In addition to the personnel issues in the D-line, I think that this goes a long ways in explaining why we matched up poorly against the offenses of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, yet matched up very well against an Ohio State offense that was actually the best in the league. As I've mentioned before, I've done a lot of coaching at different levels over the years, and something that I noticed early on was that I was probably most useful as a coach running the scout teams because I took the time to explain the philosophy and concepts to the scout team players, so that they had a reasonable understanding of what they were supposed to do. What we noticed after a couple of years was that the guys who did the best job of mimicking what our conference opponents were doing were also the most adept at stopping it when they moved up to starting varsity. It will be to Nebraska's advantage to play against offenses that try to do some of what we do, especially if they don't have the depth or the speed to simulate how we do it. Once we crack the shell of stopping the ground & pound offenses, the burden will be on those teams' defenses to stop our offense.
Also, maybe it's come up in discussions somewhere here, and I've missed it, but the word coming out of the Michigan spring practices is that the new OC has scrapped everything from the past, and he's starting over with a spread, no-huddle look. I think that that is probably a sign of the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy towards Ohio State, but it made me wonder what their practices look like. If you have an OC who wants to completely morph into something like what Nebraska or Ohio State or UCF is doing (I don't actually know what variant of the spread offenses they intend to run), but a DC who puts the "old" in "old school defensive coordinator" who probably doesn't want practices to operate the way that Nebraska's have been operating (full speed with most corrective coaching taking place by position during film time), it's going to fall on Jim Harbaugh to negotiate what the practice plans look like, and that seems like a wildcard. I expect more growing pains at Michigan, but I also expect that they'll finally match up better against Ohio State's offense by the end of the year. The irony, though, is that if Nebraska would happen to end up playing Michigan in the B1G Championship Game at the end of the year, they will have also made their offense easier for Nebraska's defense to defend.
There are a ton of online articles talking about the changes that they're making. Here's one:
https://www.mlive.com/wolverines/20...ins-hands-off-with-michigans-new-offense.html