OKLAHOMA RECAP: Not A One-Score Loss!!!
What was supposed to be a fun rivalry renewal becomes a steamrolling of a disjointed Husker program
Let’s ignore everything that happened Saturday and focus on this instead:
Ah, the good times!
PROGRAMMING NOTE 1: If you were tuned out for the offseason or are a new subscriber, I would suggest reading the post detailing the newsletter’s plan for this year; it will better explain things like success rate. For the first few weeks of the season, I’ll be comparing this week’s game’s data to the previous week’s game’s, until we get a sample size big enough to function as season-long data.
PROGRAMMING NOTE 2: Breakdown data for this post does not cover garbage time and only is evaluating the plays when the starters were playing (through about the middle of the third quarter.) So a pretty small sample size (about 48 plays on offense and 60 on defense), but I didn’t want backups/garbage time to taint the data.
OFFENSE
GAME CHART
2022 Oklahoma Offensive Game Chart
OVERALL
Nebraska opened this game ABSOLUTELY ROLLING with a 100% success rate on its first eight plays — NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP HERE WE COME — and then completely went off a cliff with a 25.64% success rate the rest of the way as OU’s defense and coach Brent Venables went into his BRING INSANE BLITZES bag (more on that below). Nebraska’s bad day was especially bad on third down, when OU’s defense was getting into some really tough pressure packages and designer stuff and throwing the offensive line and quarterback Casey Thompson for a loop.
Nebraska’s best offense against OU was going at a fast tempo and keeping the Sooners’ defense from getting into those designer looks where it could send crazy blitzes or sim pressures. Any time it slowed down or huddled, Venables was able to get a play called that either melted the brains of the NU offensive line or Thompson and caused a disaster.
Nebraska had a lot of success with quads formations (four receivers to one side) early in the game — five of its first nine plays were quads, with four being successful — and then ran quads just one more time with the starters in.
RUNNING GAME
A key issue Saturday was the execution in the running game. OU runs a 3-3-5 — three down linemen, three linebackers and five defensive backs. Nebraska’s spread formations often pulled the weakside linebacker out of the box, frequently leaving just five guys in to defend the run. This should be a feast for the running game — five or six blockers (if you have a tight end attached to the formation) facing five defenders. If a defense gives you this, you’ve got to make them pay.
Instead, OU’s three defensive linemen consistently won against Nebraska’s five blockers, mostly through gumming up double teams and preventing the second blocker on the double teams from climbing to the linebackers. This let the linebackers penetrate right away and create a ton of havoc behind the line of scrimmage. That’s the goal of a 3-3-5 — it lets you play more amoeba-style defense with better athletes, and OU has some freak athletes — but it was pretty disappointing to see NU’s line get dogwalked this badly after it seemed like they had made some good progress in the past two games. The lack of rushing success also put NU behind the chains and left it in situations where Venables could turn up the heat
We saw a lot more Duo and Outside Zone than in previous games, and NU also ran no triple option plays in the first game with Mark Whipple having full control of the offense after the firing of Scott Frost. That could be because of some game-flow stuff — NU didn’t run many plays total and got behind and entered pass-happy mode pretty early — but it also could be just Whipple jettisoning all the Frost stuff now that he’s got the reins.
