GEORGIA SOUTHERN RECAP: The End

(Not of the newsletter just of our coach's tenure)

Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Hello everyone! Did anything big happen in Nebraska football news this week????

Nebraska Huskers @Huskers

Statement from Vice Chancellor, Director of Athletics - Trev Alberts.

The Scott Frost era is over. I’ll leave the eulogizing to the more writer-y types who are interested in that, of which there are many you can read right now.

I will say, though, behind all the bravado and controversy and stupid moments, I do think Frost had a pretty smart general plan on how to maximize the Husker program. Fostering a long-term player-development environment, building through the offensive and defensive lines, running a unique offensive system that’s different from your conference-mates, hammering the 500-mile radius and one or two Southern states in recruiting, cranking up the walk-on program to deliver depth/culture, and being at the forefront of NIL (with our fans’ insane commitment level) all make a lot of sense on how to get this program back on a path toward any version of relevancy. That it didn’t work out is more of an indictment, I think, to poor decisions and execution on Frost’s part, insane/terrible player development and retention, and plain bad luck more than the process itself.

Even at this nadir (at least I hope it’s a nadir???), Nebraska still is a desirable job and will be able to attract a good coach. This program is willing to devote insane financial resources to football, has great facilities, is in one of the two conferences that are going to be relevant moving forward, and has a great NIL setup and donor base willing to give players their cash. The national media/haters will be out to peddle the usual, lazy nonsense they do every time the job is open (“It’s located near corn!!!”; “No one from Texas wants to move there anymore!!!”; “Partial qualifiers!!!”) but, ultimately, coaches want places with resources that makes consistent winning easier and more likely, while also raising the ceiling on what they can accomplish. NU doesn’t have those resources at that elite level anymore, but it certainly does at a top 20/25 level and certainly more than a place like Iowa State. And players — more than wanting to specifically live in Florida or Georgia or Texas or California — want to go to places where they can maximize their talents and win, above all else.

One great thing did come out of this: Mickey Joseph was named the first Black head coach in Nebraska’s history. While it’s big congratulations to him on his incredible career and for this achievement, let’s also all acknowledge it’s a travesty it took so long for this to happen and that he — and numerous other Black coaches — have been passed over for deserved coordinator and head coaching jobs in their careers for little more than systemic discrimination. Here’s to hoping he kills this job the rest of the season and wraps up our coaching search without us even having to do one.

PROGRAMMING NOTE 1: If you were tuned out for the offseason or are a new subscriber, I would suggest reading the post detailing the newsletter’s plan for this year; it will better explain things like success rate. For the first few weeks of the season, I’ll be comparing this week’s game’s data to the previous week’s game’s, until we get a sample size big enough to function as season-long data.

PROGRAMMING NOTE 2: My YouTubeTV didn’t record the first two drives from each team because they were on the different channel, so this week’s stats are from the end of the first quarter on. This game was also a giant time-consuming pain to chart — both teams were running no huddle and got off over 80 plays each that I had to account for — so I spent a lot more time on that than I normally do and had to skimp on the writing/breakdowns a bit this week.

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OFFENSE

GAME CHART

Georgia Southern Offensive Game Chart

OVERALL

Whatever criticisms you want to level at the Nebraska program for this start to the season … you can’t really hate on this offense in any way. It’s pretty remarkable how much ass this unit has kicked early in the year, considering all the new faces. The competition hasn’t been great, but when you play lesser teams, you want your offense to dunk on them to the tune of 7+ yards per play (and maintain that consistency when getting off 81 snaps). If you told me things were going to be rolling this much on O before the season (when I expected this team to have a competent to good defense), I would have said 8-9 wins were on the table.

And the offense has been pretty basic so far; they’ve been running, like, very limited Day One install plays out of a handful of different formations. I expect the variety there to keep expanding as they install more of the system.

The numbers show NU probably got a little lucky on some longer downs Saturday with some amazing individual efforts. There were at least a few situations like this where NU was in some deep trouble and a player just went SICKO MODE to bail them out:

Huskers X's & O's @HuskersX

This is great vision by Allen... Play was supposed to be going right and he breaks it back

(This is a variation of the WR counter play I discussed last week. Related: Whoever the new coach is should give Ajay Allen a billion dollar NIL deal to get him to not transfer.)

These sorts of plays will probably dry up when conference play starts, but a lot of the other underlying numbers are still very solid.

Nothing really crazy here. Nebraska slowed its offensive tempo down a bit as the game went on, I’m assuming to allow the defense to adjust/rest with Georgia Southern’s offense going at warp speed. The Pistol I-Formation package finally was useful, mostly because of a few great throws by Casey Thompson out of it on play action. One season-long trend I am pretty comfortable saying is going to stick is a decrease in the use of pre-snap motion. Nebraska under Frost hovered right around 50% last year, but Whipple seems to be closer to 30%. Most studies say the more motion the better, but 30% is at least a decent rate.

