OFFENSIVE RECAP: 2023 Michigan State

The Huskers chase big plays and find out what happens when you don't get them

Nebraska receiver Jaidyn Doss fails to pull in a pass Saturday. Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

Glossary of Terms¹
Link to Charting Sheet²

---

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’m ditching the drive-by-drive format to just talk about what happened in the game a little more holistically. Breaking it up into drives was getting a little tedious to read, I think, and a lot of times there wasn’t much to say about individual possessions. I had gotten some suggestions something closer to a narrative format might express the trends I was finding a little better. Hopefully you think so. Let me know!

---

The two main elements of football offense are efficiency and explosiveness. Those elements can work together or separately; an offense can be effective either for its ability to execute repetitiously or its ability to generate huge gains, and the best attacks do both. This is why the three pieces of data I track for this newsletter are success rate (the percentage of plays an offense is accomplishing its goal for a down) and explosive and havoc plays (the magnitude of those plays each direction).

Nebraska’s offense in 2023 has been deeply inefficient. Its success rate over all plays entering Saturday was 38.3%, meaning that in an average 10-play sample, the defense is winning six of them. And outside of Michigan, Nebraska hasn’t faced a particularly strong cohort of defenses. The 38% mark would be Nebraska’s worst offensive success rate since 2009 (37.6%, the Ndamukong Suh team that lost the Big 12 championship 13-12), and put it in the company of other ignominious Husker attacks like 2004 (34.9%, the offense that got Frank Solich fired), 2005 (36.4%, Bill Callahan’s first year, when NU switched from the flexbone to a West Coast system), and 2017 (39.8%, the team that got Mike Riley fired).

What this team has been OK at, though, has been generating explosive plays. Per CollegeFootballData, its average Expected Points Added on “successful plays” — an advanced stats word salad that essentially measures how impactful an offense’s good plays are — is 1.26; Nebraska’s average since 2000 has been 0.98. So the 2023 Huskers *are* doing a bit better job at generating big plays than the school’s average offense. That passes the eye test, too; when you think about this offense’s best moments, it’s been a lot more long option runs or deep play-action passes rather than long, 12-play drives. 

This would seemingly run counter to the vision head coach Matt Rhule and coordinator Scott Satterfield have expressed. The two spend the offseason talking about long drives, controlling the clock, and running the ball. They have certainly tried to realize that vision early in their first year; NU is huddling on 86% of its snaps and is running the ball on nearly 75% of its first downs. Their push for efficiency has resulted in some ugly moments of offense so far this season, but you can’t really say they didn’t try it.

But Saturday gave some signs of an acceptance the team Rhule and Satterfield inherited/partially built is a lot better at hitting those home runs — as well as a cautionary tale of why they’ve been hesitant to embrace big-play offense so far.

Several things in Nebraska’s gameplan Saturday indicated an increasing shift to more big-play prioritization:

First, the general pass rate was way up. Nebraska entered calling pass plays on about 34.5% of its snaps, and runs and RPOs at around 65.2%³. Saturday’s rate was 47.8% called pass, up 13 percentage points. Part of the elevation was NU spending the end of the game in hurry-up, come-from-behind mode while down two scores, but that’s not all of it: Wipe away the last three drives, and the called pass rate was still about 43%, nine percentage points higher than normal. And it wasn’t because of any type of defense Michigan State was operating: The Spartans lined up in a standard or light box on 62.3% of their plays Saturday, and they used two deep safeties over 60% of the time, as well. Those should have been juicy run looks, and NU still threw the ball at an elevated rate. Generally, it’s easier to generate explosives through the air than on the ground.

Second, the types of passes Nebraska was running were different. Nebraska entered using “quick game” passing concepts — short routes where the quarterback doesn’t take a drop and the ball is designed to be out of their hands quickly — on 37.8% of its called passes, with deeper “three-step” concepts at 53.4% and even deeper five- and seven-step concepts at the remaining 8.7%. Against Michigan State, Nebraska ran almost no quick game — 8.8%, or 29 percentage points lower than normal — with huge jumps in three-step usage (79.4%) and five-/seven-step usage (11.7%).