Well, that couldn’t have went any worse in Ireland this past weekend. Week 1 hasn’t even started for most college football teams, yet Nebraska is not only 0-1, but already lost a division game within the B1G. Many of the things we previewed in our ‘Northwestern Preview’ came to fruition, and we will go over those. But while we were pretty spot on with everything we talked about, the most important part of the preview we couldn’t have been more off on, and that was the final score. While I mocked people for saying “we beat them 56-7 last year we ain’t losing” I at least agreed that Northwestern wasn’t a very good football team.
It’s only one game, but for fucks sakes it looked like the same song and dance over and over.
While we still have plenty of time to get where we need to go (we will rattle off two straight here), we are 0-1 in our division before week 1 even starts for other teams. We continually put ourselves in these holes/situations.
Ugh… enough, let’s get into it.
Nebraska offense vs Northwesterns defense
As we talked about on the preview, I have heard from multiple coaches on staff the change for Nebraska this year compared to what Frost did in the past is that we were going to throw the ball to set up the run. Seasons prior, we used to run the ball to set up the pass. Nebraska’s first offensive possession started of with a bang, ending in a touchdown. With 6 passes on that drive and 5 completions, things were clicking.
And that was about how the entire game went. Nebraska threw the ball 42 times and ran it 31, despite being up by double digits two separate times in the game. We talked in the preview about how if Nebraska wasn’t going to be able to run on Northwestern, it was going to be a long season. But our inability to run on the Wildcats turned it into a long game and even longer plane ride home with an ‘L’. Nebraska only ran the ball 31 times for 111 yards. And i’m not a “take away this play” kind of guy, but you kind of have to do it here. If you take away Grants run where he broke a tackle 3 yards past the LOS, and Palmers jet sweep, Nebraska only ran for 53 yards (1.8 ypc) against a front 7 that Phil Steele ranked 14th on the DL and 13th at LB preseason. Northwestern had to grab even more transfer portal players on DL and LB than Nebraska did just to get a respectable situation going.
But I can’t blame Whipple entirely. What do you do as an OC if you are calling runs and it is going for 1.8 yards each time you call it, unless your RB breaks a couple tackles to take it to the house? If he would have kept calling those then we would be pissed because it wasn’t working, but when we couldn’t run on Northwesterns awful DL, I knew we were going to be in trouble despite being up 11 (more on that when I go over Northwesterns offense).
And another thing that is going to take some getting used to, is we just aren’t a QB run team (spare me the QB touchdown run for half a yard). Thompson rushed 3 times for -18 yards. I’ll be curious how we move forward with that, for example, look at this play:
While the DE was there to take care of Thompson, a faster and more athletic Martinez pulls that all day for a massive gain. I will be interested to see if we do some QB run the next two games in preparation for Oklahoma. Or are we going to work it a bit and wait to unleash it against the Sooners when they see we have basically never done it. Or, this may just be who we are and we don’t run our QB unless it’s a scramble?
Again, i’m not really mad about our offense schematically, it’s just weird and different. We had 466 yards, and you could see glimpses of what Whipple did to be successful at Pitt. He got the ball to his best wideout (Palmer) early and often just like he did with Addison last year. And he got the ball to his athletic TE early and often as Vokolek had 5 receptions for 63 yards. You could really see us drop off once we lost him (he will be fine just rolled his ankle). None of our other scholarship TEs could step up, and we started playing our 2 walk-ons Boerkircher and Brewington. A concern early in the season, depth at TE, had a huge impact on us offensively.
Another change in philosophies from Frost to Whipple is the lack of motions. I spoke the last few years about how Frost would use motion to not only try to confuse the defense, but make them show their hand early in regard to what coverage they are in for our QB to figure out where he wanted to go before the snap in most cases. With Whipple, that was largely gone.
While schematically I didn’t get too mad, there are things that are going to be issues moving forward. First, if you can’t run against Northwestern you aren’t running against Oklahoma, Michigan, Iowa, or Wisconsin. Second, you can’t turn the ball over 3 times. Lastly, with how thin we are on defense, you can’t have the ball for 25 minutes while the other team gets it for 35 minutes. That is going to spell disaster not only in games, but for the entire season wearing us down even quicker.
Thompson did really well for 2.5 quarters throwing the ball, then things just became unraveled a bit. While I don’t blame him for the interceptions, there were times where passes he was hitting in the first half just started becoming incompletions and misses. We talked about it in our preview, but how fast the offense gels is a huge part of things. And while we looked good early, learning how guys start running routes later in games is part of the learning curve. What Whipple could rely on early started fading away late in the game. Thompson wasn’t completely accurate and WRs had to start reaching a bit more to get balls and it would go off their fingertips.