RUNNING GAME

Nebraska destroyed North Dakota and Georgia Southern the past two weeks on interior runs, with a 60%+ success rate on each of Inside Zone, Duo, Split Zone and Trap plays this Saturday. Some of that is because of cutbacks/individual performances by NU’s backs, and some of it is because they’ve played an FCS and a Sun Belt team, but I also think the interior of NU’s offensive line may have just figured some stuff out toward the end of the UND game and is going to be a decent run-blocking unit.

Georgia Southern also didn’t help itself by playing very basic defense with few blitzes and generic even fronts. NU got a ton of light boxes on running downs in this game and absolutely torched them.

It’s amazing to me how much this running game has changed and how quickly. A lot of the bones are the same, and some of the old Frost plays are sprinkled in twice a game or on the goalline, but this is a lot closer to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers running game than it is Frost’s. When they brought in Logan Smothers to run that one Midline play, I got very nostalgic for option football!

PASSING GAME

As I mentioned, Georgia Southern was playing super vanilla, rarely getting out of a base even front, running generic coverages, and rarely blitzing or running sim pressures to give Thompson a weird look (whereas North Dakota tried a bunch of gadget stuff and a ton of pressure to try to force mistakes against a more-talented team). On the handful of snaps Georgia Southern did try to blitz on passing downs, it got picked apart pretty well by Thompson.

This was also the first game this year NU has faced a significant amount of man coverage this season, with Northwestern and UND being very zone heavy. NU wasn’t great against it, but it’s a pretty small sample size, so I’m not particularly worried. There will be much more man coming when Big Ten play starts, though, so this is something to watch moving forward.

Another thing I anecdotally noticed Saturday was Thompson’s footwork and fundamentals kind of broke down and he got into playing more street-ball mode. Some 3-Step concepts he wasn’t even taking a drop and just catching the snap flat-footed while the pocket went around him. I don’t know if that was an intentional change by NU’s staff or if Thompson was just ad-libbing, but it was sort of weird. He got away with it against Georgia Southern, but that’s another thing to watch out for.

Facing two extremely zone-coverage-heavy teams and another that also played a lot of zone to open the season has sort of skewed things on evaluating what concepts new offensive coordinator Mark Whipple is favoring. The majority of NU’s most-used plays right now are pretty classic Cover 3 and Cover 4 beaters. Nebraska will see plenty of those coverages moving forward, but I also expect it to see a lot more man, which will probably bump up some of these numbers on the shorter man-beating concepts like Stick/Spacing as we move forward.

A COOL PLAY: 989

One of the early stars of NU’s passing attack has been a concept called “989”. An Air Coryell-offense staple, 989 gets its name from the numbering of its routes as you go across the formation: two “9” routes (straight vertical gos) on the outside with an “8” route (a “Post” route, with a vertical stem of 10-12 yards before breaking straight toward the goalpost) in the middle of the formation, usually from a tight end:

It’s a staple downfield passing play used at all levels of football that can be effective against any coverage — but is especially effective against Cover 2, Cover 3 and Cover 4 (NU has predominantly faced Cover 3 and Cover 4 so far this year).

Against Cover 3, with the deep part of the field divided up into thirds by three secondary players, the three vertical routes challenge, or “lock”, the secondary players into covering each of them individually with no help, essentially turning the coverage into one-on-one man defense deep down the field. The middle Post route is often optioned into a “Basic” route (a 10-yard in-breaking route; you can see it as the dotted line in the diagram above) against Cover 3. With Cover 3 being a one-high safety coverage, the “Basic” receiver ties down the middle-of-the-field coverage player, leaving the QB with two Gos down the sideline covered one-on-one to choose from, depending on quality of release or matchup:

Cover 4 divides the deep part of the field into quarters with four secondary players and is a “split-field” safety look, meaning two safeties are typically lined up on the hashes pre-snap. This shell usually takes away the outside 9 routes, with more bodies able to cover more ground to stay on top of them, but allows the Post route to break toward the middle of the field right between the two safeties. This is also true against Cover 2 and 2-Man coverages, also considered “split-safety” coverages. Here’s Nebraska running 989 against a Cover 4 look from Georgia Southern on Saturday:

Here, because it’s a split-safety look, Thompson finds the middle Post route right in the gap between the two safeties. For an added wrinkle, the receiver running the Post is lined up where the offensive tackle normally is Whipple’s “tackle over” package.

