While the Georgia Southern game was a let down, this Oklahoma game seemed to be right up there as well. Everyone knew the Sooners had more firepower than the Huskers, but Trev Alberts had just fired Scott Frost, and some people thought this would bring a renewed energy to the team:
Someone tag Jim on ‘Freezing Cold Takes’ twitter account. I had several friends ask me in which galaxy Nebraska could stay within 2 touchdowns of Oklahoma, and I had no answer. But I understood the optimism with Mickey Joseph at the helm, ‘Big Noon Kickoff’ doing their national broadcast from Lincoln, a rivalry that generally has close games… I could kind of see it, I just wasn’t buying it.
I had 45-27 Sooners in my game preview, but the reality is it probably could have been 70-7 if OU didn’t have an off day offensively and didn’t pull their defensive starters. What seemed like a weekend full of optimism (even if it was a little wishful thinking) ended with another coach fired, and 1-3 at the bye week when many were predicting 3-1.
There’s not a ton to talk about, so i’ll just go over some things that I knew were problems in my preview and that are rearing their ugly head now. Can Joseph and Busch fix them? I really don’t know.
Nebraska defensively:
If you remember before the season, I stated that some of the things we did just weren’t going to work. We typically stayed in a two high shell to protect from big plays, but with our DL I didn’t think they would be able to hold down the fort like Stille, Daniels, Rogers, Thomas, etc., did. Also, we seemingly are constantly misaligned.
Let’s take the run fits out of it. Here you have trips to the bottom of the screen. We have a corner up pressing to take away the outside WR, Kolarevic who has proven he can’t play in space over the #2 wideout, and then a safety 12 yards deep over the top of the #3 WR who happens to be their best playmaker. Guys, before you hit play, I promise you when Oklahoma’s OC saw us line up like this, this was him in the booth:
So at the snap you have Kolarevic so far wide over #2 he can’t get to the #3, and the ILB splitting the difference heads in when the H-back goes inside. #3 (Mims) sprints at our safety to have him bail and then just stops.
That is a no win situation for anyone on our defense. No shot our pass rush gets home, no shot Kolarevic can get him, no shot our ILB comes back out to take it away, and our safety is responsible for deep ball so has to bail. That’s just so bad.
I also brought up in my preview, that for all of the people who just thought we would run a 4 man line and put 2 of our edge guys on it, that we would be in trouble because people could run all over us with no big bodies there.
Now, this is a 3rd and 7, but you see what i’m talking about as we have 3 “edge guys” in on this play. Oklahoma sees 4 in the box and just runs a QB draw culminating in some of the worst effort i’ve see on a football field by 0.
Oklahoma ran for over 300 yards on us and the offensive coordinator couldn’t have had an easier day. While the Sooners were off a little bit, not sure it could have went any smoother for them. It was just time to make a change.
I’m hoping that Bill Busch starts implementing a much more aggressive scheme and if we have a few long plays against us, fine. But maybe we could get some plays behind the line of scrimmage. We are 115th in the country in sacks, and just all around awful on that side of the ball. Let’s move on…
Nebraska Offense:
While Nebraska looked good the first 3 games, they finally played a defense with a pulse and it went as expected. Nebraska scored on the first drive of the game, then failed to score again until Oklahoma pulled their starters and Nebraska had our reserves in as well. While I like a lot of what the Huskers do, you are starting to see where our deficiencies were.
As mentioned in the preview, our OL is a problem. We lost our best player, second best guy was out for the season, now we have Prochazska out for the year, and we are just circling the drain trying to move anyone off the line of scrimmage and protect Casey Thompson. Makes you wonder where the comment came from when he said Nebraska’s OL is better than Texas’.
Let’s look at this for example, our near 5 star and 64th ranked player in the nation is at LT here going against an Oklahoma 4 star:
Maybe he held the ball too long, maybe. But what is Whipple supposed to do? Our 300 pounder gets pushed back by a 240 pound linebacker and our QB has no shot. Or what about this one with our four star RT:
Or here…
It just doesn’t make any sense to me how we are that bad on the line. Those are four star guys. And when we try to run we still can’t get a hand on anyone:
I just don’t know what answers Whipple will be able to give us until the line is figured out, and with two guys out for the season I think we’ve thrown everything that is a viable option out there.
The good news is Indiana, Rutgers, those types of teams aren’t Oklahoma so we may have an easier/better shot there.
We will see everyone on Friday with the gambling picks (up 4 units on the year) and toilet reading tweets.
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