On a positive note, Nebraska only had one penalty for five yards. But the fumble and 2 interceptions unfortunately outweigh the positivity there. Also, Nebraska only had 4 first downs rushing the football (16 throwing the ball), that’s an almost unheard of stat in Lincoln. It’s just a different era for Nebraska right now, and we are riding this train to the end of November so buckle up.
Nebraska Defense vs Northwestern Offense
In my season preview I talked about how our defense was going to take a step back this year, and boy did they ever first game in. With that said, I told everyone that’s ok as long as our offense and special teams take steps forward. As I talked about in the portion up top, once our OL had trouble moving a putrid Northwestern front 7, I knew our defense was in for a long day. We heard all through fall camp that the OL and DL were battling it out, which means they were equals essentially. If we struggled with a bad Northwestern front 7, what would our new DL do against a very good Wildcat OL?
We also made mention in our preview about how much more difficult it was going to be for our ILBs to play well without the likes of Daniels, Stille, Rogers, etc., keeping the OL off of them. Others started mentioning it in game as well:
What is meant by my preview and this tweet, is that at minimum our DL last year would keep those ILBs clean so they could make tackles away from “the trash”. The more our DL gets pushed back, the more clean climbs to the LBs the OL gets, the more “trash” there is to play in. And it showed. Here’s a great angle of what i’m talking about.
You see on the right side, their tackle completely take our only returning DL with more than 26 snaps off the screen. Our NG gets turned. The ‘h back’ washes Nelson down. But where things get tricky is the tackle that combos down on Feist barely has to touch him and gets a completely clean release up to Henrich. Feist in this scenario with no downblock from the tackle absolutely has to make the play in that gap, this really isn’t on Henrich here. But you can see what we miss not having a guy like Rogers or Stille there. If they aren’t blocked, they make that tackle last year. Or they make that tackle block them which frees up Henrich. That’s going to happen all year. They can single block our interior guys like Feist and Hutmacher so they can get right up to our backers.
We also spoke about how Northwestern would come out in 2 TE sets to try and keep us in our odd front with a NG, and we saw that as well. But Northwestern threw a bit more than I thought they would early on. Hilinski at one point was something like 20 for 22 passing the ball, and was extremely efficient. But Northwestern saw what we all did, and our front 7 started getting gassed, especially when Reimer went to the lockerroom and Henrich had to stay out there.
What was interesting to me is that early in the game we did a good job playing one high safety to stop the run. We had the one coverage breakdown when Farmer went out, but other than that it was a great scheme. All of a sudden when Northwestern starts running the ball we were in a 2 high shell for whatever reason, that didn’t make a ton of sense to me, and the announcer even made mention of it.
Special Teams
For the first time in a while, it was nice to see our special teams not lose us a game. Our punter averaged over 45 yards per kick. Fieldgoal kickers looked good. Kickoff specialist was putting it through the endzone. I could have done without a couple of Palmers decisions to take it out of the endzone, but overall it looked good.
But let’s talk about the elephant in the room, the onside kick. Again, that’s a coaching decision, that’s not on our special teams in my opinion. It was executed as well as it could be, it just didn’t make any sense. I’m all for being aggressive, but that just made no sense, and we are getting absolutely drilled on social media for it.
Overall Summary
The game unfolded exactly how we laid it out in the preview, it just turns out Northwestern knows who they are, and we still don’t. I have to agree with Fitzgerald here:
How many times did you listen to Huard questioning Fitzgerald running the ball 3 straight times but you sat in your recliner with your beer thanking a higher power he did so? He knew his team, he knew what their strengths were, but he also got a feel for what we were going to do. That game was a perfect example of a team with an established culture going against a coaching staff still trying to find themselves in year 5.
I also thought that was the most gassed i’ve ever seen our football team. I hate our S/C platform/staff currently, but I can’t fully blame it on them (they get some blame). Between an Ireland trip with jet lag and lack of depth, it was bound to happen. But us being on the field 10 more minutes than Northwesterns defense proved insurmountable. While I gave our edge rushers props earlier, look how tired we get here. This is a captain up top at the DE/Edge spot, and our most seasoned DL at DT next to him:
Teams know that if they just keep it close, that is what the fourth quarter is going to look like running the football against us. We lost our best guys on the DL, we have no depth, and And that does not bode well with the toughest part of our schedule being on the back half.
Further, Henrich looked absolutely drained towards the end. He spent all day trying to shed blocks, so he missed tackles and then couldn’t cover anyone.
And i’m not sure this was a factor, but us in space again was an issue. Kolarevic, who won basically every Husker Power weight room honor when he transferred here couldn’t get a Northwestern player down in space to save his life. When we would sub Gifford in for him, they’d just run at us because we were 30 pounds lighter.
We have a lot of issues ladies and gentlemen. I think we will look pretty good against North Dakota and Georgia Southern. Many people will state how we have things figured out, but it will be back to reality against Oklahoma, who is a much more talented team than what we just lost to this past weekend.
Join us on Thursday when we do a preview of North Dakota!
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