What Can Dana Holgorsen Fix In Three Weeks?
What Can Dana Holgorsen Fix In Three Weeks?
Nebraska is handing its offense to a new coordinator from outside the building in Week 11. What does that mean for now and for the future?
Nebraska coach Matt Rhule dropped a bomb in his Monday presser, announcing newly hired analyst Dana Holgorsen would take over offensive coordinator and playcalling duties from embattled OC Marcus Satterfield. The Huskers’ offense finished 123rd in SP+ offensive rating in Satterfield’s first year and was at 98th this season at the time of the switch. An outsider walking off the street into a coordinator post in Week 11 is pretty wild,1 but it’s also hard to argue at this point from the overall results that making a change isn’t justified.
I was less critical of Satterfield’s isolated performance than I think most others — within the system the head coach was asking him to run, generally Satterfield’s concept designs were sound and called against the defensive looks you’d expect them to be, players were used to their strengths and not often asked to do jobs they were ill suited for, and the team was prepared in situational football. I feel, and still feel, the vast majority of the issues I saw on film were from inconsistent player execution — specifically from quarterback Dylan Raiola, which is to be expected in some sense when you start a true freshman — and that baseline-level quarterback play probably could have gotten what Satterfield was running to a league-average (or slightly worse) offense. No matter who the OC is, those execution issues aren’t going away overnight.
But more than anything that happens the rest of this season, I do think it’s good for the long-term health of this regime that Rhule is admitting the conservative offensive approach he initially adopted was misguided and that he’s doing it as early as possible.
One quote early in this staff’s tenure has always set off alarm bells for me. This was from Satterfield, in his introductory press conference, though he’s also basically speaking as an avatar of Rhule here:
“We are going to be a pro-style offense. We actually get into a huddle, which is kind of taboo these days. We are going to get into a huddle and call football plays. We are going to use tight ends, and we are going to use a fullback. We are going to run the football.”
After six years of Scott Frost’s power-spread offense, plenty of fans celebrated this quote as “a return to Nebraska normalcy.”2 And there’s a certain aesthetic appeal about the Huskers and running the ball and fullbacks. I get it, and I’m not immune to it, either.
But it’s also a sentiment and hubris that expressly went against everything we’ve learned about college football offense in the last decade.
These “pro-style” schemes — with their proscribed passing routes and grueling paces and courted heavy boxes — have more-or-less been run out of the sport in favor of spread attacks that prioritize optionality after the snap, easier reads on passing concepts that get playmakers the ball in space fast, and tempo that keeps defenses from being complex. We have 10+ years of data at this point showing that not embracing those ideas makes it harder to score points. There are certain benefits to any scheme, and players trump plays every time, but trying to run a complex, hyper-specific and hyper-proscribed offensive system in the era of “Glance RPOs and Mesh go brrrr” only leads to you having to execute better than your opponent to achieve the same result.3 Think back to the Indiana game: Watching Nebraska do multiple kill checks at the line to hit a 3-yard under-center run into a stacked box while Indiana was in 2x2 and 3x1 wide and letting its quarterback decide what every play was after the snap has felt like a death knell since it happened. The Model T blowing past Nebraska’s horse and buggy still slogging through the mud.
Pretty much every other coach we consider to be “good” has looked at that landscape since 2010s and said running these types of pro-style schemes isn’t the easiest way to win. Nick Saban ran a singleback, run-heavy offense at Alabama until 2014, when after a couple Hugh Freeze Ole Miss spread teams torched his top-10 defense he hired Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian, Mike Locksley, and Josh Gattis and started recruiting real quarterbacks and running RPOs. James Franklin was similarly pro-style, until his anemic offense almost got him fired and he hired Joe Moorhead. Jim Harbaugh’s “Power O out of the I” philosophy that worked early in the decade at Stanford was a dud against good teams at the start to his Michigan tenure, and he went out and poached Gattis and incorporated reads and some more sophisticated passing into his power-football philosophy. Luke Fickell got to Wisconsin, with its own run-the-ball history, and went out and hired a Veer-and-Shoot play-caller. Bret Bielema isn’t even running this stuff anymore. By my count, only a handful of regularly competitive Power 4 regimes still are: Georgia, Oregon State/Michigan State under Jonathan Smith, Iowa, Utah and Pittsburgh. One of those programs is a recruiting behemoth Nebraska can’t compete with. A second has had success but needed years to reach sustained effectiveness at OSU and looks like it will need the same grace at MSU. The other three are regularly among the most inefficient/made fun of offenses in the major conferences. The results and coaches are saying these schemes are just not the easiest or most dependable way to put points on the board at the college level in 2024.
