NORTHWESTERN RECAP: Oh No, We Suck Again!

Self-inflicted mistakes doom Nebraska in a very familiar-looking loss to open the season

Photo courtesy Huskers.com/Scott Bruhn

The Nebraska Cornhuskers and their fans have angered the Gods and are now in hell. That’s the only reasonable explanation left at this point:

Bill Connelly @ESPN_BillC

Scott Frost's UCF went 4-0 in 1-score games in 2017. In his other 5+ years as HC, he is 6-24 in them. Defies pretty much everything we've ever thought we knew about close games and randomness.

PROGRAMMING NOTES: If you were tuned out for the offseason, I would suggest reading the post detailing the newsletter’s plan for this year; it will better explain what things like success rate are and why the changes happened. For the first few weeks of the season, I’ll be using Nebraska’s 2021 data for the season-long comparison until we have a bigger sample size to compare to from this year. Also, expect posts to be in your inbox on Fridays after games; obviously I’d love to have them out sooner but charting this stuff is time-consuming. Thanks, as always, for reading!

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DEFENSE

GAME CHART

Northwestern 2022 Defense Game Chart

It was a long day for the Blackshirts however you slice it up, though it was maybe not quite as bad as it appeared in the moment.

Nebraska’s defense was actually more successful than Northwestern’s offense on a per-play basis — just the times they messed up, they REALLY messed up. There were quite a few issues I saw, some of which seem correctable and some of which may be cause for concern.

Let’s start with some things I think can be fixed pretty easily/aren’t a big deal:

• Tackling: Nebraska defenders’ sloppy tackling made Northwestern’s backs look pretty good, especially in the first half. I had Husker defenders missing five dead-to-rights tackles in the first half, with the additional yardage after the missed tackles accounting for 60 of the Wildcats’ 261 first-half yards and keeping alive two scoring drives. It could just be that they’re bad at tackling, but tackling is never going to be at its best in an opener for anyone, and NU was a very good tackling team last year, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that was probably an aberration.

• Field Position/Variance: Three of Northwestern’s five scoring drives started on the Nebraska 48, the Nebraska 44, and the Nebraska 43. Those are short fields the D was left to defend that were caused completely independent of its performance. Northwestern also siloed 66% of its yardage into six of its 14 drives; it happened to group most of its very successful plays together, which is mostly a product of luck and due for some variance.

There were other things that I think are cause for more alarm:

• The Defensive Line — One of the things I was watching for Saturday was whether the defensive tackles could occupy multiple gaps to make the 2-4-5 scheme work. Not only did that not happen and the interior guys got blown off the ball, but Nebraska’s elite trio of edge rushers in Garrett Nelson, Caleb Tannor, and Ochaun Mathis — the preseason strength of the entire team —were completely ineffective in run defense and as pass rushers.

The interior guys couldn’t occupy blocks, which let Wildcat offensive linemen get to the second level and neutralize the Huskers’ middle linebackers. Northwestern returned four starters on its offensive line, including a likely future high-NFL pick in tackle Peter Skoronski, so it’s possible that’s just one of the conference’s best O-lines and NU is not in that much trouble. But independent of that, the lack of depth on the interior was very concerning.

Nebraska used a true rotation on its interior defensive line last year, subbing in five players for two spots; fresh guys were always in the game. But on Saturday, Nebraska more or less left Ty Robinson and Colton Feist out there for the majority of snaps, aside from some brief subs. Those two naturally got gassed facing 70+ plays, which mostly led to the gashes on the ground you saw late in the game. NU’s coaches were likely hoping to use a rotation, and so that they weren’t tells me they don’t trust anyone other than Robinson and Feist to play significant roles right now. Which is bad. Another thing that would suggest NU didn’t trust it’s interior run defense was its heavier use of Base 3-4 personnel and less of the Nickel personnel (more defensive linemen on the field is better against the run). Northwestern is primarily an 11 personnel team, so Nebraska should have been able to stay in Nickel personnel for most of the game. Instead, it nearly doubled the amount of Base personnel it played from last year.

It could just be that new transfers Stephon Wynn Jr. and Devin Drew just need some more practice and game reps to earn the coaches’ trust — which they’ll have chances to get in the next two weeks against North Dakota and Georgia Southern. But if they aren’t capable and NU doesn’t have five-ish strong-enough or experienced-enough bodies in the middle, you can’t really flip a switch to magically fix that mid-year; that is season-dooming stuff.

