Let's Build Nebraska’s Real Playbooks In College Football 25

The video game is back!! Here's actual data on tendencies, formations, and concepts that can build better versions of NU’s offensive and defensive schemes in this computer simulation for children

Photo courtesy my Playstation 5 SNOW-GAME UPSET OF IOWA a few days ago. And probably, like, EA Sports?

Similar to most college football maniacs who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, the NCAA Football video game series was an annual tradition and huge part of my fandom. As a middle schooler, before I even really knew anything about how football was played, I’d spend late-summer hours on our basement TV’s Playstation 2 trying to lead Nebraska to a national title or win Zac Taylor a Heisman¹ while my parents would be upstairs saying stuff like, “Wasn’t Jordan supposed to mow the lawn today?” 

Later, in high school, every year on the appointed late July night, my friend and I would go to the Walmart closest to our tiny Kansas town at 11:45 p.m. and wait for the beleaguered employee to unlock the case so that we and the small crowd waiting in the electronics section could get the latest version of the game at midnight. We would then take our copies back to his parents’ sick flatscreen, absolutely house Mountain Dews, and stay up all night playing whatever weird combos of games we could think of and yelling stuff like, “Jeremiah Masoli I WOULD DIE FOR YOU.”

I had less time for it as I got involved with real college football coaching, but when the franchise was (fairly) shelved over the lack of player compensation soon after, it was still a bummer. I kept playing my same worn-out copy of NCAA '14 sporadically through the next decade of college and young adulthood. Until, trapped inside and bored during the pandemic, I dusted off my ancient XBOX 360 for a four-person online dynasty with some friends that ended up lasting for several years and got me pretty back into the game. Fun!

So, when EA Sports announced in February 2021 that it was bringing a version of a college football video game back — with players allowed to receive compensation and schools more open to giving over licenses — I was stoked. I attentively followed the updates, plans, and delays over the last three years, and Friday — this time as a person with a real adult job — went over to my local Walmart to pick up a copy and snacks (sparkling water instead of Mountain Dew) and felt the rush of nostalgia for a few hours.² 

While football video game playbooks are kind of silly enterprises and not that tangential to how anything actually works on the field, one of my absolute favorite things to do in these games is to build playbooks. In real life, things like “NCAA practice hour rules” or “the limits of human memory” prevent a team from, say, combining a Flexbone option running scheme with an Air Raid passing attack. But in the video game, I can make these pixelated young men understand the value of the Veer and how to run Stick-Nod, no problem. Any playbook combination you want is open, as long as you have imagination and a desire to be an innovator.

The game comes shipped with semi-generic offensive and defensive playbooks for each team that are supposed to reflect their styles of play on both sides of the ball. All the defenses are basic, untailored versions of the “3-3-5” or “3-4” or whatever your school runs, with basically the same plays and no customization. But the game has fun with the more exotic offenses in college football, like a Chip Kelly Oregon or a Gus Malzahn Auburn in the previous iterations, and will give these schools some cool, proprietary plays and formations. The new version has alignments and concepts specific to Tennessee’s Veer-and-Shoot, UNLV’s Go-Go Offense, Wake Forest’s Slow Mesh, and the Jamey Chadwell’s shotgun-based triple-option attack. All fun to play with!

The catch comes if your team doesn’t have one of those cool, attention-grabbing schemes. The more bland identities — like a 2023 Nebraska, for instance — tend to just get a basic, bad playset that doesn’t really reflect any sort of work or research beyond designating this team is “pro-style” or whatever.

Nebraska’s offensive playbook in College Football 25 is heinous. It’s a random collection of shotgun formations and a few pistol sets, with none of the singleback or I-formation plays that NU ran last season. It has none of the under-center power football and deep play-action shots Matt Rhule favors, few option plays like ones the team turned to mid-season with Heinrich Haarberg, and it incorporates little of the quick passing or RPOs we saw utilized heavily under the new Dylan Raiola-centric scheme in the spring game. The generic 3-3-5 playbook for the defense is pretty solid, but lacks some customization. EA Sports didn’t really do the research or work here on what Nebraska was running, and I think these playbooks could be improved upon a lot. 

