OFFENSIVE RECAP: 2023 Purdue

Pick routes!!!

Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

Glossary of Terms¹
Link to Charting Sheet²

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DRIVE 1

4 Plays, 0.5 Yards Per Play
25% Success Rate
0 Explosive Plays, 1 Havoc Play Allowed

Purdue attacks Nebraska’s offense in an identical way to how Illinois did, with five-player-across Bear/Penny fronts on nearly every snap, heavy boxes, and man coverage with one safety aligned very deep. The Boilermakers would be in the five-player front on all but four of the game’s 57 offensive snaps, in a “heavy box”³ on all but two snaps, and in Cover 1 on all but six snaps. The similarity between the two teams is no surprise, with new Boilermakers coach Ryan Walters coming over from his stint as the Illinois defensive coordinator. But it’s an aggressive alignment designed to have plus-one defenders in the box at almost all times to stop the run, a tough matchup for a team like Nebraska that’s running the ball at one of the highest rates in the Power 5.

The Huskers try to take advantage of this heavy box and man coverage on the opening few plays, lining up in the I formation to ensure Purdue is keeping players in the spine of the defense, then tossing a swing screen out to the back and making the defenders have to sort through traffic to get to it.:

Nebraska has almost exclusively run or taken a deep play-action shots out of the I this season, so throwing it quick to the outside is already an opening-snap tendency breaker, and with the Huskers knowing Purdue would be in man coverage, they created leverage to the outside of the formation, knowing the man coverage defender would have to sort out all the traffic in the middle of the field to get out to cover the swing from the back. An additional wrinkle was that tight end Nate Boerkircher was lined up as the wide receiver to the playside to provide better blocking. 

The blocking from the pulling linemen, Boerkircher, and fullback Janiran Bonner doesn’t hold up and the gain gets called back for a hold. But this would be a foreshadowing opening call from coordinator Marcus Satterfield, who utilized similar concepts frequently before the game was in-hand. It was also would have been Nebraska’s first successful screen play of the season, if it hadn’t been for the penalty.

Satterfield continues to try to exploit the man coverage on the next two plays, a pair of downfield run-pass option plays:

The first is an Outside Zone read option to the backside of a trips formation, with an attached out route from the backside receiver. With Purdue’s shell the same and the secondary players manned up across the board, Satterfield knows that if he lines up in wide trips he’ll have just one defender to the backside of the formation, the corner over the lone receiver.

The line runs the Outside Zone action to the strength of the formation, and when the edge defender (circled in yellow below) crashes down with the line, quarterback Heinrich Haarberg pulls the ball and gets to the outside. From here, the play design has put the lone defender to the boundary in conflict: They can either cover the out route from the lone receiver with their man coverage responsibility (in blue), or they can come up to tackle Haarberg on the run. The corner stays with the receiver, so Haarberg pulls it down for an 8-yard gain. 

This is, essentially, a modern take on the triple option, something Purdue would be vulnerable to with the amount of man coverage they run, with the secondary players’ eyes on defenders instead of what’s happening in the backfield. NU’s triple option rate entering was 3.4%, but would be nearly doubled on Saturday.

Satterfield goes to another man-beating RPO on the next snap, a Split Zone running play with a Slot Fade/Smash concept attached to the two-receiver side out of a doubles formation. 

This isn’t a triple option-style RPO, with Haarberg having no run option, but rather a leverage one, with the quarterback having the ability to pull the ball and throw downfield if the receiver gets tight coverage and a safety isn’t aligned over top of them. Purdue starts in a rare two-high coverage look, which would indicate a give to the back on a running play, but one of the safeties flies down just before the snap to press slot receiver Jaiden Doss. The other Purdue safety also steps up into the box at the snap of the ball on the run action, and with Doss now getting one-on-one coverage and no safety capable of getting over the top of him, the read is now to throw the ball downfield on the RPO to the speedster on the fade route to the sideline. Haarberg delivers the ball right into Doss’ arms — one of his best throws since becoming a starter? — but it’s dropped.