But Matt Rhule arrived at Nebraska almost two years ago, surveyed that same landscape, and doubled down on them.4
Rhule seems predisposed to conservative offense from his time coming up through the ranks and at Temple, and I think Rhule coming from the NFL — where you actually do have to run a hyper-complex, siloed scheme to counter better, faster and more diverse defenses — also probably impacted his thinking. And his track record had earned him the benefit of the doubt to try things how he wanted to at first. The question was going to be how he’d respond if/when that offensive philosophy proved to be hurting his program.
If we can tell anything about this move at the moment, it’s an answer to that. I think the Holgorsen hire is a positive no matter what happens the next three games in that it’s the death of that earlier hubris from Rhule on how he wants to score those points — it’s a move to understanding the points are all that matter. You don’t get credit for doing things the “hard” or “noble” way; no one came back at the end of that Indiana game and gave Nebraska an extra touchdown because it was doing the complex run checks and IU wasn’t. One of those teams ran for 200 yards, and it wasn’t the team playing “real” football. Whether or not Holgorsen makes a meaningful difference in the rest of 2024, this willingness by Rhule to admit his approach was a mistake this early, to me, can only be a good thing.
But what about the next three games? I doubt Holgorsen will attempt to install the Air Raid during the regular season, and Rhule said as much in his presser. Holgorsen will probably try to add a few of “his” plays in each of the coming weeks, as most teams already install and practice a handful of new concepts for each game. A potential series of bowl practices would be an opportunity to more thoroughly overhaul things, should they get there.
Holgorsen, then, will be largely working with Nebraska’s current playbook and certainly its current personnel. Off some quick film and statistical study — a deeper dive will have to wait for the offseason — here are at least a few areas in NU’s current play and personnel arsenal where I feel Holgorsen could make an impact:
A Slimmed-Down Menu
The playbook the Huskers have operated from this year feels massive. They get to a lot of different concepts and they use a lot of different formations. I chart every passing concept Nebraska uses in non-garbage time, and here is where we’re at after the UCLA game:
That’s at least 35 different concepts they’ve used in some form this season. Again, good for an NFL team of professionals with years of experience, bad for a bunch of 18- to 21-year-olds who are being led by a teenage QB. The breadth of what NU has tried to run has made it feel a bit as if Nebraska is capable of running a lot of different plays but doing them all poorly; you wonder if the offense would be better served by getting really good at a smaller menu of options. Rhule lightly hinted at that during his presser:
“He can come in and say, ‘Hey, what are the things that we do well? Who are the guys that can make plays? And let’s figure out how to do it with those guys.’ That’s the big picture that I think he’s doing right now.”
That seems like one area Holgorsen can help with. This is from a Chris B. Brown profile on Holgersen’s 2012 West Virginia offense:
“West Virginia’s scheme is successful for many reasons, but it’s primarily a function of two elements: (1) It requires the players to master a limited number of concepts, which allows them to play without any hesitation, and (2) there’s an aggressiveness — in the form of both packaged plays and deep play-action passes — that puts maximum pressure on defenses.”
Point 1 would seem to really help this NU team, if they have the time left in the season to do it.
Better RPOs
Nebraska has heavily upped its run-pass option package this season, using RPOs on 17.6% of snaps so far in 2024, compared to just 6.9% last year. That’s still pretty low for a 2024 college offense, but they’re at least in the playbook.
