Struggling To Move Forward
Nebraska's offense has regressed under the new staff. Here are some of the biggest factors why.
However you want to dice it up, Nebraska’s offense has been inept though the first five games of the 2023 season.
Do you care about predictive metrics? Nebraska’s attack is 87th nationally in SP+ offensive ranking, 97th in FEI offensive ranking, and 107th in FEI’s offensive efficiency.
Are you old-school, not don’t buying into that mumbo-jumbo? The Huskers are 111th in points per game. Iowa’s offense is a common college football punchline, but the Huskers are currently 25 spots below the Hawkeyes in PPG.
Are you an an eye-test person? Through 49 possessions of non-garbage-time football, NU has just five total touchdown drives that have extended beyond four plays (not relying on a huge explosive play to score), one of which required a fake field goal, and all which came against lower-division opponents Louisiana Tech and Northern Illinois. They’ve scored 11 total non-garbage-time touchdowns.
Nebraska’s offenses were generally been OK to average — and sometimes even good — under former coaches Mike Riley and Scott Frost; the defense was far more often the culprit in the six-year streak of missing bowl games. In new coach Matt Rhule’s first year, things have flipped: A disastrous Husker attack is wasting a pretty good effort by the Blackshirts. Things have, undeniably, taken a step back on offense.
It’s Year One, and I think most reasonable fans were at-best hoping for just a competent unit this season, so this isn’t meant as a hatchet job on the new staff. But I think there are some interesting tidbits in the data as for why moving forward feels so difficult right now:
Offensive Style Is Making It Harder To Turn Yards Into Points
Nebraska’s adjusted yards per play is 84th nationally. That is bad, but not so bad people are releasing stats about your school’s worst offensive starts in history. And a below average offense wasn’t totally unexpected, as NU bypassed experienced offensive talent in the offseason at need spots like receiver and offensive line to prioritize young, developmental talent. Eighty-fourth is about within the range where I expected the offense to be, had you asked me in July.
But its adjusted points per drive is almost 30 spots lower, at 112th. THAT is bad. Really bad.
This illustrates a disconnect between how Nebraska is moving the ball and how often it’s actually converting it into the meaningful currency (points on the scoreboard). Some of it is caused by variance (which means some positive regression is probably in order), some of it is caused by a freshman kicker missing three field goals (which you assume will get better), some of it is mistakes (a later section), and some of it is the style of offense Rhule has elected to play.
Rhule has been vocal about wanting to play high-efficiency football — as he did at Temple — with long, physical, clock-eating drives that value down-to-down consistency over big explosive plays. In his weekly presser Monday he criticized recent Husker teams that have tried win through scoring:
“We are a defensive football team. The defense has to learn we are a defensive football team. They’ve got to learn great defense while the offense kind of plays body blows. We don’t need the offense out there in four-wides dropping back 50 times a game; we did that the last couple of years, right, and everyone said ‘Hey, it doesn’t work here.' So why would the defense want us to keep still doing that?”
Needed caveats: There are upsides to playing Rhule’s more conservative way, plenty of teams succeed with that style, it worked for him at Temple, and he should get the full runway to try to make this work however he wants before judgment rolls in. But this is a hard way to play offensive football in 2023, and some of that is showing up in Nebraska’s lack of scoring so far.
When you’re less reliant on explosives, you have to trade that for efficiency, and efficiency means consistent execution. An explosive team just needs one play to go right to get to the end zone. An efficient team needs to string eight or nine or 10 good plays together in a row. That’s difficult for even an experienced and disciplined team; Nebraska is a pretty young squad under a first-year coach that’s still working on instilling an attention-to-detail that’s been missing from the program in recent years. You see a lot of Husker drives right now start with a few good plays, then someone blows a blocking assignment for a loss or gets a penalty, and now you’re off schedule, the drive is dead in the water, and you don’t get points. That’s part of how you end up 84th in yardage and 112th in points. The hope is that discipline and attention-to-detail comes and you can consistently execute down the field — as a team like Michigan did last week — and you’ll have an advantage moving forward. But Nebraska’s players just don’t have the practice equity or time spent right now to have meaningfully developed or instilled that mindset from the new staff.
The sport of college football has changed seismically over the last decade, even from Rhule’s last stint in college. Nick Saban very successfully played a run-heavy, bully-ball style for his first six years at Alabama, then watched Hugh Freeze’s Ole Miss rip apart his more-talented defense with monster gains by spreading the formation and moving at tempo. Saban hired Lane Kiffin the next year, recruited guys like Jalen Hurts and Tua Tagovailoa, and started running downfield RPOs. Similar shifts happened for Urban Meyer at Ohio State, Kirby Smart at Georgia, and Jim Harbaugh at Michigan. The most successful coaches in the country looked at the landscape of the sport and where it’s heading, and all decided to ditch their efficiency-based attacks to embrace the spread and an easier brand of football.
Rhule is choosing to do offense the harder way — and he has a right to do that and the trust to make that choice — but early on we’ve seen the disconnect of that when you have a young and undisciplined team.
Nothing Is Happening On First Down
So if you want to play efficiency-ball, that means solid gains on every down, right? On first down you get 4 yards, on second down you get 3 more, and then you convert a third-and-short. Chains move. A bit reductionist, but that’s the general gameplan.
It’s kinda hard to do that when you’re ineffective on over half your first downs. Through five games against mostly bad defenses, Nebraska’s current success rate on first down is 37.5%.
