What is Nebraska's Offensive Identity?
The Huskers' offense has not delivered as needed so far under Scott Frost. Let's look at what they're trying to do as we head into the 2021 season, and how it can get better
Remember when Scott Frost first got hired at Nebraska? Remember the promise of the hyper-speed, explosive offensive system that spread defenses from sideline-to-sideline and was equally as comfortable running for 400 yards as it was throwing for 400? Remember “Oregon Speed and Husker Power”? Remember the offense that did THIS to Wisconsin?
Three seasons into Frost’s return, it’s admittedly hard to find many traces of that promised identity or excitement. In 2018, 2019, and 2020, Nebraska has respectively ranked 42nd, 41st, and 35th in Offensive SP+ and 64th, 89th, and 86th in offensive points per drive — pace-adjusted stats that are more indicative of the performance of teams that operate at a fast tempo. Those rankings are underwhelming to bad for a Power 5 team, and they become especially glaring considering a lot of the the Nebraska program’s overall identity and plan to win football games — the aggressive defense that will accept giving up lots of yards or points if it gets a few turnovers, the hyper-speed, as-many-reps-as-possible practice routines, the roster construction and heavy player rotation — are dependent on an offense that’s scoring in bunches. To win football games the way Scott Frost plans, Nebraska needs to score a LOT of points, and so far it just hasn’t.
Some of the lack of success is attributable to the lack of inherited talent and the competition: NU has decidedly NOT had the horses it needs at the skill positions or the lines the last couple of years, and as tight end Austin Allen said at Big Ten media days at the end of July, some of the stuff that worked on your UConns and South Floridas in the American Conference is not going to work on the uber-disciplined and physical defenses of the Big Ten. By all accounts this offseason, the talent level and depth on the line and at receiver is greatly improved and the coaches have done some reckoning with how they can win in the Big Ten. And that may fix things! But still, the choruses that rose up across the state and on message boards on Saturdays last year — “WHAT IS OUR OFFENSIVE IDENTITY????”, “WHAT DO WE DO WELL???”, and “WILL I EVER GET TO RELEASE THIS BALLOON???” — are questions I think are still worth examining before we enter a new season.
To hopefully get some answers to those questions, I charted and broke down the Iowa, Purdue, and Rutgers games — three late-season contests after Adrian Martinez took back the starting quarterback job mostly for good and it seemed as if the Nebraska coaches settled into a consistent plan and set rotation of players. Below are links to PDFs of the spreadsheets of my breakdowns, and below that are some general observations of where the offense stands as we get ready for the 2021 season.
Iowa Game Breakdown Sheet: Google Sheet Link Here
Purdue Game Breakdown Sheet: Google Sheet Link Here
Rutgers Game Breakdown Sheet: Google Sheet Link Here
Why Not Build The Whole Plane Out of Tight Ends??
Nebraska was playing with multiple tight ends on the field for the majority of its snaps down the stretch last season. Against Iowa, Purdue and Rutgers, NU was in 12 personnel (1 back, 2 tight ends = 12 personnel) on 63 PERCENT of its non-kneeldown offensive snaps. Against Purdue, 49 of those 70 plays featured two tight ends. And that’s counting two rotation players in Chris Hickman — who moved to receiver briefly last year before moving back to tight end this offseason — and Levi Falck — often confused by broadcasters as a tight end — as wide receivers.
That two of Allen, Travis Vokolek, and the now-graduated Jack Stoll were on the field for nearly three-quarters of the team’s snaps is pretty wild. That would be considered extremely heavy tight end usage for a pro-style team like Wisconsin or Iowa, let alone for the spread-out modern offenses Frost is known for. The two NFL teams that used multiple tight end at the highest rate, Cleveland and Tennessee — both traditional pro-style, I-formation offenses — used multiple tight ends on 48 percent of their snaps last season. Nebraska was 15 percentage points higher than each of them in tight end usage. And most of the Huskers double tight use was not your typical two-tight end formations; it was Frost’s typical spread/gun formations WITH TIGHT ENDS PLAYING THE ROLES OF RECEIVERS.