I wonder if there’s a newsletter devoted to an unhealthy cataloging of Nebraska’s alignment, concepts, and other tendencies that could help us build out real-life versions of the Huskers’ schemes in the video game???

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OFFENSE

Before we get too into laying the video game playbook out, let’s revisit some data on what real-life Nebraska actually ran last year. Here’s a quick breakdown of some alignment, personnel, pre-snap operation, and concept tendencies NU used last season:

So, general guidelines:

• We probably want about two-thirds of our plays to be from the shotgun, with some spice from under-center singleback, the pistol, and from the I-formation.

• We’re also going to want to prioritize trips alignments, and include minimal (but some) quads, unbalanced, empty, and two-back specialized looks. And we’ll want to get a healthy amount of bunch and condensed formations in there, as those were both a staple of NU’s alignment.

• For personnel, we’re going to want to have predominantly 11 personnel (one back, one tight end, and three receivers) and about a quarter of our plays from 12 personnel (one back, two tight ends, two receivers). But we’ll also want to be sure to include a little 21 (two backs, one tight end, and two receivers), 13 (one back, three tight ends, one receiver), and 22 (two backs, two tight ends, and one receiver), as those are all above around 3% shares. And we can touch on some of the other 1% specialty looks, too.

We want to include built-in motion on around a third of our plays, especially when running the ball. And, for play distribution, we obviously want lots of runs. Anybody who watched NU last year could have told you that one. We’ll also want to keep the run-pass option plays (RPOs) pretty limited. Nebraska only ran a couple of trick plays last year (most notably the Jeff Sims throwback pass against Minnesota), but not utilizing the new trick plays in this game seems like no fun, so I’m going to fudge that a bit and put some in there.

Now let’s talk about actual concepts:

In the run game, Nebraska majored in Counter, Split Zone, Duo, and Inside Zone, so we’ll want to prioritize those if we see them in the video game playbook. But in general, NU had a pretty diverse rushing attack, tapping into a lot of different concepts and identities depending on matchups throughout the season. So we’ll want to reflect that with our own variety of different looks. We’ll also want to obviously include a healthy amount of quarterback reads and runs, but not in the form of tags (the little bubble screens attached to run plays) because NU didn’t really run those. Only a small amount of triple option looks, too.³

One thing not on here we’ll want to include that NU didn’t use much last year are Arrow/Slide RPOs. Nebraska utilized this concept occasionally early in the season:

but went away from it as Haarberg (as a quarterback) couldn’t really operate getting the ball to the slide player. But they were heavily used in the spring game with Raiola in the fold, and it seems like the offense has been practicing them a lot. I think those are going to be an early-down staple in 2024, so I’m including those a lot, also.⁴

If the run game was very advanced, there were probably high schools with more complex passing designs than the one NU used last year. It’s overwhelming No. 1 concept last year was a Stick variation called Shock, a trips-formation play with a hitch route from the No. 1 and No. 3 receivers and a slot fade route from the No. 2, often with a choice route on the backside by the running back.⁵ Any time we see this, we’ll want to include it:

But Smash, Verts, Flood/Sail, Post-Wheel, Slant-Flat, Deep Crossers, Out-Verticals, Double Posts, Curl-Flat, and Drag/Tunnel Screens were also used frequently, so those will also be priorities. Shallow Cross, Spacing, Levels, and RB Screens all got a lot of run in the spring game, too, so we’ll want to put in some of those. I also think we’re going to see a lot more Dagger concepts — a specialty of “Shanahan” offenses, which Rhule said he wants to move to — in 2024, so I’m goint to put those in there, as well. The rest of these lesser concepts that NU used we’ll sprinkle in where we can.

This game, unlike previous versions, introduces some some heavy protection deep passing shots, too, which fit in with the Huskers’ identity last year.

For a more in-depth examination into Nebraska’s offensive tendencies than just the basics I’ve laid out here, check out the post below:

The above are all just guidelines/vibes we’re trying to follow. If we made a true one-to-one copy of the plays Nebraska ran in games last year, we’d end up with around 60 formations, the majority of which would have one to five plays each. You can’t really play a video game with that. We’re trying create an accurate — but useable and fun — playbook for a video game in the spirit of NU’s 2023 and expected 2024 offense. For example, even if Nebraska in real-life only used two run plays out of a specific formation, I also tried to include a quick-pass and a deep pass (as true as possible to NU’s tendencies and concepts from last year), which gives us a more well-rounded video game playbook you can audible from, scroll through, etc., so that every formation isn’t so specific that it becomes disjointed or unusable.

