REVISITED: What Did Dana Holgorsen *Actually* Change With Nebraska’s Offense?

A statistical analysis of NU’s offensive play-calling and efficacy after its surprise Week 11 OC switch

Luke Lindenmeyer converting a first down against Boston College. Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

In the four seasons I’ve done this newsletter, Nebraska has had four offensive coordinators/lead offensive designers. Scott Frost was solely in charge in 2021 but ceded responsibility to Mark Whipple for the 2022 season. Matt Rhule brought Marcus Satterfield with him to serve as OC for most of the past two years, but then Dana Holgorsen took over with three games left in 2024. If I believed in curses, I might start to think me writing this newsletter has magically doomed NU to a revolving door of OCs? Four in four years!

The Holgorsen move we are now experiencing is different than the other changes, however, in that we’ve actually had the chance to see him call plays at Nebraska. In the other takeovers, I was largely left watching film of other programs from past seasons and trying to decipher what might be applicable with NU’s personnel or in the Big Ten. Not here: We got four games (if you count the Pinstripe Bowl) of Holgorsen calling plays at Nebraska with its personnel in the teeth of a Big Ten schedule. While I’m certain that with a full offseason Holgersen will more fully overhaul Nebraska’s offense to fit his preferences and identity, I also think we saw enough clear new framework being set up in those four games that some elements will carry over moving forward.

On the bye week before Holgorsen took over I tried to speculate on what elements a new Air Raid-based OC might change in Nebraska’s offense:

My informed guesses (and they really were guesses; I was just looking at the general profile of NU’s offense to that point and trying to compare that to what I know of the Air Raid scheme) were that Holgorsen would:

• Slim down the passing concepts menu;

• Improve Nebraska’s efficacy at run-pass options;

• Run more Mesh and Post-Wheel concepts;

• Sustain the high usage of Jet Sweep plays;

• Generate lighter boxes through spread formations;

• Prioritize quick-game passing to get the ball out faster; and

• Up Nebraska’s tempo between snaps.

I want to go back and compare those to my actual charting data for the four games Holgorsen called (against USC, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Boston College in the bowl game) and see what areas he really did alter and how that affected Nebraska’s play. We all saw that he was largely operating off the same playbook as Satterfield, but there were also some definitive shifts in how Nebraska used that playbook and how much success it had with it. Let’s explore them:

More Efficiency On Runs And RPOs

It’s a little backward to think that bringing in a coordinator from a pass-heavy scheme would actually end up turning Nebraska into a hyper effective rushing team, but that’s largely what happened down the stretch of last year. Shifts Holgorsen made in the offense resulted in Nebraska running the ball slightly less but doing so much, much more effectively:

NU’s success rate (a metric I use to track efficiency, which can be explained here) on true rushing plays jumped up seven percentage points in the four Holgorsen games, a huge increase. It felt like it by the eye test, but the numbers back it up: Nebraska was much better at running the ball after the OC change.

Even more impressive was how much Nebraska improved on run-pass option concepts (often called RPOs). RPOs as an idea in the football discourse are overused to the point of being meaningless now, but they’re essentially plays that contain both a running and a passing element, with the quarterback able to choose whether to give the ball to the run or pass element based on the defense’s behavior. Nebraska was horrid on RPOs in the games Satterfield called. It had a success rate of just 40.4% of its RPO calls in those first nine games, seven percentage points worse than on its just pure designed runs. RPOs are increasing in usage across all levels of football because they are efficiency monsters, allowing you to “make the defense wrong” on every play by sending the ball to where the defensive structure is weakest. But Nebraska was so bad at running them in the first nine games that it was performing significantly better on the plays where it didn’t even try to use any of that optionality and just handed the ball off no matter what happened.

In my post explaining what I thought Holgorsen might change before his takeover, I wrote:

“The RPOs have felt like they were side-show stuff tacked on to the offense, Rhule and Satterfield begrudgingly adding a little bit of college-y stuff onto the pro-style attack they wanted to run. There didn’t seem to be much investment in them, and neither guy has a background in ever running RPO-heavy schemes. The results on that limited investment have spoken for themselves.

Holgorsen, though, has Day One RPO bona fides. His offense at Oklahoma State was one of the first to gain notoriety for using them, and RPOs fueled his attack at West Virginia that helped Geno Smith put up mind-bending stats and popularized them across the sport.

All of that is to say NU now has a guy on staff who really understands RPOs and can teach them. If NU’s coaches were previously minoring in RPOs, Holgorsen majors in them. He’ll have a better idea than anyone else on staff how to design them, how to teach players how to run them, and when and how to call them during games.”

I’m not in the building, so I can’t tell you exactly what changed, but NU’s performance on RPOs skyrocketed after Holgorsen took the reins. That 40.4% success rate shot up to 52.2%, more in-line with what you’d expect from Nebraska’s offensive profile and its (pretty efficient) rushing offense.