Why was this happening? It’s tough to tell without more information from the coaches, but some good guesses are that with the lack of both talent and experience at wide receiver, coaches thought shoring up the perimeter blocking and getting Allen and Vokolek — probably two of the team’s better pound-for-pound skill players — on the field as much as possible was in the offense’s best interest. That’s an understandable move, but it comes with a tradeoff of having less athleticism outside for big passing plays down the field. That showed up last year for Nebraska; NU THREW DEEP ON JUST 12.2 PERCENT OF ITS PASSING PLAYS last year, according to Pro Football Focus, which ranked 115th in the country. With some expected improvements at receiver, especially in the bigger (and hopefully better-blocking) Omar Manning and Samori Toure, it will be interesting to see if 2020’s heavy tight end usage was a stopgap solution to a temporary problem, or if it’s a strategy the coaches want to continue to employ in the more rugged Big 10.
A Million Different Looks
As the breakdown sheets show, Nebraska utilized a ton of formations and concepts in 2020. It was throwing a ton of different looks at defenses.
Every team has its handful of bread-and butter looks it gives to a defense week-to-week, and NU was no different. But when the gameplan deviated from the norm, it REALLY deviated from the norm. Against Bob Diaco’s Sure-I’ll-Give-The-Offense-A-Free-Gap-On-Every-Play Purdue defense, Nebraska utilized several different unbalanced quads looks on 14 of its 70 non-kneeldown offensive plays — including one with two quarterbacks — and ran four total unbalanced plays in the Iowa and Rutgers games. Against Rutgers, they used a nice, effective empty stack with motion for their running back into the backfield to get into their running game, something they didn’t use in any of the previous games. Formationally, while they were predominantly in the gun, they also flashed some pistol and under center looks that didn’t really fit with the rest of their core identity.
The run game was incredibly diverse. Most teams have a few concepts they hammer, but in the three games I broke down Nebraska did basically everything: inside and outside zone, split zone, read options off those zone plays, traditional power concepts, counters, jet sweeps, triple option, midline, speed option, bash, pin-and-pull sweeps, draws, toss — almost all of which had some sort of RPO or tag element also attached and a lot of which were also folded into the QB run game. The one area where things stayed pretty predictable or conventional from week-to-week was the passing game. Frost had his concepts he loved — mesh, smash, clearout drags, switch routes, and wheels — and it didn’t deviate much week-to-week.
Considering all this, it’s becoming more understandable why younger players might struggle to get on the field; this is an incredibly diverse and complex offense.
Pass Pro-dictable
Nebraska was not really interested in keeping bodies in to protect. Per PFF, the Huskers were SEVENTH NATIONALLY in use of five-man protections — that’s the offensive line pass blocking only, with no backs or tight ends staying in to help — using it on 80 percent of their passing plays. That season-long trend played out in the end-of-season games I watched, too; Nebraska ran five-man protections on 34 of its 42 non-RPO or non-screen passing plays against Purdue and Iowa.
There are some pretty understandable reasons for 2020 Nebraska to heavily use five-man protections (also often just called “man protections”). If your receivers aren’t capable of winning much one-on-one, you’re going to need to be more reliant on scheming them open. Five-man protections let you get all five eligible receivers out in routes, providing you more options to be creative in play design or more checkdowns for your quarterback. And man protections are especially easy to use when you have an extremely athletic quarterback like Martinez. His mobility and ability to make rushers miss allows you to put him some bad situations in the interest of giving your passing game more options. You’d ideally like to never put your quarterback in harms way, but in a football-as-a-game-of-attrition-and-tradeoffs sense, there are worse bets than occasionally asking Martinez to get out of some tricky situations.
But the reliance on the five-man protections also ties into the lack of downfield passing plays. If you want to take “shot plays,” you’ve got to be able to protect them — usually by keeping backs and tight ends in to block. Doing that also means trusting your fewer eligible receivers to get separation down the field. Seeing what protections NU runs in 2021 — and how they’re influenced by the receiver play — will be another key thing to watch as we enter 2021.