Another problem I ran into is that the game only allows you around 50 formations and 500 plays. To include every formation and play that reflects NU’s offense last year would be well over both totals. So I took some creative license in eliminating or combining some of these formations, but I’ve explained my reasoning below where applicable.

Let’s get started with the methodology of how I built the video game playbook, going through formation group by formation group.

BUILDING THE PLAYBOOK

Singleback

NU’s under-center singleback package only comprised about 13% of its plays but was pretty varied formationally, so I used a lot of formations here but kept the plays pretty limited. Nebraska was very run-heavy from this alignment — only 18 of its 84 plays from under-center singleback were passes, 21.4% — so I’ve made the plays in this set predominantly runs, with a few play-action looks and a little quick game sprinkled in.

Here are the formations and plays NU ran in real-life from under-center singleback last year (you can click on the image to zoom in):

From left to right, the columns indicate my name for the real-life formation, the personnel it uses, how many total plays Nebraska ran out of it last year, and a quick overview of the concepts it ran from the formation.

NU operated from singleback predominantly from bunch formations (24 total plays across three variations) and from two-tight-end wing looks, both doubles and trips. The game has applicable formations for all of those.

I’m going to cut out the Ace Doubles Y/H Wing Condensed formation and the Trey Wide formation (formations that get cut are in red font). The Ace Doubles Condensed look was only used for two plays last year in the Colorado game, and the non-condensed version will be in the video game playbook. We’ve gotta cut somewhere to get this to fit in the parameters of the video game, and a formation that only got used for two snaps in one game and has its standard version already in the playbook included is an easy axe. The Trey Wide formation didn’t have a good one-to-one video game counterpart and also only got used for a handful of snaps in the Illinois and Michigan State games midseason, one of which was a spike to stop the clock, so I’m comfortable dropping that, too.

Now, to translate this to College Football 25:

The first yellow column on the left is the video game’s best comparable counterpart formation for NU’s real-life formation, and the second yellow column contains the plays I chose from that video game formation to represent Nebraska’s real-life offense, in the order you encounter them in the College Football 25 playbook editor. At the end, we’ll add all these formations from the first yellow column and the plays in the second yellow column to our custom playbook in the game.

The under-center singleback running concepts in this game are really strong. We’ve got a Split Zone, Duo, Counter or Wide Zone play in almost every formation, which fits real-life Nebraska pretty well. The set also features plenty of the Jet-motion runs and GT and GF Counter plays Nebraska used in real life from under center last season:

It’s also got what seem like a few of the Windback run plays in there that the Huskers had great effect with in 2023, called “Misdirection” by the game:

One notable omission in the running game is that Nebraska ran almost no singleback Power last season, so I didn’t include any of those plays, in this set or later ones. It just wasn’t something they seemed to use or practice, so I didn’t put it in the playbook.

Where I did include passes here, I went with play-action boots with Flood routes, or deeper play-action looks that had crossers, in-breaking routes, or downfield posts for shot plays. I also put in some Slants or quick Spacing concepts; Nebraska didn’t really run these out of under center last year, but I wanted people to have answers to blitzes when playing the video game.

I tried to go pretty heavy on bulking up the singleback formations NU used most, like “Singleback Wing” and “Singleback Bunch X Nasty” in the video game’s parlance, and a little lighter in the more situational alignments (“Singleback Wing Pair” and “Singleback Ace Double Wing” were 13 and 14 personnel looks Nebraska used only in short yardage last year, so I included fewer plays from those).

So far we’ve used nine of our formations and about 70 of our plays. That’s a little more than we wanted our guidelines to be, but I wanted to have the under-center sections be strong parts of the playbook’s identity, and a lot of these plays are pretty cool/fun. Moving on.

I-Formation

Nebraska ran six total alignments last season out of under-center two-back (also known as the I-formation).