PASSING GAME
Venables kept things very vanilla and basic for about the first eight plays of this game — during which Nebraska was able to have about its only offensive success — and then it’s like he flipped a switch and he went into PSYCHO PRESSURE MODE and pulled out his craziest tricks. I’ve detailed Venables’ pressures from a key stretch in the game:
This is a 1st and 10 on Nebraska’s third drive, when the game was still tied at 7:
OU lines up and appears to be bringing a six-man pressure with its two linebackers lined up in mugs in both A Gaps pre-snap. OU has one safety deep, indicating Cover 3 or Cover 1 coverage behind the blitz, with the deep safety dropping to the middle of the field, the two corners taking the outside thirds, and the two second-level players dropping to the hashes (in Cover 3). With the six-man pressure, there wouldn’t be a middle robber player:
Post-snap, it is indeed Cover 3, but it’s only a five-man pressure — and neither of the two linebackers who appeared to be coming pre-snap actually come. Instead, the two linebackers in the A Gap drop to the hashes, and one of the second-level players comes on the blitz. Also, the other second-level player drops into the deep middle Cover 3 responsibility, while the deep safety comes up to play the robber because it’s only a five-man pressure:
The next of Venables’ games came on the very next play, a 2nd and 8 that resulted in a sack:
Pre-snap, OU shows Thompson what looks to be a 2-Man coverage look: Tight man coverage by the underneath players, with two deep safeties over the top and four pass rushers. Nebraska is running a Stick concept here (a good route combination against man coverage) and is in an Empty formation with a tight end attached to the line, meaning NU is likely to be running a five-man protection or possibly a six-man protection if the tight end stays in (not likely but possible):
Post-snap, it is man coverage, but it’s not 2-Man, it’s Cover 1. One of the previously-thought two-deep safeties is actually playing man coverage on the tight end, and the hole player previously thought to be covering the tight end is actually the one coming on the blitz. The other deep safety drops all the way across the field into the deep middle responsibility, and the linebacker thought to be blitzing pre-snap drops as the Cover 1 Robber player.
Venables would run a standard blitz on the next play to get a sack and end the drive. OU scores on its offensive possession, and on the next Nebraska drive, instead of blitzing at all, Venables plays basic on first down and plays Drop 8 coverages (three rushers with eight players in coverage) on second and third down to force a punt. OU scored again to make it 21-7. On Nebraska’s fifth drive, a Jet Sweep to Trey Palmer loses six yards to knock NU behind schedule. On the ensuing 3rd and 16, the pressure returned (though Nebraska was running a Trap play into it):
This pre-snap looks like another six-man pressure with the linebackers mugged up and Cover 3 behind it with no robber:
Like the first example, both mugged linebackers drop to the hashes, and the safeties also flip deep responsibilities and robber again. But unlike the first example, the down lineman to the boundary drops into the flat, and the nickel player becomes the blitzer, meaning Venables is actually only bringing four rushers:
It also puts all four of OU’s rushers on one side of the offensive line and away from the running back, meaning it’s four rushers on three blockers.
After the punt, OU went down and scored again to make it 28-7. On the next drive, NU had something going, nearly getting to midfield. The last example of Venables craziness I want to talk about came on a 2nd and 9 on that drive:
This AGAIN looks like a six-man, mugged LB, Cover 3 pressure:
Like the first play, the mugged linebackers drop and the four down linemen come. Like the second play, the nickel player also blitzes. But unlike either of those plays, it’s what looks like a TWO-DEEP COVER 4:
Venables absolutely had Thompson and Whipple in the torture chamber Saturday. This man is certifiably nuts. One reason I’m not that down on the offense after Saturday is that NU won’t face anything like this again; the good Big Ten defenses are much, much more vanilla than this, even if they might be as good overall. Whomever let OU get a good defensive coach should be arrested.
You can see the prevalence of the pressure in the rate NU used six-man protections; in Nebraska’s most typical pass protection the running back “checks” to see if the defense is blitzing before releasing out into his route. OU’s heavy pressure meant the back was often having to stay into block, which also kept NU from getting all five eligible players out on routes and eliminating a check down for Thompson.
OU also ran a lot of “Drop 8” coverages — only three rushers with eight defenders dropping into pass coverage. OU got a few pressures and a sack Saturday on this — meaning their three defensive line were beating Nebraska’s five blockers.
Three guys beating five. What a mess!
One issue that did come to bear in this game was the limited playbook Nebraska has been working with and how siloed elements of its offensive gameplan are.