The main driver of this improvement in the RPOs was that the “pass element” of the plays just started being a lot more effective. In the Satterfield games, those RPO “pulls” (where the quarterback bails on the run element to throw the ball) had just a 30.3% success rate. Think about all those failed bubble screens out wide or the arrow routes to Thomas Fidone that got tackled for a loss in the early part of the season; those are the plays being charted here. But in the Holgorsen games, the success rate on those pulls improved to 46.7%, a 16 percentage point bump in production. NU just getting better on those throws out wide made a huge difference in the offense because it changed how defenses were able to play them …

Lighter Boxes

So, how did the run game get better?

The biggest thing Holgorsen did was get defenses to stop crowding Nebraska at the point of attack. In Satterfield’s nine games, Nebraska faced a defensive box (the area between the offensive tackles to five yards deep) with at least one more defender than it had blockers on 49% of its total snaps (aka “heavy boxes”). It faced “light boxes” — meaning at least one fewer defender than blockers — on 12% of its plays.

Holgorsen was able to lighten those fronts pretty significantly:

Holgorsen got the rate of heavy boxes down almost 9 full percentage points. An increased use of spread formations, a more successful quick passing game, and the improvement on those RPO throws all caused defenses to widen, forcing them to respect the space outside of the tackle box. Which meant fewer defenders bunched in tight to stop the run. Defenses in the final four games predominantly played Nebraska in “matching” or “standard” boxes, meaning an even or tied number of blockers to defenders. It’s much easier to run into those fronts than it is when you’re outnumbered before the snap.

It’s also worth noting that even this heavy box total for Holgorsen is still being inflated by the bowl game. With the field conditions at Yankee Stadium resembling a swamp and no one able to run, Boston College stacked the box heavily on Nebraska. Factoring out the bowl game, in the other three Holgorsen contests, Nebraska faced a heavy box on just 34.7% of its snaps, a 12 percentage point decrease in what it was facing with Satterfield.

A Quicker Passing Game

I’ve written about this a lot before so I’ll be brief: Nebraska under Satterfield was trying to run an offense that pounded the run and then hit deep, downfield, heavy protection passing shots when the defense came up with heavy boxes to stop the run. There was some other college football-type stuff tagged onto that ethos, but largely this was an offense that was trying to throw the ball vertically down the field and hopefully connect on a few big plays a game. It was a passing scheme with few quick, easy answers that instead prioritized low-percentage-but-big-payoff type of concepts. Whatever you want to say about the efficacy of that as a long-term strategy in the offensive environment of football in 2024, it worked fine against the bad defenses on Nebraska’s schedule early in the season. It also then undeniably dried up in Big Ten play against teams that could stop the run and were able to play sticky downfield coverage behind it and disguise their looks.

Holgorsen arrived, then, and started trying to put more easy answers into the passing game:

It wasn’t a total overhaul, but after Holgorsen took over, NU saw its rate of “quick-game” concepts — short passing concepts with simple reads where the quarterback gets the ball out immediately, often without taking a drop — rise from 24% to almost 34%, and it saw its rate of five- and seven-step concepts — those longer-developing downfield shot plays more likely to feature heavy protection — fall by four percentage points. Nebraska also got a lot better at running those quick-game passes, with the success rate jumping 10 percentage points in the Holgorsen games. Holgorsen also severely cut back on the amount of intentional boot- or roll-action plays NU was running, which a decent amount of those shot-type passes were coming off of.

Nebraska probably still ran an elevated level of designed shot plays in the Holgorsen games relative to the rest of college football, but toning it down a little let the passing offense not feel so boom or bust all the time. Anecdotally, it felt as if there were a lot more eight-yard completions to set up a third-and-2 instead of just a deep shot that went incomplete to set up a third-and-10. The numbers back that up.

This also resulted in better, more structured quarterback play: In Satterfield’s games, I charted quarterback decision making (largely a measure of how often Dylan Raiola was going to the correct spot with the ball within the structure of the play) at 60.1% of dropbacks. In Holgorsen’s four games, that figure rose to 73.7%. The easier answers in the offense made Raiola play better, too, and presented him fewer situations where he was having to decipher a complex downfield read.

A Consolidation of Pass Concepts

The other big change Holgorsen made to the passing attack beyond just getting the ball out fast more frequently was to slim down the menu of passing concepts Nebraska was running consistently:

Nebraska’s top four most used passing concepts under Satterfield had the following shares of Nebraska’s passing snaps: 9.5%, 7.9%, 6.7%, and 6.3%.

That same measure under Holgorsen was 12.4%. 10.7%, 10.1%, and 8.9%. Holgorsen only had six concepts with a 3.9% share of the passing offense or higher; Satterfield was using twelve.

The concepts Holgorsen gravitated to are not surprises: Spot/Snag, Double Slants, and Mesh are Air Raid playbook staples and became three of Nebraska’s most used plays immediately despite getting little run under Satterfield, whose two most used concepts were Yankee/Deep Crossers (imagine two deep routes crossing the field in the form of an X) and just straight downfield Vertical routes. NU got by largely in the Illinois game by just running four verticals and having Raiola pick the best matchup; Holgorsen instead gave him quicker passes, with Spot/Snag and Double Slants being quick game and Mesh being a three-step concept.