TENDENCIES: 2024 First-Half Offense

A big-picture view of what Nebraska's offense has run in the first six games of the season and how effective it's been

Dylan Raiola’s arrival has keyed a more downfield-based passing attack. Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

Bye weeks are times when most football teams will do a thorough “self scout,” a deep examination of how their squad has played, through both film and data. With so much of each game week spent on prepping for an opponent, there’s little time to reflect on what your own team is doing. The bye offers a chance to step back and take a big-picture look at yourself.

Coaches will take on the mantle of approaching their own team’s profile like an opposing staff would when preparing for a game, looking for both strengths they should be leveraging more often and weaknesses other teams are trying to exploit. A lot of that work happens in the film room: Do we need to tweak how we run Counter? Do we have a tell in our secondary’s alignment that’s allowing opponents to know when we’re about to run Cover 2? Things like that. But with advanced stats playing an increasingly important role in the sport, that’s factoring in more and more now, too. 

I like to do a similar big-picture look at the bye week;¹ I think it’s a useful exercise to examine an overall picture of where each Nebraska team is at, how it’s operating, and how much success it’s having. I chart dozens of elements on both offense and defense from each game, from personnel usage, to alignment, to play concepts. I also chart how often those elements are “successful” under success rate, a common efficiency metric. I collate all that data each week in a massive Google Sheet, and it spits out an overview of, essentially, how often that element is being used and how often it’s working. I also like to compare that data to past seasons, so that we can see what’s changed, in both the operation and efficiency.

That’s what this post will dig into. This iteration will focus on the offense; the same exercise for the defense came out earlier this week:

I’ll also do this same thing for the offense and defense at the end of the year, so that we can see what changed in the second half of the season. 

As a brief explainer, it looks like this:

This is just one example from the defense post. The first two columns on the left in black and grey are the data from last season, with the black the usage rate (how often Nebraska is using said element) and the grey the success rate (how often said element is working). The two columns on the right in red and lighter red are the data from this year, with the dark red the usage rate and the lighter red the success rate. So, to be specific for the graphic above, the black column tells you how often NU used each type of rush in 2023, the gray column tells you how effective each type of rush was in 2023, the red column tells you how often NU used each type of rush this season, and the light-red column tells you how effective each type of rush has been this season.

I’ve broken it out into several sections for us to examine for the offense:

• General Performance

• Alignment/Formation

• Personnel

• Pre-Snap Operation

• Play Type/Distribution

• General Run Game Data

• Run Game Concepts

• RPO Concepts

• General Passing Game Data

• Situational Passing Game Data

• Protection

• Passing Game Concepts

Let’s get started:

General Performance

After one of the worst offensive performances in the nation — and in the program’s history — last season, the statistical ratings models would say Nebraska’s offense has improved a lot, to just … fine? FEI and FPI rate the Husker attack as average or slightly below it for a Power 4 team, while SP+ remains much lower — though even that represents a 40-spot improvement. Sometimes going from unmitigated disaster to regular bad/mid is a win, too. I think that’s basically what’s happened here.

Probably the most impressive improvement in this profile is how often the group has stopped shooting itself in the foot. NU has cut its rate of allowing “havoc” plays — any tackle for loss, sack, pass deflection, pass breakup, interception, or fumble — in half, dropping it to a (pretty good) 7%. Nebraska was starting from an extremely havoc-y spot, but dropping it that much is not easy to do, especially with a true freshman quarterback. That was a clear point of emphasis this offseason that’s shown real fruit.

The rest of the profile is mostly mediocre results that still represent solid improvement. The overall success rate remains below average but is still 9 percentage points better than 2023. The adjusted yards per play and points per drive are just outside the top 50 but also improved by over 50 spots each. The average third down is still above 6.5 yards but is over a full yard improved. NU is more efficient on all three downs, and explosive plays are up, too.

Ultimately, I think you probably have to play better offense than this to win something real in 2024 college football. But, considering the starting point enter this year, it’s great progress.

Alignment/Formation

A few things really stand out here. 

First is the shift away from being a heavy trips formation team to a near dead-even split between doubles formations and trips formations. NU spent almost two-thirds of its snaps in trips last season, but now is in a 50-50 spot. Some of that could be situational, stemming from specific matchups Nebraska has played so far, but some of that could be NU trying to run a more balanced, 2x2 passing attack with split-field concepts. Some quarterbacks also just prefer to be in doubles, as it helps them see the field and identify where blitzes are coming from.