Just even watching from the TV copy, it’s fairly easy to predict what couple of plays NU is going to run based on its formation: when it’s in its trips offset look out of the gun, it’s running Inside Zone or Duo with a Bubble tagged on it; when it’s in the Pro-I look out of the Pistol, it’s going with a basic under-center run or throwing 989 or some deep crossers; when it’s in Gun Doubles it’s running the Shallow Cross/Out-Vertical concept. Nebraska has lined up in an Empty formation nine times so far this year, and in it, it’s run this exact same Post-Wheel concept to the trips side seven of the times:
And the other two times were a very basic Stick-Slants concept that came from a different formation (you can see it as the second example in the Venables pressure section above).
It’s not the biggest sin to hammer the same concepts, especially if they are giving a smart QB multiple ways of attack multiple coverages like this play does, and I’m not advocating for, like, a 900-page playbook from Whipple. But NU’s offense is giving away some massive formational tells right now, and that’s coming from me — just some amateur guy who doesn’t have access to All-22 film. An FBS defensive coordinator has to be just ripping this stuff apart right now, and if the defense has a pretty good idea of what play you’re running before you even snap the ball, you’re cooked. That also seemed like a decently big part of the offense’s struggles Saturday. Say whatever you want about Frost or his playcalling, but he was fanatical about not giving away pre-snap tells. Whipple needs to spend the bye week either installing more of the offense or installing some tweaks to keep defenses from teeing off before we hit Big Ten defenses.
DEFENSE
GAME CHART
2022 Oklahoma Defensive Game Chart
OVERALL
DEFENSE:
The Blackshirts actually played better against OU than it did against Georgia Southern … that’s called PROGRESS.
Coordinator Erik Chinander caught a firing Sunday for this early-season defensive disaster, and while I think the majority of the issues have been personnel based, he certainly didn’t help himself by keeping his scheme extremely basic and static in the face of those personnel deficiencies.
I’ve talked about this before, but Chinander’s basic philosophy at Nebraska was to prevent big pass plays by keep everything in front of his safeties and wait for the offense to make a mistake. He was more than happy to give up rushing yards with a light box and underneath passing yards with his corners bailing into Cover 3 and Cover 4, with the expectation that most college quarterbacks are not going to be able to string long drives together without doing something stupid or that a havoc play would knock the offense off of schedule and allow him to bring in an exotic look on third-and-long. It’s not a dissimilar strategy to what a team like Iowa wants to do, or what the Gus Bradley-era Legion of Doom Seahawks teams of the 2010s did.
But there are two differences between successful teams that run that philosophy and Nebraska: Those teams had … GREAT PLAYERS. Having good dudes makes any defensive plan look good, but it’s especially important here: If you don’t have 3-techniques or nose tackles who can play gap-and-a-half or two-gap, or safeties who can competently fill from depth against the run (instead of, say, diving at every ball carrier’s feet for no reason???), the offense has a leg up in the run game. And if you don’t have corners who can drop in Cover 3 or 4 while also being good enough to not have to give up a massive cushion to do so, the offense will have unlimited access to 5-6 yard completions on the outside. NU mostly had those guys on the D-line and in the secondary last year, but it’s been pretty clear the exodus of defensive linemen to graduation and transfer in the offseason and the loss of JoJo Domann’s ability to take away those short routes has made this philosophy untenable for this Nebraska team. This is what it looks like when you try to run it with inexperienced players.
Secondly, you have to eventually get aggressive if you want to play this way. If Iowa tries to play a two-deep shell while rushing four on 80% of its plays, on those other 20% of plays its corners are on the line of scrimmage, beating the hell out of receivers in press, or it’s bringing some creative pressures. Chinander never wanted to do stuff like that unless he had clear third-and-longs, which he rarely got because he was giving opposing offenses free yards on early downs. And even on the third-and-longs, he mostly kept things static or had huge tells pre-snap. And again: I’m just some guy doing this in my living room off the TV copy; if I can call out what coverage you’re going to run pre-snap because you only ever drop into Cover 4 or Cover 6 out of your two-high shell, the quarterbacks and receivers who have been going to seven-on-seven camps since the third grade sure as hell can, too. If you don’t have better players than the offense and try to play the way Chinander did, you’re cooked before the ball is even snapped. There’s a reason NU could never get off the field on third down under Chinander, even the years the D was good, and it wasn’t all because of poor luck.
