Long time lurker here, first time post. So, hey y'all.
Great post, ***. You always having really insightful stuff.
It's interesting that you identified this play as a bright spot. This play stood out to me too, but more as an encapsulation of my frustration's with Frost's offensive philosophies. I actually turned the game off shortly after seeing it.
The core of the play is pretty simple: an inside-zone/glance route RPO. This is the bread and butter of a huge swath of college teams. It does have a differentiating/innovative element but, like the rest of Frost's bells and whistles, the premise of the innovation essentially boils down to "use speed to get to the edge in space" (here an RB getting to the edge on a DB). The same theory undergirds all Frost's wide zone handoffs, jet sweeps, WR flares, and the shallow routes in the flats.
This play worked here, and I'm sure Frost and Lubick can massage formations and motions to isolate the wrong defender in space once or twice a game, and pop it for a few nice gains. However, a P5 defense will generally shut that down for little gain, and occasionally dump it for a loss when the DL is gapping lanes in an unexpected way.
More often than not, this sort of thing would work at UCF because they had access to faster skill players vis-a-vis most of the teams in their league. Those sorts of plays didn't work at all against Auburn in the Peach Bowl. Fortunately for UCF, they had a really heady play maker at QB, which made the deep and intermediate passing game sing. I'm not sure Nebraska has one of those right now.