This Offense Is Really Not Far From The Triple Option
The option holds a special place in Nebraska’s history and has a certain sentimental status with fans. But it also provided some actual schematic advantages for NU in the 80s and 90s — doing something “different” from the increasingly pro-style and pass-oriented offenses of their more-talented elite contemporaries of that time evened the playing field for Nebraska. The option still used today as a shorthand reference for programs that can’t find themselves at a resource or talent disadvantage.
Likely for a lot of those same reasons, this staff has heavily embraced Nebraska’s option roots, though not necessarily in the same formations or ways Husker fans are seeing. Though the “option out of the shotgun” has been around for a long time now, and Frost is partially responsible for its mass popularization while at Oregon, he’s cranked that dial up to 100 since taking the Nebraska job. Last year, per PFF, NU RANKED 26TH NATIONALLY IN NUMBER OF PLAYS WITH AN OPTION ELEMENT and eighth nationally in plays where a quarterback runs. And beyond just the standard read-option run plays out of the shotgun, RPOs (“Run-Pass Options,” where the quarterback has the option to run or pass) can be a form of triple option football: The quarterback has the three options of handing off on an inside zone, attacking the edge with his legs, or swinging the ball out to a receiver on a bubble screen, for example. Take Martinez’s long touchdown run against Rutgers.
This is essentially a triple option play:
Here, the quarterback can:
Hand the ball off to the dive man if the end defender on the line of scrimmage (the “Dive Read” or “First Read”) stays wide;
Keep it himself if the Dive Read crashes down to take away the dive and the next-widest player outside the tackle (the “Pitch Read” or “Second Read”) runs with the arrow route from the tight end; OR
Throw to the arrow route if the Pitch Read attacks the quarterback.
Here, the Dive Read crashes down on Wandale Robinson, so Martinez pulls. His eyes then go to the Pitch Read to determine if he’s keeping or throwing the arrow route to Allen.
The Pitch Read commits to the arrow route, so Martinez turns upfield for a big gain and a touchdown.
So while it’s not out of the flexbone or I-formation that Husker fans might be used to, plays such as this are the modern philosophical heir to the triple-option concepts NU won with in the 1990s. Nebraska ran these “triple-option RPOs” on 16.8 percent of its plays in the Iowa, Purdue, and Rutgers games.
While a lot of these decisions make sense to me, embracing an offense like this comes with some downsides. Mastering these option/single-wing concepts well-enough for them to be effective requires a ton of practice time, nearly all of it. With that much practice investment required, you don’t have time to rep much else or have other answers if a team CAN stop those option concepts. You don’t have an off-speed pitch to turn to, essentially; you’re locked in to the option. It’s a system that gives you a high floor, but by its own nature, caps your ceiling. And I do think it’s fair to question if this staff might be “trying to do too much” with the an option approach combined with the previously discussed diversity of running concepts and formations Nebraska utilizing.
To be fair, even with the downsides, I don’t think this is a bad approach for Nebraska. If you can get that high floor from your offensive system and inject it with the top-20ish recruiting that a place like Nebraska should be able to consistently get, that’s probably going to be a pretty winning blueprint. Lots of excellent teams have run similar systems before; for some analogues, think of the service academies, K-State under Bill Snyder, or even the early Urban Meyer OSU days with Braxton Miller. It just might not be the system we all expected when Frost was hired.
PROGRAMMING NOTES
Thanks for reading the initial post! If you didn’t read the intro post, head over to the Archive section from the menu at the top of this page to read a little more about the newsletter and what I hope to provide with it. The general plan once the season starts is to post a breakdown of Nebraska’s previous game (available to everyone), a preview of the next week’s opponent (available only to subscriber, and other posts as I see fit. I’ve got a few more posts locked-and-loaded before the season starts, including one later this week breaking down five of NU’s most popular concepts.
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