To me, it is the outrageous idea, that for three decades NU dominated college football, running the same basic downhill plays using the I formation, option football, then decided it had to change to a pass happy west coast offense.I've been wrong about multiple things on here before. I remember telling people before the 2019 season that we would see a ton of 2 TE sets because we were inexperienced at WR and we had a lot of experience with Stoll and Allen/Rafdal. We proceed to barely do it and I look foolish. Fast forward to preseason 2020, I sit on HuskerMax proclaiming that with Austin as the run game coordinator and with the most starters returning on offense in the B1G, the most starts returning on the OL in the conference, a big downhill RB returning in Mills, and again needing to groom young WRs for the second year in a row, we would be running north/south on people all day long. Our OL has had 3 years with our strength staff and they know the scheme now.
To date, here are the guys listed as RB on the roster and their carries with yardage through five games:
Dedrick Mills 31 carries for 95 yards and 2 touchdowns
Marvin Scott 23 carries for 60 yards and 0 touchdowns
Rahmir Johnson 6 carries for 26 yards and 1 touchdown
Ronald Thompkins 5 carries for 24 yards and 0 touchdowns
I really have no idea what is going on, but to me this is the root of most our problems. I can sit here and talk penalties with you, special teams, but sticking with offense, if you are a play-caller, if you don't have a single RB over 100 yards after 5 games you are in serious trouble. Is it lack of a push and S/C? Is it lack of coaching/technique? Is it bad play calling? I don't know but we have to insert our QB as a +1 in the run game to get any sort of rushing yardage.
It seems crazy to type those things out when we quite literally at the beginning of the year could have started the exact same offensive line as we did in 2019 where Mills had success with over 5 ypc. One theme I would like to put to bed is "how young" our offensive line is, take a look with returning starts going against Ohio State:
Jaimes - 33
Wilson - 21
Jurgens - 12
Farniok - 28
Benhart - 0
TOTAL - 94
*feel free to add Hixson with 12 starts if you would like, but since he hasn't started this year I didn't want to skew the results
vs Ohio State, they only had 3 returning starters who compiled 54 returning starts
vs Northwestern they only had 3 returning starters who compiled 15 returning starts
vs Penn State they had 4 returning starters who compiled 78 returning starts
vs Illinois they had 3 returning starters who compiled 75 career starts
vs Iowa they had 3 returning starters who compiled 55 returning starts
I found this fascinating.... we had 106 starts returning that we could have used, so the "we were young on the offensive line" is a terrible excuse considering the fact that we didn't have to be young. Secondly, Illinois had one returning starter who switched over from DL in 2018 and then a new starter this year that moved to offense from defense. I understand people will say "but we ended up starting Piper" and again the counter would be that we still have 3 returning starters on the line, with returning starts still in the 70s. I also find it interesting that the team with more returning starters and the closest returning starts to us was the team we actually beat (Penn State) I also understand that Jurgens is new and that's where people would go too. But the long and short of it is we actually performed better in 2019 than we are in 2020 in the run game, and we quite literally could have every piece still here that we had in 2019. If we are young, if we are retuning less starters, if we are returning less starts, then it's based on a decision we made. We can't have the most veteran OL returning for the 2020 season then have our excuse be "but we are young."
But to summarize... what is going wrong? I still have no clue. Long thread to basically say I was wrong and have no idea where we have faltered and why we are worse now than we were last year. You literally have every single player back that started last year where we had much more success than this year.
Why? And, don’t tell me it is because the game was evolving. The game of football is played from the inside out. Do the basic fundamentals well, blocking and tackling, and the rest will take care of itself.
Forget this idea of trying to recruit a super hero, dual threat QB. Find a talented, real QB who can manage the game, move the sticks and score consistently inside the red zone. Stop the “cuteness” and play the game.
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