The issue is the RPOs haven’t been very good. NU’s RPO plays have just a 40.4% success rate on the season, and a majority of their successful plays on the RPOs have been when they hand the ball to the back; NU’s success rate on plays where it throws the ball out to the “pass” element of the RPO has been just 30.3%. That 40.4% overall figure is 7 percentage points worse than Nebraska’s success rate on just true run calls. So on these RPO plays that are supposed to optimize the offense by getting the ball to where the defense is weakest, NU is worse than when it just runs the ball no matter how the defense responds. Wild!
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. Maybe he has specific drills or teaching points that can help Raiola make the correct reads on these plays — a consistent problem all year — or shore up the perimeter blocking — an even bigger consistent problem all year.
This is probably the specific play-calling element I’ll be watching most closely.
Mesh and Post-Wheel
Mesh is probably the most popular passing play in football now, but it was created by the Hal Mumme Air Raid system that Holgorsen came up in. It’s been a huge concept for Holgorsen at all of his stops. Here’s a coaching clinic he ran on it a few years ago:
Nebraska ran Mesh a lot under Frost but has rarely used it under Satterfield and Rhule. NU ran Mesh on just eight snaps last season, and we’ve seen just four uses of it in 2024. With Nebraska now having one of the premiere Mesh teachers in football, that’s about to go through the roof. It’s already in the playbook, and nearly every high school runs it at this point, so NU’s players should have base familiarity with it. But I imagine it’s about to be repped a lot in practice to Holgorsen’s liking and with his tweaks.
Another concept I saw a lot of in Holgorsen’s tape against single-high looks was Post-Wheel, with a switch release from the slot receiver on a downfield wheel route and a post coming from the outside. Post-Wheel was NU’s fourth most used passing concept in 2023 but has seen only 10 snaps in 2024. I think that concept — especially with NU’s speedier receivers in the slot — is also something that we could reasonably expect to increase under Holgorsen.
Jet Sweeps
The Jet Sweep “touch pass” variation out of the shotgun — where the ball is tossed up in the air as the sweep man runs by — is ubiquitous across all levels of football now, and it was created by an offensive guru named Bob Stitt at Division II Colorado School of Mines. Holgorsen, though, is the coach largely credited with bringing the touch pass to the FBS level in the early 2010s. He memorably sprung it on Clemson in a 2012 Orange Bowl game where West Virginia scored 70 points with Tavon Austin torching people on the sweeps:
The Jet Sweep touch passes have been one of Nebraska’s most efficient plays this season, with a 64.7% success rate. But they have just a 6% usage among Nebraska’s run concepts.5 Likewise, the End-Around plays — another thing Holgorsen runs a lot of — have an 83.3% success rate already for NU this year on less than 10 snaps. You can’t base you running game out of Jet Sweeps and End Arounds, but I’d expect to see a lot more of both after the switch — Holgerson brought this play up to the major college game, and NU has been good at them.
Using The Tiny Speedsters
Holgorsen has a prolific history with slot receivers — he was the inside receivers coach for Mike Leach when Leach was popularizing the Air Raid at Texas Tech — and especially small, very fast slot receivers.
Tyron Carrier went for 1,026 and 1,029 receiving yards in Holgorsen’s two seasons as Houston coordinator in 2008 and 2009; Stedman Bailey and Tavon Austin had a combined 2,465 yards in 2011 and 2,911 yards in 2012 in Holgorsen’s first two years as head coach at West Virginia; and Tank Dell went for 1,329 yards and 1,398 yards in consecutive seasons at Holgorsen’s last stop, Houston. If you’ve got a tiny, super fast guy, there’s maybe no one better at getting them the ball than who NU just hired.
That would seem to be a boon for Jacory Barney Jr. and Jaylen Lloyd, two diminutive guys who lack polish as receivers but can blaze down the field. Barney has seen an increasing share of the targets in recent weeks and done well, but Lloyd is averaging over 21 yards a catch and has gotten just 16 targets on the season. I think both are about to see their shares increase.