First down success rate is determined by getting half the yardage you need to convert, so on a standard first-and-10, that’s getting at least 5 yards. But even gains of 3 or 4 yards on first down are good to set up manageable second downs, right? But that’s not really happening, though, either, with only 52.8% of Nebraska’s standard-time first down plays gaining at least 3 yards. The Huskers have gained zero or 1 yard on 22.5% of their first down, and they’ve gone backwards on another 9% of their first downs. That means, combined, on about a third of their first downs, they’re losing yardage or gaining no meaningful positive yardage. They’ve also fumbled three times on a first down.
Being bad on first down alone shouldn't be a unit-killing thing in-and-of-itself, though, but when you combine it with the run-focused, efficiency-based method of play Rhule is pursuing, it becomes crippling. Lack of success on first down directly leads to longer second downs, which leads to having longer third downs, and the longer the third down, the more difficult it is to convert. Nebraska’s average distance it needs to convert on third down is 8.29 yards; I don’t have a national ranking for that, but I can assure you that’s not good. And it’s especially good when you’ve based your offensive identity on converting in short yardage.
The Dropback Passing Game Is A Disaster
So Nebraska’s lack of early down success is getting it backed up and creating longer third downs. That’s not an efficient way to play, but it’s less of a concern if you can pass the ball well and convert your money downs.
That … is decidedly not happening, either. The Huskers have a success rate of 28.6% through five games on all true dropback passes (non-RPOs), which falls to 27.5% when you factor out all play-action passes. On quick-game passes, which are short routes designed to be low-yardage, high-percentage completion adjusters where the quarterback doesn’t even take a drop, NU only has a success rate of 31.0%, and 26.7% of the quick-game drop backs have resulted in a havoc play for the defense. These are supposed to be layup passes, and a quarter of the time the defense is sending NU backwards. Three-step, play-action, or quick-game, there isn’t a single thing Nebraska is doing in the drop-back passing game that’s working right now.
Some of that was to be expected: This looked like a pretty buff receiving corps entering the year, the line has struggled in pass pro for what’s felt like a decade, and even the best-case scenario for Jeff Sims didn’t involve him winning in straight-up dropback situations. And a little was bad luck: One starting receiver in Zavier Betts left football before the season even started and another in Isaiah Garcia-Castenada suffered an early season-ending injury, and Sims’ injury and lack of progress forced the program to turn to a young quarterback with no experience in Heinrich Haarberg.
But this passing attack has been far worse than just a couple bad breaks, and little progress has been shown in key areas I thought we’d see marginal improvement. Multi-year starting tackles Bryce Benhart and Turner Corcoran have given up 19 combined pressures in five games, against four teams with non-existent pass rushes, and Corcoran is one of the worst-graded pass-blocking tackles in the Big Ten per Pro Football Focus. The weapons aren’t there, either, with tight ends Thomas Fidone and Nate Boerkircher and receiver Billy Kemp grading out as slightly above-average pass catchers but the rest of the weapons being in the red. Haarberg, too, lacks experience, has shown some processing struggles, and doesn’t look comfortable as a dropback passer. NU’s passing game is in a position where it can’t really trust the line in protection, it can’t trust the receivers to get open, and it can’t trust its quarterback to deliver the ball.
This gives Marcus Satterfield a limited menu to work with. The lack of passing-game talent or execution leaves him needing to call passing concepts that are out of the quarterback’s hand fast to protect the line, create rubs and picks to help the receivers get open, and have easy reads for his young quarterback. This shows up in NU’s most utilized concepts so far: Satterfield has called seven passing concepts 5% of the time this season, and five (Curl/Flat, Slant Flats, Stick, Y Cross, Flood) are either ultra-quick concepts or half-field reads commonly used on play-action. If that’s all your offense is, defensive coordinators are going to be teeing off.
The Stuff That Works Is Limited
Positives time: The run game has been a lot better than the pass game. NU’s pure rushing plays are successful about 45.8% of the time; most teams aim for about a 50% success rate on runs, but considering NU is utilizing pure runs at a super high usage rate (54.3%), that success rate for the Huskers on that much usage is genuinely pretty good. The run game has been especially effective on plays where quarterbacks have a read-option (48.9% success rate) and out of the I formation package (50.0%).
But really … that’s all that’s working. RPOs have only been marginally more successful than the passing game, and NU isn’t running many of them. And Satterfield’s already turned the QB run and I formation dials up pretty high: Nebraska is reading 34.5% of its runs, and the I formation package is being used on almost 15% of the Huskers’ total snaps. I don’t know if you could really make those bigger parts of the offense than they really are. Satterfield’s in a tough spot: He’s using what works as much as he reasonably can, and without the passing or RPO games getting better, his play-calling menu is going to continue to be limited.
Unforced Errors
I don’t really need any advanced stats for this one: Nebraska has given the ball away 10 times, 115th in the nation. It’s averaging 9.5 havoc plays allowed on offense, meaning about a fifth of its non-garbage-time offensive snaps per game are resulting in a tackle-for-loss, pass defensed, or fumble. It’s averaging an additional 5.6 penalties per game, a majority of which have been pre-snap procedural errors. This offensive philosophy is built on moving forward, and the Huskers are moving backward at one of the highest rates in the nation.
Yards Per Play measures how many non-penalty yards NU gained on a possession divided by its non-penalty snaps, a measure of its efficiency. Success Rate measures how often an NU play gained 50% or more of the yards it needed on a first down, 70% or more of the yards it needed on second down, or 100% or more of the yards it needed on third or fourth down. An Explosive Play is any designed run that gains more than 12 yards and any designed pass that gains more than 16 yards. A Havoc Play Allowed is any tackle for loss, sack, fumble, interception, pass break-up or batted ball NU allows.