I hate to criticize the coaches because anyone coaching at the P5 level has more football knowledge in, like, their little toe’s fingernail than I do in my entire brain, and there were understandable reasons for Chinander adopting this strategy, but at some point this has begun to feel like an archaic strategy that isn’t reasonable to run in 2022 unless you’ve got Alabama/Georgia-quality studs or a 20-year development pipeline like Iowa to pull from.
I’m not confident his replacement, Bill Busch, will be able to to “fix” the defense — I think that would probably require him magically finding a few competent nose tackles and 3-techniques and a starting corner — but I do expect him to at least get more creative and havoc-y. That could also backfire horribly by giving up big plays, but at least it’s not lining up the same way over and over again to get papercut to death for 40 minutes.
That being said, Chinander did try some stuff Saturday — it just mostly didn’t work because OU is much better than Nebraska. He upped the pressure rate a lot from the Georgia Southern game, which was already high from how tame it had been in the first two games. And the blitzing actually was pretty successful. He also played more man coverage and used more pressure packages than in any game so far this season.
He also displayed a couple new front looks in an attempt to get more creative on standard downs.
Nebraska’s typical four-man front has a nose tackle lined up shaded off one side of the center, with the defensive tackle lined up over the opposite guard. Saturday, they tried a shifted front, with the nose tackle head up on the center, the defensive tackle head up on the guard, and the EDGE player head up on the tackle, essentially creating a three defensive linemen on three offensive linemen to one side of the formation with only one defensive linemen to the other side:
Lining up head up on the offensive line to one side prevents it from being able to use slide protection away from the three-on-three side on passing plays, giving the defense a guarantee of the offense’s protection numbers to each side that it can isolate on blitzes. I saw NU run this some last season, but this if the first I’ve seen it this year.
NU also busted out a straight 3-3-5 Odd Front for the first time, with EDGE Garrett Nelson lined up as a true linebacker. On this play, he shifted to the defensive line just before the snap to create a four-man front after OU had set its protection:
Neither of these worked very well because OU is … much better than Nebraska in every way. The Sooners were running a ton of the Lane-Kiffin-at-Alabama-style RPOs, with two routes to each side and a run element for the quarterback to choose from. Pretty effective if you have a bunch of freak players to do it with!
Defensively, I’m fairly excited to see whatever changes Busch makes, which makes the next game, against Indiana, pretty intriguing! … OK, maybe not, but bear with me; I’m trying to find stuff to be excited about.
I think we can all use a break from Nebraska football after this start to the season, so there won’t be a new post next week on the bye. I’ll be back to recap the Indiana game the Friday after that! I’m also going to start using the season-averages for the posts from here on out, now that we have a big enough sample size, so we should have some good game-to-game comparisons from here on out.
Thanks, as always, for reading and GBR! Comments open below!
How easy would it be for the defense to implement more disguises similar to what Oklahoma did? Could it be accomplished in a bye week or just a normal week of preparation, or would it require an off-season or fall camp? One thing I noticed is that Nebraska rarely ever if at all disguises what they're going to do on defense presnap. My guess would be that's another reason why they've gotten ripped apart by RPO/Air Raid offenses the past two games in addition to just not having good enough personnel to run their defense like you elaborated on. Those types of offenses are predicated on quick reads and taking what the defense gives you, so I'd imagine it's much easier to run if you know exactly what the defense is going to give you presnap. Do you think that's something Nebraska needs to implement defensively more often for the rest of the season or are there some significant disadvantages that I might not know of? I would love to know your thoughts. Thanks!