Lighter Boxes
One of the biggest issues with the offense is that teams have little fear of Nebraska’s ability to throw downfield or to the outside, so the NU running game has seen a high number of stacked boxes. Over 54% of Nebraska’s run plays or RPOs this season have been into a “heavy” defensive box count, with more defenders inside the tackle box than the offense has blockers. That number’s only increasing as the weeks go on, and NU doesn’t have a quarterback who’s a rushing threat to adjust the box counts.
Holgorsen’s general philosophy could help with that. In the Houston and West Virginia games I saw, he primarily operated in open formations, with all four eligibles detached from the offensive line wide, or in Y Wing looks, with one tight end attached. I saw few snaps of 12 personnel.
That’s probably a longer-term philosophy change for if he does become the new full-time OC, but, for now, we could see more wide spread looks and less tight ends in this short-term three-game stretch. NU is currently running 12 personnel on 23% of its snaps. Let’s see what the rate is vs. USC.
Getting The Ball Out
Another huge issue with NU’s attack in 2024 has been with Raiola just not throwing to open, first-read routes underneath. We’ve seen a lot of plays like this:
Nobody is probably better versed in quick-game passing than the Air Raid guys, and Holgorsen has worked with a ton of prolific QBs who have thrived running these underneath, fast concepts; he’s been the play-caller for 4,000-yard passers in Graham Harrell at Texas Tech, Brandon Weeden at Oklahoma State, Smith at West Virginia, and Clayton Tune at Houston. He was the quarterbacks coach for most of those guys, too. He’s generated lots of yardage and points out of quick game.
Holgorsen will hopefully be able to bring some drills or coaching points that can help Raiola get the ball out of his hands faster than what’s happening now. The Satterfield offense was trying to throw the ball down the field and asking Raiola to make more complex reads — quick game concepts have only composed about 24% of Nebraska’s passing offense in 2024 — but a priority on increasing the usage and better execution of the simpler passing stuff could take some pressure off the running game. In theory, these should be the easiest passing plays to run and teach and the most that could improve in this three-week stretch.
Tempo
Holgorsen isn’t one of the hyper-tempo Veer-and-Shoot guys, but plenty of his offenses have primarily operated out of no-huddle, and he seems to know how to pick up the pace when it’s useful. I can’t imagine Rhule is signing off on the offense running 85 plays a game and getting the defense cooked, but Nebraska could certainly stand to operate faster. It’s lightly dabbled in more tempo this year than in 2023, but its rate of huddling or subbing still remains at 90% of snaps. That’s a snail’s pace in modern football and letting defenses communicate with the sideline and get lined up in the designer stuff we’ve been seeing.
The NU no-huddle operation from the sideline is already in place and I doubt the staff wants to overhaul the mechanics of that in a game week, so Holgorsen would be working to refine it more than overhaul it. But we might see a faster tempo.
Also should be noted that Nebraska flirted with bringing Holgorsen in as an analyst in the offseason. So it isn’t totally new. I imagine there were discussions about the overall offensive philosophy when they were meeting in January and that he’s had a base familiarity with the playbook since that time.
Though, for whatever curdled promise of the Frost era or his offense, all of his teams finished above the national and Big Ten average in SP+ offensive rating. Nebraska under Satterfield/Rhule finished second-to-last in 2023 and is third from the bottom this year. If Nebraska’s defense in the last two years had been paired with any of Frost’s offenses we’d probably be talking about a pair of eight- or nine-win seasons.
And that’s to say nothing of the roster turnover the transfer portal era has brought. Everyone from here on out is going to be teaching three new starters their offensive scheme each offseason; can someone tell me if making them learn an NFL playbook in three months is a good idea?
I’ve always found it curious people were mad about the, “We’re going to make the Big Ten adjust to us,” quote but not the Satterfield/Rhule fullbacks/huddling one. Both coaches are essentially saying the same thing — “My offense and ideas are better than the prevailing trends of my peers” — yet one was a cudgel rolled out as a signifier of a failed coach’s mistakes and one was celebrated two months later because it was 1990s Huskers-coded. An interesting window into what the Nebraska fanbase punishes and what it doesn’t.
I count these as runs because they still function like hand-offs to a player, even if the ball is going on a “forward pass” and counted as such in the stat book.