head at me dropping, “Michigan State’s good drives were good and their bad drives were bad.” Yes. Absolutely. Paying customers please don’t unsubscribe. It’s just worth pointing out the Spartans had a remarkable rate of keeping their good and explosive plays siloed in a handful of certain drives and their bad and havoc plays siloed in the rest.

The good news is, this is absolutely just variance/luck. Random chance is how football works sometimes, and NU has benefitted pretty massively from some lucky sequencing on both offense and defense this year. Just worth pointing out how one of the year’s most efficient defensive performances can end up resulting in the the third highest point total of the year.

As for the mechanics of the actual game, this was a more subdued performance from coordinator Tony White, with stopping Carter pretty obviously White’s main concern.

To combat the run, Nebraska played with a heavy box on a third of its snaps — a pretty sizeable margin for a base Nickel team. The season average entering had been about 22%. White mostly accomplished this by bringing safeties down into the box to serve as de-facto linebackers or edge defenders. With two safeties down, this was Nebraska’s highest usage this season of single-high safety structures, at 69.8%, by a lot. That’s about 20 percentage points higher than the average entering (52.5%), with only the game against run-heavy Michigan cracking 60% single-high usage (60.5%). It’s most common alignment, on 40% of its snaps overall, had field safeties Malcolm Hartzog/Omar Brown in the slot and Rover Isaac Gifford down more as the hole player, but it also played a lot in a more spread look with Hartzog/Brown and boundary safeties Phalen Sanford and Marques Buford down over the slots and Gifford deep over the top (31.5%). Overall, the Hartzog/Brown safety spent 85.2% of its snaps operating down near the line, a season-high. The average entering had been about 71.2%, so this was a physical game for those guys and why you saw them in on a lot of action.