The Newsletter's Plan For 2022

It's almost time for another horrifying, sicko Husker campaign

Courtesy Scott Bruhn/Nebraska Communications

When this hits your inbox there will be 53 and a half hours until the Huskers’ first game of the 2022 season, against Northwestern in Ireland. Personally, I’m feeling that mix of major excitement and major anxiety I do before any Nebraska season — but with that anxiety knob cranked ALL THE WAY UP. There are more scary and unanswered questions than usual before a season opener: Was the improved play last year real, or were the close-game losses circumstantial? Can this transfer-heavy group gel enough to play to their talent right away against a conference team? Will Scott Frost save his job or does the program have to start over again? Do we have an offensive tackle who can pass pro? Has this football program been cursed by a vengeful god to lose every game by one score? Did Adidas make absolutely terrible team gear and coaches polos for like the ninth straight season? Who knows!

But before the games get going, I just wanted to give a quick update on my plans for the newsletter for the upcoming season and what you can expect to be receiving in your inbox.

First off, thank you for subscribing. The newsletter is just a little over a year old, and writing it has been very rewarding for me and I hope insightful for you. I started this project because I felt as if there were a hole in the Husker media landscape for some more serious/evidence-based scheme and analytics discussion and to combat some of the more hot take-y and troll-y elements that pop up from media and fans in a season — and also just to have fun and get to understand my favorite team more. I think was able to accomplish at least some of the first part — I’m still learning about some of this stuff myself and don’t pretend to be an expert, but I do think I found some insights — and definitely accomplished the second. But overall I still appreciate all of you who let some random person flood your inbox with Husker talk.

Second, the newsletter has some NEW DIGS:

I dropped some cash on having a very nice graphic designer from Canada make a new banner/logo so that you don’t have to stare at that terrible Word-doc-screenshot monstrosity I had originally used. The goal was to replicate the CRIMINALLY UNDERUSED script font — a personal favorite of mine in the NU graphics catalog, along with the psycho ’90s Herbie and the Blackshirt logos.

Third, the content for the newsletter is going to change a bit this season. The biggest thing: I am no longer going to do the opponent previews before the games. I rarely had time to watch more than one of the upcoming team’s games beforehand and didn’t feel like I was actually seeing enough film to deliver you anything worthwhile. I didn’t particularly like how those were coming out and they felt half-baked to me. I’d love to have the time to do those, but I do have a day job and outside life and I feel I’ll deliver you something more interesting and valuable by focusing my time on breaking down Nebraska’s games in more detail.

I’m also going to slightly tweak what the game recaps cover. I want to focus more on trying to categorize and evaluate what concepts NU is actually running each game and compare their usage to season-long trends. I’m also going to play around with tracking success rate this year, a stat I’ll explain below. Doing this will, I think, better help us be able to tell what plays and concepts Nebraska ran, how often they ran them in a specific game, and how successful they were. Here’s some more detail on what it will look like:

GAME RECAPS

The stats sections at the beginning will remain largely unchanged. For each of the offense and defense, I will post the GAME CHART (the spreadsheet I use to track all the individual plays), YARDS PER PLAY (total yards gained or allowed divided by total number of plays faced; a good measure of down-by-down success adjusted for pace), POINTS PER DRIVE (the total points scored or allowed divided by the number of drives faced; a good measure of overall unit success adjusted for pace), EXPLOSIVE PLAYS (total number of passes of 16 or more yards and runs of 12 or more yards earned or allowed), and HAVOC PLAYS (total number of tackles for loss [including sacks], pass breakups, interceptions, and forced fumbles allowed or earned) and compare them to NU season averages and national averages, as well as a look at how they rose or fell. Examples from last year’s Ohio State game recap are below:

But I’m also going to introduce a stat I didn’t use last year called “SUCCESS RATE.” Success rate, simply, is an efficiency measure that adds in the context of down-by-down success for the offense and defense. It’s defined like this: A play is deemed “successful” for an offense if it gains:

• at least 50% of the yards needed to move the chains on first down;

• at least 70% of the yards to gain on second down; and

• at least 100% of the yards to gain on third or fourth down.

(The inverse of these are true to measure defensive success rate; did you prevent the offense from gaining those x percentages on that x down?)

The total success rate for the offense or defense will then be the number of plays they were “successful” divided by the total number of plays faced. I’ll also apply success rate to individualized stats, which I’ll explain later. Success rate is a useful stat because it tells you how often the offense or defense was actually accomplishing its goal on a given play. For example: An 8-yard run looks great for an offense as a raw data point on the breakdown sheet, but if it came on 3rd-and-18 it was actually a pretty useless play. Whereas a 2-yard run is looks pretty meh, but if it converted a 3rd-and-1 it was a key event. This, I think, adds a piece of evaluation that wasn’t being captured by just the raw yards per play. If you want a more detailed example/explanation of success rate, you can find it here.

For the offensive section, I will also continue tracking tempo usage, personnel groups, formations, and motion usage. The big change for this section will be that I plan to do some more detailed tracking of plays and concepts in the games and how successful they were. An example of this for the running game that it may look like is this:

I’ll also have a similar section examining passing concepts (though my view of pass concepts is often limited thanks to the TV broadcast camera angle). Doing this will help us see what concepts NU ran more often than usual against certain opponents, as well as what worked and what didn’t.

On defense, I’ll keep tracking personnel, fronts, box counts, safety shells, pass rush and coverage as before, just with the success rate for each added:

I also will continue to provide commentary on these numbers or point out anything interesting I see, as well as provide explainers or the famous “A COOL PLAY” section as warranted, though probably not every week. I think digging into the success rate specifics will actually provide you some useful info on what the Huskers are running and how effective it actually is. Last season, I felt myself wanting information like this so that I could actually examine NU’s strengths and weaknesses based on something tangible, so here we are. I realize this is all some BIG-TIME NERD STUFF, but, hey, it’s what I’m interested in. The commentary and analysis isn’t going away; I just felt like adding this part better accomplishes my goals for this.

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I’d love feedback on whether you’re down with these changes or on what you’d like to see from the newsletter, so I’ve opened this post up for comments/questions.

I don’t have much to preseason stuff to write about or examine until I can actually see NU play meaningful football snaps, but I will have a short post dropping tomorrow with a few things I’ll be watching for in the opener from a scheme perspective. Otherwise … it’s football time.