** 2023 Previews: CBS Sports Post-Spring Overreactions **

[Saunders]

It's May. Nobody in college football is taking a snap in anger for nearly four months. That's a lot of time for everybody -- fans and media alike -- to kill waiting for something tangible to talk about. Thankfully, we have spring practice. Sure, spring practice is helpful for coaches and players to figure things out, but the primary reason for its existence is to draw wild conclusions from it with little evidence. Did the team's Twitter account post a video of your transfer WR making a sweet one-handed catch? Heisman! Did your local beat reporter see both quarterbacks fighting for the No. 1 job miss throws during the 10 minutes of practice they were allowed to watch? Worst passing offense ever! Need to hit the portal and gather some NIL money to buy Caleb Williams from USC!

We're all at our dumbest in May. Let's take a look at the kind of overreactions that could be going on around the message boards of Big Ten country right now.

https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/big-ten-spring-football-overreactions-ohio-states-major-concern-michigan-qb-j-j-mccarthy-takes-next-step/

Nebraska

QB Jeff Sims is who Adrian Martinez was supposed to be: Adrian Martinez, like Scott Frost, arrived in Lincoln with a lot of hype, and the early returns were promising. Then things never got better. In some ways, they only got worse. Now both Martinez and Frost are gone, and here's Georgia Tech transfer Jeff Sims, who was so good this spring that last year's starter, Casey Thompson, hit the transfer portal. Sims was among the top players in the 2020 class and surprised many by committing to Georgia Tech. He made smart decisions with the football during the spring game, which is something Nebraska fans haven't seen from their QB often enough.

 

[brophog]

Both Adrian at Nebraska and Sims at Georgia Tech can be very fairly questioned on their decision making. However, if you run a bunch of RPOs and max protect play action plays, you really limit that decision tree. That's largely what happened in this year's spring game.

 

[Undone]

Both Adrian at Nebraska and Sims at Georgia Tech can be very fairly questioned on their decision making. However, if you run a bunch of RPOs and max protect play action plays, you really limit that decision tree. That's largely what happened in this year's spring game.

Well, Frost dialed up plenty of RPO plays for Martinez in his time here. And as far as max protect pass plays, yeah, Frost didn't have as much of that in his playbook. So Martinez's "decision making" always looked shakier when he was running for his life.

And this is a rehashing of a ton of old conversations on this site, but I think Martinez would have had a lower turnover rate if the rest of the team had been more mistake-free. It wasn't just him making all of the mistakes; it was a constant train wreck of bad special teams, 15 yard penalties, false starts, and the list goes on. And we almost always ranked highly in offensive yards per game, but it was a lack of power in the red zone that often times left us failing to put more points on the board.

And, he really only had one season where the defense was halfway decent (and even in 2021 it was deceptively bad in terms of overall quality when you looked at yards allowed).

If we still have those problems this season, I think with Rhule's more conservative offensive style we could see 2023 being a thing where we score even fewer points than we did in the Martinez years.

 

[brophog]

If we still have those problems this season, I think with Rhule's more conservative offensive style we could see 2023 being a thing where we score even fewer points than we did in the Martinez years

I don't know about 2023, but once he gets this thing going I'd expect scoring to be in the high 20's to low 30's. Rhule just doesn't prioritize pace that highly, and I think over time more and more teams are realizing the same. There are also concerns that games are taking too long, and so rules will decrease the number of plays as well.

And we almost always ranked highly in offensive yards per game, but it was a lack of power in the red zone that often times left us failing to put more points on the board.

Red zone was definitely an issue, but so was getting to the red zone. It's hard going 80+ yards every drive. It leads to a lot of drives that stall out in that grey area. Obviously some of the placekicking issues hurt scoring chances there, too.

I think it is interesting to look at the 2018 yards per point stat. That year is picked both because we can see Rhule's second year, which is about the closest analogue to our current situation and because this is one of Frost's highest scoring offenses. This stat is simply how many yards of offense you had divided by how many points you scored. It's a level of how efficiently you score. Explosive plays will obviously help, as do special teams and defensive scores.

Rhules second year at Baylor, 2018

Nebraska 15.9 (97th) (28.6 ppg)

Baylor 16.3 (106th) (27.4 ppg)

Rhule's final year at Baylor, 2019

Nebraska 14.9 (74th) (28 ppg)

Baylor 13.0 (28th) (31.9 ppg)