This is a great route combination if you’re trying to throw a deep shot down the field, but it’s difficult to protect it long enough. Nebraska has run 989 out of a few formations this year, but seems to really like doing it out of the Pistol I-Formation look, where it can easily load up a 7-Man pass protection by keeping both the tailback and the offset fullback in to chip protect. Both backs can release into the flats as checkdowns if they’re not needed in protection. So far this season, when NU has thrown out of this formation, it’s mostly been 989:

This is a popular pro-style concept, so it makes sense it’s a big part of Whipple’s playbook. NFL coach Norv Turner, a big-time Air Coryell disciple, used to spam the hell out of this play; I’d conservatively estimate at least two thirds of the Philip Rivers to Antonio Gates catches you’ve ever seen came on a 989 Post route. The current king of this concept is Joe Burrow, who ran it a ton at LSU and now is doing it with the Bengals. If you see Ja'Marr Chase or Tee Higgins making a deep catch up the sidelines on a Sunday, you probably just saw 989.

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DEFENSE

GAME CHART

Georgia Southern Defensive Game Chart

OVERALL

Football is the most strategically complex and intricate sport in existence. For all of its reputation as being about physicality and strength and gruffness, the things that actually win modern football games more often resemble chess moves and countermoves. A player aligned here, a motion that shifts a linebacker there — these can be just as critical to an effective play as having a five-star athlete. That’s a big part of why I’m so interested in it!

But, also, at its deepest and purest, it can also be an incredibly basic game of numbers. It was Saturday.

Georgia Southern’s offensive plan for a lot of the night was remarkably simple: It lined up in wide spread formations to extend Nebraska’s defense out and then ran RPOs to send the ball post-snap to the area where Nebraska didn’t have numbers. If Nebraska lined up with a two-high safety shell and sent its strongside linebacker out of the box to cover the No. 3 receiver (leaving only the four defensive linemen and one linebacker in the box), Georgia Southern ran the ball with its five blockers vs. five defenders:

If Nebraska kept its strongside linebacker in the box and brought a safety down to matchup with an inside receiver, Georgia Southern threw the ball on an outside screen or quick route to where it had the same number of receivers over secondary players:

This strategy more or less turned the game into a test of one-on-one matchups: Five Georgia Southern offensive linemen vs. Nebraska’s five defenders in Scenario One, and Georgia Southern’s two receivers vs. Nebraska’s two secondary players in Scenario Two. Who would win? More often than not Saturday — especially on the defensive line — the answer was the Eagles. Nebraska’s defensive linemen were incapable of getting off blocks or taking on multiple gaps (a problem all season) and Georgia Southern mostly just spammed this strategy to the tune of 600+ yards.

The defense’s struggles in the past two games had been sort of overstated: It had been better than the offenses it faced on a down-to-down basis but had just allowed big plays and been unable to get off the field on money downs. That’s NOT what this game was; this game was a pure, unadulterated ass kicking. Georgia Southern’s offensive players lined up and beat Nebraska’s defensive players one-on-one, all night, repeatedly.

It wasn’t just all on the players. Coordinator Erik Chinander came out playing soft, deep zone coverage with a two-high safety shell against an Air Raid team — a scheme that wants to hit quick, underneath passes. NU was freely giving them 7-8 yard completions for most of the first half. It took until halftime for Chinander to adjust to start playing more man coverage — it played more man Saturday than it had all season so far — but he also coupled that with cranking the blitz rate up after the break.

He increased the blitz rate presumably because the defensive line was incapable of winning against the Georgia Southern offensive line in the run game, but blitzing the Air Raid is also a major no-no — Air Raid QBs get the ball out fast, and there’s usually a deep route they are automatically chucking a one-on-one ball to if they see pre-snap pressure. Buffalo QB Kyle Vantrease was on a major heater and making some nuts throws — was he unconscious?? — and Eagle receivers were making some nuts catches, but it’s crazy to me Chinander didn’t trust his secondary to win in man coverage against a G5 team sooner.

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I really hope the rest of this season doesn’t get ugly, though I think it might. The problems on the defensive line are of experience and talent — you can’t really fix those by doing anything other than (a) getting new players or (b) letting people work through struggles with reps. And the secondary has shown a lot of unreliability, making a lot of the other fixes you’d send toward a leaky interior — more guys in the box, more blitzing — untenable, as they’d only expose the secondary more.

I’m getting strong vibes of the final year of Bill Callahan’s tenure, when a pretty good offense was undone by a leaky run defense. At least after that we got the Ndamukong Suh explosion! Maybe that will happen again! Also, I do find it a bit strange/funny that Frost is now the fourth straight Husker coach to lose his job after a fairly unexpected run-defense collapse. Is it something in the water???

Thanks, as always, for reading. Comments open below!