OFFENSIVE RECAP: 2023 Iowa

One of the worst offensive seasons in program history comes to an ignominious end

No photos from the Nebraska Athletics department this week?? Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

Glossary of Terms¹
Link to Charting Sheet²

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It’s hard to put up 10 points and 264 yards in a football game and have the advanced data come back and say you overperformed expectations, but leave it to this year’s Nebraska offense to refuse to ever have a normal one. Iconoclasts to the end!

The Huskers put up some truly abysmal numbers in the 13-10 loss to Iowa on Black Friday: an 18.97% overall offensive success rate, a season low by over five percentage points and worse than even the blowout loss to No. 1 Michigan; only one gain of five or more yards on 21 first-down plays; and a 5.2% explosive play rate, another season low by five percentage points.

Nebraska was, in short, pretty lucky to come away with 10 points in that game. The scoring was largely buoyed by one 66-yard pass, and an outlier 8-for-17 performance on third and fourth down that kept drives alive. That Nebraska was so good on third down was absolutely just luck/variance: NU had eight successful plays and a 47% success rate on its 17 third downs; it had just three combined successful plays on 41 attempts across its first and second downs. Whether or not Nebraska was moving the ball at all vs. Iowa more or less came down to whether or not it was getting one of these fortunate conversions.

A portion of the ugly data is slightly misleading. NU was getting lots of OK plays that didn’t qualify as successful — 3- or 4-yard gains that set up more manageable third downs — and even with the three turnovers was doing an better-than-average job of avoiding negative plays, with a lower rate of allowed havoc plays than its season average (12.1% of snaps were a havoc play; the season average entering had been 16.4%). Nebraska’s average length of third down was 7.29, which was actually the fifth-best of the season and shows the Huskers were at least doing SOMETHING on early downs, even if they weren’t getting a ton of “successful” plays by the strict definition. And there’s the added context they were doing this against an Iowa defense that is top three nationally by virtually ever ranking service

But however you want to frame it up … Black Friday was a bad day for the O. The Wisconsin game had been a marginal improvement in efficiency from some of the more recent abysmal contests, but all of that positive momentum went away against Iowa. Chubba Purdy had delivered what seemed to be some stabilizing QB play and processing against Wisconsin but often looked frazzled and was bailing on reads prematurely. A run game that’s been quietly pretty successful for the box counts it was facing all year got pulled back hard. And a line that had been competent and improved looked as if it were getting muscled around every snap in run blocking and pass pro. NU wasn’t executing well in any phase on offense, really. 

Schematically, this game was a bit of an outlier from coordinator Marcus Satterfield. Nebraska went as heavy into its dropback passing game as it has all season, with a 56.9% pure pass play rate, with just 37.9% called runs and 5.2% called RPOs. The season averages entering had been about 36.8% called passes and 55.7% called runs, so NU’s run-pass balance effectively flipped against Iowa. That 56.9% pass rate was a season high (the second highest being against Michigan), as was the rate of passing on first down (38.1%; the season average entering had been 26.9%).