There was plenty of room for improvement in Bill Callahan's offense. And in Bo Pelini's offense. And now in Mike Riley's.
But it is utter madness to ignore the huge, historic drop off in the Nebraska defense during most of this stretch.
The defense went out and earned the right to be criticized. No idea why some here take much more comfort blaming the offense.
(I'll save you the time: I understand how offensive turnovers and stalled drives make it tougher on a defense. But that excuses next to nothing in terms of the actual problem)
Do you think that could have anything to do with the offensive systems moving away from the ground oriented game?
Frankly, due to the reality of recruiting to NU, NU should deploy a "Navy" strategy where NU minimizes possessions by the other team. A lot of that is about offensive ball control. TOP is a decent stat for that, but I wish I had time to go back and look at the detailed numbers from the 80s and 90s. I would bet a lot of money that NU's opponents averaged less possessions per game against NU than most other teams during those years.
Strategically, philosophically, however you want to frame it, NU won't consistently compete with and beat the top 10/20 programs trying to out recruit them and running a "match up based" system. We have to have a system that out schemes opponents, not one that relies on "my guy is better than your guy," if we are going to stand a chance. Going toe-to-toe is a receipt for average to below average results.
We have the pure talent on the roster to be a 10+ win program if we have the right coach.
You use words that people who talk about football use, but your logic can't survive a single sentence.
So: We have the pure talent right now, but we can't possibly compete in head to head talent because Nebraska can't recruit pure talent, so we have to rely on a scheme that keeps our offense on the field because we've given up hope that our defense can hold up its end of the bargain. And they shouldn't
have to. That's the offense's job. The right coach would understand all this.
Right?
Listen, I know you're busy and who has time to look up ancient TOP stats these days?
So let's speed things up with TOP this year under the wretched stain of Mike Riley and fling-it-all-over-the-place Langsdorf.
Nebraska is 26th in Time of Possession in the NCAA, averaging 32 minutes a game, or two minutes behind #1 Stanford.
That means this year's Nebraska offense had better time of possession than Clemson, Florida, Iowa, LSU, Oklahoma, run-happy Georgia Tech and Houston, TCU, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State and lingering near the very bottom of TOP, Oregon at #111, Baylor at #115 and North Carolina at #126.
TOP doesn't appear to prove much in terms of rushing or defense or winning, because there are a lot of moving parts to the game of football.
A better metric has traditionally been turnover margin, an area where Nebraska truly sucks, at #119, a suckage that extends to our former coaching staff.
You gotta be careful with subjects you don't know much about and information that doesn't fit your agenda.
I know you won't disappoint me.
