Thanks for the great responses. I'm going to pick out several comments and address them here....
I realize he needs the right players but lets remember the BIG is a very run heavy conference as opposed to PAC 12. I don't have any preference except use a scheme that doesn't produce one of the worst run stoppers in the conference.
I agree, and I think that we all will be able to see the improvement this year due both to greater familiarity with the scheme (which is actually a lot simpler to learn than many others for most positions) and a lot more depth and size in the D-line. We have the personnel to line up in completely different packages against Iowa or Wisconsin when they run 22 Personnel (2 RBs, 2 TEs). I think that we'll see some true 4-man fronts against those teams with an extra DT thrown in when they go heavy.
I'm going to match up your single back set with a five man front with six in coverage.
That is the defensive front that I showed in the 3-4 sketches above. When the OLBs are rolled up to the line, you have a 5-man front. Some coaches call that a 3-4 Up front, but that's mostly what all 3-4 coaches run now as you rarely see 4 LBs lined up 4-5 yards off the Line of Scrimmage.
One last thing, with as many offensive skill players as we need, a 3-4 allows us to have more players recruited for special teams being in a 4 LB set.
Excellent point. The Upper Great Plains produces a lot of athletes in that size range, too. Whether or not they have the quickness/speed is usually the issue, but we have a lot of big, strong kids who love to play football coming out of high school who weigh 200 to 225 pounds, and it's nice to be able to effectively use as many of them as possible.
I think I miss the 4-3 when I watch our 90's D-line being able to zone blitz with those fast OLB's.
Fwiw, Chinander runs a mix of man and zone coverages, but he has every zone blitz package that is plausibly imaginable. I wrote about this already in another post, but if you didn't see it, you'll love to know this.... Do you remember the Jojo Domann strip-sack against Ohio State? That was a beautifully designed and perfectly executed Fire Zone Blitz. One of the problems with the older zone blitzes of the Steelers in the 70s or McBride's Nebraska defense in the mid-90s is that the combinations of formations and motions can make it backfire badly if you make a blitz call, and the offense lines up in a way that attacks it. A Fire Zone Blitz call is one of several general calls that is sent in from the sideline, but it's the players' responsibility to identify the formation in order to make the call for who will actually be blitzing. On that play against Ohio State, Nebraska was lined up in zone coverage with a blitz call to come from the wide side of the field. When OSU lined up, the LBs and Safeties identified who was in coverage, etc., and picked who was free to go. Just before the snap, OSU motioned a TE/H-back over from the left side of the formation to the right side of their formation, and Nebraska had an ILB move with him (so it looked like man coverage to Haskins). What Haskins didn't know is that that LB moved over to cover the shallow center of the zone coverage so that the other ILB and Safety could pick up Domann's WR in coverage, and Domann was automatically unleashed and sent hunting. The beautiful thing about it is that if you watch the replay, you can see the Nebraska defenders communicating with one another, and you can see Domann look over at the LBs, but he never moved his feet, and he never changed his stance or where his eyes were focused (on the inside WR's numbers). At the snap of the ball Haskins looked left because he expected a WR to come open against man coverage on the outside, but it was zone, and he couldn't tell until it was too late. Meanwhile, Domann got a straight shot at him, and he put the hammer down. It doesn't get any more beautiful than that, and the fact that all of the adjustments were made on the field, in real time shows how well Chinander's defense can adapt in real time.
I've been burned on the 3-4 since it hasn't really worked well for us, IMO.
Give it a chance. You haven't really seen the 3-4 yet. You've seen Diaco's version of the permanent prevent defense, and you saw Chinander trying to get through a season without key guys in positions that are crucial.
I see two interior O-lineman take on our LB's and it just doesn't look that good to me.
I'm not sure which games you were talking about, but we looked our worst on defense against Michigan against the run, followed by Wisconsin, so I assume that you mean one or both of those games. I don't think that we'll line up the same way against either this year, but even if we do, those Guards were getting to our ILBs so quickly because the Center and OTs were all able to handle our 3 down linemen one-on-one. That won't happen this year. Pick a game that made you cringe, go back and watch the other team's highlights of the game, and you'll consistently see our D-line getting shoved back 3-5 yards on every key play. That can't happen, but we didn't have the bodies to stop it. To put names to the positions, last year you would have seen Carlos Davis at NG, Freedom Akinmoladun at one DE, and either Kahlil Davis or Ben Stille at the other DE. This year we'll have a bigger, stronger Carlos Davis slid out to DE, and when we know they're going heavy, we can have Damion Daniels at NG and Darrion Daniels at the other DE. If the other team's O-linemen can block those guys one-on-one, let alone shove them backwards into the LBs, we have no hope. Add in Green, who can play either NG or DE, and a bigger, stronger Stille, who I think will play a sort of hybrid DE/OLB position at times to the short side of the field against heavy offensive units, and our biggest, strongest guys last year would now be smaller and not as strong as our smallest D-linemen this year. If our D-linemen hold their ground, our LBs will make plays that weren't even possible a year ago because they were having to jump over the bodies of their own teammates before being blocked by another O-lineman who got to the hole first. Those days are over.
Also those short passing games that killed us in the recent past were embarrassing to watch at times.
Are you referring to 2017 and the defense under He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named? We don't run anything like that defense anymore.
Wisconsin and Iowa and Northwestern are not out-recruiting Nebraska. They are out developing us; and have consistent schemes over time. This is the secret sauce. Not A gaps and 3 techniques or all of that other stuff. It's picking something and perfecting it.
Mostly agree, but some clarification. Yes, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Northwestern have clearly been beating us by out-developing our players and running consistent schemes, but it's worth pointing out that their schemes have ceilings when they run into teams with properly developed personnel who are slightly quicker and run schemes to take away their strengths. Wisconsin may never have a better combination of offensive linemen and RB than what they had last year, yet defenses consistently stopped them when they had decent D-lines. Ferentz has some sort of magical potion for when the big guns come to play in Iowa City, so I don't know what to make of that, but they're not going on the road and shoving the ball down the throats of teams with good D-linemen. When Nebraska is able to stop both teams' power running games without cutting corners somewhere else, those offenses are in a lot of trouble.
I've always felt that the zone read is the spiritual successor to the old option schemes that Osborne used to run.
I agree, and Osborne has said as much when talking about how he thought his offense would have evolved had he stayed coaching much longer. Nebraska fans forget how often we were already running 1-back sets in the mid-90s, and it was almost all zone blocking up front. If Frazier and Frost had been in shotgun more often, it would have taken Osborne a matter of a handful of games to figure out how to run his own version of the Zone Read and the Power Read (which is pretty much what Frost was running from under center in '97) and the Shotgun Veer.