Something that I think is pretty easily fixable in the run defense was some poor alignment/scheme. When Nebraska was in its Base 3-4 Bear front (five defensive players on the line of scrimmage, more-or-less head up on every offensive linemen), it was occasionally dropping Edge player Tannor out into the slot. Even when NW had multiple tight ends to that side, creating some pretty massive gap inbalances:

In a standard Bear front, Tannor typically lines up where the yellow arrow is pointing. Even with him there, Nebraska would still have been a gap down to that side for this two-tight end alignment from Northwestern. With him split out, it makes Nebraska two gaps down. Asking him to be split out like that and play a run gap on the end of the line of scrimmage is an impossible assignment; it’s simply too much space to cover with run/pass responsibilities. At the very least, the NU’s front needs to be shifted here to not have four guys to the weakside and three guys to the strong side. I can’t tell if this was an intentional call by coordinator Erik Chinander (because they did it many times) or a lack of adjustment by NU, but either way … bad.

You’ll be shocked to learn that on this play, Northwestern ran a pin-pull action right to the gaps NU vacated for about 10 yards:

On the nine reps of this “Bear Drop” look where they pulled Tannor to the slot, NU had a success rate of just 33% and Northwestern averaged 11.44 yards per play and got three of its 10 total explosive plays for the day. This one alignment was a huge reason Nebraska’s defense looked like buns.

• Nickel Inexperience/Growing Pains — The other big issue I’m worried about: Nebraska had six new starters on defense coming into the year, and I think we all probably trusted the development we’ve seen happening on that side of the ball a little too much without appreciating the newbies might need some time to grow.

This was apparent especially at Nickel, where Nebraska really missed JoJo Domann.

Northwestern did a ton of its damage Saturday by freezing linebackers with run actions and then flipping the ball to the flats or booting off it to run various Weakside Flood concepts. Flood is just a three-level route: A flat, a 10-12 yard out, and a vertical route:

It’s an especially effective combination against Cover 3 and Cover 4, as it forces the Curl/Flat defender (in Cover 3) and Flat defender (in Cover 4) into conflict and makes them choose between covering the flat route or the deeper out.

Nebraska’s defense asks its Nickel back to be that Curl/Flat defender in Cover 3 and Flat defender in Cover 4. This is a tough job; you have run responsibilities to the weakside, while also needing to potentially get all the way out to the sideline in coverage. This is why Domann was so valuable — he had the talent, instincts, and experience to do both well. Replacements Isaac Gifford and Chris Kolarevic were not at that level Saturday:

This is in Cover 4. You can see Gifford (circled in blue in the still image above) doesn’t have the awareness to recognize the Flood is coming at him and doesn’t get the depth here to take out the deep out, and the ball gets thrown over his head for a big gain. Domann had repped this hundreds of times in games; many times last season he recognized concepts and dropped into deeper throwing lanes to take them away, here hopefully forcing the ball to get thrown to the covered flat. That’s the difference between a 2-yard gain and a 12-yard gain. You hope the Nickels will improve with reps — and they probably will — but Northwestern exploited them on these concepts for 9.44 yards per play Saturday and got some of its biggest gains. Gifford and Kolarevic also were big culprits in missed tackles.

Gifford did improve as the game went on and adjusted his depth, but at that point the Wildcats were in major run-the-ball mode and it wasn’t as big of a factor. Hopefully he can start from that point next week, but the Nickel position’s inexperience was a huge factor Saturday and I don’t see how it gets fixed quickly.

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OFFENSE

GAME CHART

Northwestern 2022 Offense Game Chart

OVERALL PERFORMANCE

For the first game, Nebraska’s overall offensive numbers were very similar to last year’s, in some good ways and bad: It had little problem generating lots of yardage and explosive plays but struggled to translate those into actual points. The Huskers did do a great job Saturday of not letting Northwestern get them off schedule; of the five “Havoc plays” (tackles for loss, sacks, interceptions, pass breakups) they allowed, two were interceptions that should have been caught by NU wide receivers and another was the quarterback tripping on air as he rolled out to pass. Some of that was Northwestern being a very vanilla defensive team that doesn’t blitz much, but some of it was also (a) slightly improved pass blocking from NU’s tackles and (b) greatly improved pocket mobility, accuracy and awareness from NU’s quarterback. When Nebraska’s offense was suffering negative plays, it was because it was doing it to itself. Which I guess is better than having the opponent do it to you?

A lot was made of the offense’s late collapse, and the numbers more or less bear that out: Nebraska had an offensive success rate of 54.0% for the game through Anthony Grant’s 46-yard touchdown run in the middle of the third quarter but was “successful” on just 6 of its final 23 plays (26.1%) after that. Most of that was, again, because of self-inflicted mistakes (Thompson missed a couple big passes late in the third — including a 70+-yard, wide-open touchdown to Trey Palmer — and the receiver drops), but the numbers don’t differentiate why the mistakes were happening.

