TENDENCIES: 2024 Full-Season Offense, Part II

Evaluating the pass and run game concepts of Nebraska's attack in 2024

Photo courtesy Nebraska Athletics.

This is the second and final part of my annual tendencies breakdown of the usage and effectiveness of the formational, operational, and play-calling elements of Nebraska’s offense, covering the 2024 season. Part 1 — which I’d encourage you to read first — and an explanation of how to interpret the charts can be found below:

This post will cover:

• Defensive Box Data;

• Run-Game Optionality;

• Run-Game Concepts;

• General Pass-Game Data;

• Pass-Game Protection;

• Pass-Game Situational Performance; and

• Quarterback Charting

Let’s get back to it:

Defensive Box Data

I wrote about it several times during the year, but the box data was the most confounding and surprising part of NU’s offense all season.

Teams stacked the line of scrimmage heavily against Nebraska in 2023, with little passing threat from NU’s quarterbacks to punish the strategy. But the idea/expectation in the preseason was that the arrival of superstar freshman QB Dylan Raiola would force defenses to respect the downfield pass a bit more and lighten the box up for the running game.

That didn’t really happen at all, and teams likely played more heavy boxes against Nebraska in 2024 than 2023. I charted the light/standard/heavy box qualifications slightly differently this year, so I don’t want to make a true 1:1 comparison between any of the 2023 and 2024 usage numbers, but they were at least close enough that we can definitively say the boxes didn’t really get any lighter. And Nebraska’s efficiency passing against heavy boxes actually got slightly worse in 2024, with a 34.9% success rate from the Jeff Sims/Heinrich Haarberg/Chubba Purdy crew over Raiola’s 33.3% success rate this year. While Raiola was clearly a much more advanced dropback passer in general than the three 2023 quarterbacks (reflected in how much better NU’s success rate passing against standard and light boxes got from 2023 to 2024), he did struggle to complete passes downfield this season, and both Haarberg and Purdy were able to hit some bombs at times in 2023. With Raiola not really punishing teams over the top, defenses had little incentive to not stack their resources in tight to the line of scrimmage. NU was just off target on several deep shots this year that likely would have backed defenses up, but when you’re not actually hitting the shots, DCs aren’t going to change. That deep passing has to be something that’s more of a threat in 2025 for Nebraska’s offense to get better.

One positive sign, though, is what happened in the final six games of the year. NU’s rate of facing heavy boxes went from 54.4% in the first six games to 37.5% in the final six, a much more manageable figure to run the ball against. There is some slight noise to that number, as Nebraska played Illinois and Purdue — two teams that run the Ryan Walters “five-down, plus-one” defense that leads to very high box counts — both in the season’s opening half. But even with that, Dana Holgorsen’s stint as offensive coordinator led to some definitively lighter box counts in the season’s final three games. ¹ I’d imagine Nebraska’s staff would still like these box counts to go down, but the move from the Marcus Satterfield super-condensed “49ers” style offense to the more spread approach from Holgorsen did have a positive effect.

Run-Game Optionality

Nebraska went from a read-heavy run game with dual-threats Sims and Haarberg mostly running the show in 2023 to one that used optionality considerably less with Raiola. The rate of runs that featured a read — with the quarterback evaluating just before or after the snap who should carry the ball — fell from about half of run plays to about a third. The drop was especially noticeable in the first half of the season, when Nebraska’s read rate was about 32% and it was relying heavily on just true predetermined runs. The rate went up slightly in the back half of the season as NU’s run game faced better defenses that weren’t quite so susceptible to being blunt force run over, but it still only rose to 41%.

How Nebraska’s optionality occurred also changed in 2024. Last season — with Sims and Haarberg at the helm — we largely saw true “option” run plays with the quarterback as a run threat, with QBs keeping the ball on 40.9% of all runs featuring a read. But with Raiola, that fell to just 7% for the season (and 3.4% in the first six games) as NU’s optionality instead became throwing bubble screens or slide/arrow routes off of run-pass options that don’t really have the QB as a ball carrier within the design of the play. NU’s rate of giving the ball to the dive player on runs featuring a read went from 48% of plays to 62%, and its rate of giving the ball to the outside option — which includes those bubble screens and slide routes — went from 9% to 31%. Nebraska (or Raiola) did get more willing to run the quarterback in the second half of the year, with the rate going to 9%. Raiola kept the ball on reads just twice in the first six games (two pulls on fourth down in consecutive games against Northern Iowa and Illinois) but would keep it eight times in the final six, including two keeps off triple option concepts in the Iowa game that got key conversions.

This is my charting on what types of run-pass options were attached to the runs. I didn’t keep this data in 2023 so there’s no comparison to last season, but we can see what was consistent and successful in 2024. Bubble routes, arrow/slide route (with the tight end or a receiver running into the flat), and slant routes were the most used RPOs throughout the year, each getting significant usage in both halves of the season.

There were a couple of differences in the final six games. One was that Nebraska pretty much totally eliminated glance-route RPOs from its offense — deeper post-route RPOs that typically evaluate a safety — in the second half of the season. Those comprised about 13% of Nebraska’s RPO usage in the first six games, but Raiola threw a bad pick on one in the Rutgers game, and NU didn’t run a single rep of them in any game after that. The second change we saw was that Nebraska cut out some of the bubble screens — routes where the No. 2 or No. 3 receiver works from the slot to the outside of the field — in the final six games to instead throw the ball out to wider screens to the No. 1 receiver. The usage of those wide screens rose to 11% in the second half of the season after not getting used at all in the first six games. That likely had to do with Nebraska’s inability to control some of those box players with their receiver blocking on the bubble screens; the solution became to just throw it further outside.

Run-Game Concepts

This is a big, long, boring list so here are the main takeaways:

• Nebraska cut way back on its usage of counter plays, especially in the second half of the season. Counter — a gap-scheme run that features two blockers pulling across the formation to the opposite side — was Nebraska’s most used run concept in both 2023 and during the Scott Frost era, and Nebraska was quite good at running Counter during that span. Though the success rate stayed about the same, NU, on tape, was just worse at running it this year and was generating less production on it and didn’t seem cohesive. Some groups of linemen are just better at running certain concepts; Nebraska’s group this year struggled with the mechanics of Counter. It fell to just 6.3% of all runs this season from 15.3% last season. In the final six games of the year, the Counter usage was just 3.0%. In Holgorsen’s three regular-season games as offensive coordinator, NU ran just two reps of Counter in 102 total run snaps. It certainly wasn’t a play he thought they were good at.

• Interior runs will always be a team’s most used concepts, but Nebraska really leaned into running in the A and B gaps in 2024. Over 60.7% of its runs this year were either Duo — a gap-scheme run right off the center with two double teams — or Inside Zone and Split Zone — two interior zone running plays. Those interior runs comprised 53.3% of NU’s run plays in the first six games and then went to 68.3% in the final six, meaning NU turned to more inside running as the year went on. Its two best run-blocking linemen on tape were guard Justin Evans and center Ben Scott, so it’s not surprising it chose to run behind those two.