NU also has seen a huge jump in “condensed” formations. Those are alignments in which the wide receivers are positioned tight to the frame of the formation, in close with the offensive line. NU has increased its usage of condensed formations almost 17 percentage points, and was starting from a pretty decently high 21% usage. Condensed formations are beneficial in the running game at giving you more blockers and in the passing game at both creating traffic in the middle of the field and also springing people free on deep crossing routes. Condensed formations are very in-vogue in the NFL right now and are a staple of “Shanahan/McVay” offenses that are being run by a lot of the league. The “49ers offense” was one of the Nebraska staff’s comparison for the attack it wanted to run in the offseason, and it has embraced this element, at least. More on that later.

The final thing of note here is how little specialized looks this offense has gotten to so far. NU has played just two total snaps of empty alignment — the quarterback alone in the backfield with no running back next to them — in the first six games, something it ran on about two snaps per game last season. It hadn’t run any snaps of extra offensive linemen until the Rutgers game, and its only reps in two-back formations have been out of the regular I-formation or an I-form look out of the pistol. Nebraska’s run a couple reps of Wildcat with Heinrich Haarberg, but neither has worked. It’s been a pretty unexotic start.

Personnel

The personnel has also been very generic/siloed, too. NU has essentially just operated out of 11 personnel (one back and one tight end) and 12 personnel (one back and two tight ends), then occasionally brought in the I-formation personnels (22, 22, and 23, all indicating two backs) in short yardage.

I thought we’d see an increase in 11 personnel from last season with Dylan Raiola in the fold, as I felt this would drift a bit more toward a spread attack. That did happen. But I didn’t expect Nebraska to not use any 13 personnel (one back and three tight ends), and I didn’t expect the I-formation/two-back personnels to fall off so much. Those formations were over 10% of Nebraska’s offense last season and are now around 5%.

Pre-Snap Operation

Two changes here have been in a slight increase in tempo and pre-snap motion. 

Nebraska is still operating at a pretty slow pace, with a 79% rate of plays without tempo — where the offense substiutes or full huddles — but there has been more willingness to operate at a slower, “check with me” no-huddle pace, with that rate rising from 6.7% to 15.6%. That’s not blinding speed, by any means, but last year NU operated at tempo exclusively in end-of-half or end-of-game situations. So that the staff is more willing to do it now in standard situations is a little promising and a sign it’s being used as a situational weapon.

The motion rate has also gone up about 7 percentage points from last season. With so many new players in the lineup for the offense in 2023, the staff likely was forced to keep the pre-snap operation as simple as possible. With a more stable environment and consistent players on the field, we’ve seen that rate go back up to about 40% of snaps. 

Play Type/Distribution

Not shocking to anyone watching the games, but, in general, this has just become a pass-centric offense in the first half of the 2024 season. Whereas NU was utilizing designed runs on 54% of its snaps last season, that rate has fallen to 38% in 2024, with significant rises in the rates of both true dropback passes and run-pass option plays (RPOs) and passes on first downs. 

A little surprising, to me, is that true runs have still been Nebraska’s most efficient play. They lead the two other main play types in success rate by at least a few percentage points, and a 47.7% success rate on your true runs is not bad at all. Nebraska’s running game efficiency (horizontal axis) has been above average nationally, and that’s without much of a threat on the ground from its quarterback:

That was a bit of an interesting find as I did this, as a decent chunk of the bye week narrative from both fans and Matt Rhule himself seemed to be about fixing the running game. While there have been a dearth of big runs (vertical axis, pretty yikes), and I think the backs have definitely left some yards on the field, I think the running game has been efficient — as supported by these numbers — and executed well on film, so I think this isn’t as big of a deal as the scuttlebut seems to be making it. I think the big runs will get unstuck in the second half, even against a tougher defensive schedule.

A couple things in the formational run/pass splits were of note. First, NU has skewed very run-heavy under center, with a run on almost 80% of its plays. The success rates for the play types remain in line with each other, but I think that will be less true in the second half if they continue to be so predictable; teams will just start stacking the box any time Nebraska is under center.