We wanted to see how the Scott Frost and Mark Whipple offenses were combined, and while one game is a small sample size, we did get some answers. There’s a ton to get through here with the new offense and I don’t want this post to take 30 minutes to read, so I’ll just point out a few of the biggest things:

• People who complained about Nebraska “not running the ball” under Frost are really not going to like this offense. The Huskers were one of the most run-heavy offenses in P5 last year, and now are going to throw it more than almost anyone else. That really is a wild change.

• Nebraska killed Northwestern when moving at fast tempo. There is some noise to ignore with that number — when your offense is doing well, you’re going to push down the accelerator on the pace, which will make the numbers look better — but the Wildcats were completely lost when the Huskers went fast. Also, Whipple seems to want to push the pace more than Frost actually did last year.

• The pro-style Pistol running game Whipple brought to NU needs some work. Nebraska had a 37.50% success rate when running out of the Pistol I-formation Whipple likes, and most of their big and successful runs came on RPOs or on spread-out shotgun concepts. I thought the offensive line struggled in run blocking quite a bit, but the good news is they should play two pretty marginal fronts in the next two games, so they should be able to work some stuff out.

RUNNING GAME

One of the biggest questions I had entering the year is what the running game would look like. I think we all assumed Nebraska was going to pass a lot more under Whipple, but when they did run, was Whipple (bland, pro-style running game) or Frost (diverse, option-based zone running game) making the decisions?

Based off one game, it would appear Whipple is still mostly calling the shots, with a Frost play mixed in here or there. NU ran Inside Zone or Duo (two very similar and basic inside-hitting running plays) on 43.33% of its snaps with a run element. Their third-most-used run was Power, a staple of NFL offenses that Nebraska didn’t run all that much last year. There was none of the more designery stuff we’ve seen under Frost. It was also evident this is Whipple’s run game by the massive drop on run concepts that featured a post-snap read, from 46.86% to 19.35%; this was a much more shackled, straightforward, “I want the ball to go in this specific spot to get 3 yards” rushing attack. I can’t say that I like that because it is a very boring vibe, but it seems to be what they are doing. This is what Frost more-or-less was saying in his deepl mischaracterized postgame “blaming the offensive coaches” comment, which he later clarified:

"In the Big Ten it's hard to just turn around and hand it to a back and think you're going to be real consistent," he said Tuesday. "I think I was referring [in the Saturday postgame] to having a few more things in the run game that are schemed for the particular opponent."

Also, to be fair, the Frost concepts weren’t very successful — they got a nice run on Inverted Veer in the fourth quarter, and Logan Smothers came in for his one play to give them a nice Freeze Option rep — but the four triple-option style plays NU from last year that NU ran gained a combined 7 yards (play action looks off of them were effective, though).

Overall, I thought the run-blocking looked kind of underwhelming. Northwestern allegedly has a solid front seven, but it was still a pretty disappointing showing after hearing all fall camp of how THE PIPELINE WAS BACK. There was very little forward push on zone plays, double teams were getting held up and prevented from getting to linebackers, and I noticed the tackles (especially Teddy Prochazka) get blasted into the backfield action to mess up a few outside-hitting plays. The line has some new starters, so maybe they just need some game reps to gel, but it wasn’t a great start.

I’d also like to point out that I did ABSOLUTELY CALL Grant being awesome.

PASSING GAME

My charting for the pass game will get more robust in the coming weeks as I get more familiar with what they are running and can hone in on favorite concepts, so stick with me on this section.

The biggest surprise to me here was how little the Huskers used play-action. We all knew coming in Whipple was a timing-based, 3-step guy, but to halve your play-action rate seems like malpractice. Every piece of football analytics we have says that play-action makes your passing attack significantly more effective, even if you aren’t good at running the ball or even running the ball often. NU was almost twice as successful Saturday when using play-action than it was on 3-step concepts. And that’s not counting the two bombs quarterback Casey Thompson missed at the end of the third quarter, the first of which came on the play-action deep crossers concept off of the triple-option action Nebraska used a ton last year, and the second of which came off a Mills look using play-action out of the Pistol Pro-I. I’m not going to get too upset yet at a one-game sample size, but if I don’t see the play-action rate increase I am going to side-eye Whipple pretty hard.

Overall, Nebraska saw a ton of Cover 3 and Cover 4, with Northwestern using one of those two coverages on 39 of Nebraska’s 45 plays with a passing element. The goal on beating Cover 3 is to exploit the area between the curl/flat defender and deep third defender (the area about 8 to 12 yards up the sidelines ). Cover 4 is usually exploited by operating underneath against a zone defenders that need to get depth or by forcing the deep quarters defenders to “lock” onto routes down the field (typically deep in-breaking routes and posts), essentially creating 1-on-1 man matchups.

One concept Nebraska seemed to be spamming Saturday were a Drive look out of doubles:

Gun Doubles Open WR Flex — Drive/Vertical-Out

This look is a Drive concept (a 10-yard in-breaking “Basic” route with a drag underneath) to one side and a deep out from the slot and a vertical from the #1 on the other side:

I’m not totally familiar with Whipple’s coaching points, but I imagine the Drive side is the zone-beating side (allowing them to high-low a zone defender), and the Out-Vert side attacks man coverage. I saw them run this concept at least three times Saturday. The high-low plus same-direction breaking routes is also a Whipple staple.

I also saw them running a lot of Double Posts to also get a high-low on those zone guys and a lot of vertical clearout routes with a drag coming underneath. More to come on breaking down the passing game as we see more games and concepts.

The passing game on the whole looked … very impressive? Most of the second-half “struggles” were really just a couple missed throws and three key, absolutely brutal drops. The Huskers receivers REALLY struggled with catching the ball; I had them dropping seven passes that hit them in the hands or went through their hands that would have been first downs. Three of those came in the final drives when they desperately needed some offensive momentum. Both of Thompson’s picks came on passes that easily should have been caught by receivers (Oliver Martin and Wyatt Liewer playing over Omar Manning WHY???). You’re never going to be perfect on drops but … c’mon fellas. I also thought tight end Travis Volkolek’s injury in the third quarter has been an underdiscussed aspect of Saturday: He was having a great game as the seam threat in those high-lows and as a release option, and his backups are both non-scholarship players who were not nearly as effective.

Otherwise, I thought Thompson did a great job getting the ball out fast and accurately and displaying awareness in the pocket. It was a bit of whiplash to watch an NU quarterback play with sharp fundamentals after four years of Adrian Martinez turning everything into circus ball the moment anything got slightly cloudy. I also thought Trey Palmer showed a lot more as an actual wide receiver than than I thought he ever did at LSU. I was even slightly impressed with the pass blocking at times. This was a few misfires away from being a 400-yard passing day in a new starting QB’s debut. We’ll see how opponents adjust, but I came away pretty optimistic about the offense as a whole, especially with it using what seemed like a limited playbook.

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Onside KickGate

Here’s why they did the onside kick:

I feel like lost in the discussion of momentum and game-management is this basic fact: Northwestern lined up with a giant 15-yard gap in its front line. Nebraska’s staff saw this and Frost tried to take advantage.

Was it a risk? Yes. But was it an understandable risk based on a pretty glaring weakness/dumb thing presented by Northwestern? Also yes. It was smart to try and take advantage, especially if Frost realized the defense was in trouble. That the execution was bad does not mean the decision was. A coach getting killed by his own fanbase and media for taking a smart risk to try to steal a possession is Exhibit A on why football coaches routinely behave conservatively to their own detriment.

It also … wasn’t what I would consider to be one of the most impactful plays of the game? If you asked me to rank the biggest things that happened that led to the NU loss, I would say:

1. Northwestern getting a random fumble in the red zone where the guy seemed pretty likely to be down;

2. Thompson missing the wide-open third-quarter touchdown;

3. Martin letting a big first-down completion go through his hands to be intercepted and returned 40 yards;

4. Nebraska’s defense letting Northwestern score with two minutes before the half when it had the Wildcats in 4th and 1 on its own 38.

The onside kick did affect momentum, but actual good teams are able to execute after bad things happen. That’s really what this game came down to: **Not getting** the onside kick did shrink the margin of the game, but when things got tight when it mattered, Northwestern executed, and Nebraska didn’t. Simple as that.

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OVERALL THOUGHTS

I couldn’t really blame anyone at this point for losing whatever little faith they still somehow possessed, but I did see some positive things: Offense looked a lot better than I thought; NU played maybe its first penalty-clean game under Frost; new specialists looked good. I came away deeply worried about the defense, but I think some of that can be cleaned up.

CFB history is littered with teams that play crappy in their opener and rebound to have good seasons. NU has absolutely not earned that expectation in any way, but I also think this was just a very Northwestern-ass game that we’ll view as an outlier. There’s also a chance they just suck! Either way, I’ll feel a lot better if they come out and drop the hammer the next two games.

Sorry this post was longer than Ulysses, and thanks as always for reading. Comments are open for discussion or questions.