Who should be our starting QB?

Who should be our starting QB?

  • Adrian Martinez

    Votes: 13 12.3%

  • Luke McCaffrey

    Votes: 85 80.2%

  • Other

    Votes: 8 7.5%
  • Total voters
    106
ColoradoHusk said:
Other than Iowa, NU is playing some pretty bad defenses in the last 4 games of the season.  I agree that whomever is starting, should benefit from an improved offense by playing bad defenses the rest of the year.
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Purdue is actually playing pretty good defense this year - currently ranked 40th and allowing 23.7 points per game.  Iowa is ranked 12th, right behind Northwestern.  Illinois's defense (92nd) is actually ranked above Penn State (96th), and Minnesota (103rd).  

 
ColoradoHusk said:
Other than Iowa, NU is playing some pretty bad defenses in the last 4 games of the season.  I agree that whomever is starting, should benefit from an improved offense by playing bad defenses the rest of the year.
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I'm curious if anyone in the country has a tougher slate of defenses this year. The numbers have time to move around, but the West is loaded defensively - Wisconsin, NW, and Iowa are all top 5-10 depending on your statistical measure of choice. OSU and Penn State are the top 2 defense in the East, with OSU in the same range as the trio of West teams and PSU more like 20th. Just sorting on the different defensive metrics, I don't see any possible schedules coming close to that.

Obviously every other team in the West plays the same divisional opponents, and we missed Wisconsin. But the other West teams didn't draw the top 2 defenses in the East. Incidentally going by the original schedule, adding Cincinnati would cement the case since they're right on par with NW/Iowa/Wisconsin. I know some people will scoff at the idea that their defense is as good given who they play, but the numbers do try and adjust for that. 

Hilltop said:
Purdue is actually playing pretty good defense this year - currently ranked 40th and allowing 23.7 points per game.  Iowa is ranked 12th, right behind Northwestern.  Illinois's defense (92nd) is actually ranked above Penn State (96th), and Minnesota (103rd).  
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Although you can argue it's the only defensive stat that matters, I don't like PPG as an overall measure. Penn State ranks pretty well in most other stats, and things like Williams' scoop and score and CTB setting us up with a short field heavily penalize the defense in PPG. The stats I linked jive with how I feel about the defenses - Wisconsin, NW, Iowa, OSU are elite, PSU is good, Purdue has been decent and Illinois and Minnesota have been bad.

 
Guy Chamberlin said:
This still leaves the question open: why are there so many inexperienced players on the field in Scott Frost's third year? 

Are you going to sit there and tell me the defense is outperforming the offense because it has more Mike Riley recruits? 
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Let's take a look at WR and RB scholly recruits from the 2017 & 2018 classes, who should be making up the bulk of our 'experience' right now, shall we?

2017 (Seniors/redshirt juniors this year):

  • Tyjon Lindsy: gone
  • Jaevon McQuitty: gone
  • Keyshawn Johnson: gone
  • Ben Miles: gone
  • Jaylin Bradley: gone

(Yeah, Jaylin Bradley and Ben Miles - that was the running game of the future Riley had lined up for us. :blink: )

2018 (Juniors/redshirt sophomores this year):

  • Maurice Washington: gone
  • Jaron Woodyard: gone
  • Greg Bell: gone
  • Andre Hunt: gone
  • Miles Jones: gone
  • Justin McGriff: gone
  • Mike Williams: gone
  • Dominick Watt: gone

Do I really even need to go into 2016 (redshirt seniors)?

Scholarship guys at those two positions with at least 1 year of game experience are as follows:

  • Wan'dale Robinson (2019 recruit, sophomore now)
  • Kade Warner (2017 redshirt junior, a walk-on prior to this year)
  • Omar Manning (2017 redshirt junior transfer)
  • Dedrick Mills (senior juco transfer)



And that's it. Including walk-ons, there's a total of 36 guys in those two groups on the roster (13 RBs and 23 WRs). Out of those 36, there's four guys with any semblance of experience, and one of them isn't looking real likely to contribute anytime soon. Literally every other WR and RB on the roster is a true freshman, redshirt freshman, or walk-on.

This is why I keep saying that I'm not really even concerned whether Adrian or Luke starts - it almost doesn't even matter because neither of them can turn redshirt freshmen into seniors. QB play isn't the main problem with the offense, and thus changing the QB is unlikely to fix our problems.

 
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Guy Chamberlin said:
Keep in mind that Scott Frost, Adrian Martinez, Luke McCaffrey and the entire Husker offense  executed textbook opening touchdown drives against Ohio State and Penn State. 

We have the talent and the offensive system.

But the other team always makes better adjustments.
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I think it's a combination of other teams making adjustments and us running out of scripted plays.  Our rookies only know so many scripted plays so we become fairly vanilla after that first series.  Toe's post above illustrates the why...  

 
I also think it's the coaches are hamstringing themselves.

The opposing defenses start each game saying "Well this is the game we have to be careful they're going to throw the deep ball", and keep their safeties off the line-of-scrimmage.

As the game progresses, they realize that that our coaches are still only calling passing patterns that are relatively short in order to minimize likelihood of interceptions (or sacks and fumbles), so they can push their safeties further up to the LOS and into the box.  This makes the shorter pass routes very dangerous as they're often sitting in 10-yard deep zones watching our QB's eyes to jump routes or alternatively jumping into run blitzes creating too many men for our OL to block at the point of attack in our run game.

Bottom Line:  Even if it increases the risk of interception (or sack and fumbles), Frost has to throw at least one deep ball over 20 yards per half, in order to keep the opposing safeties from choking all our running lanes and short passing routes.

 
Hayseed said:
Since there’s no redshirt burning, I’d like to see Logan Smothers get on the field. He looks well coached on his high school film.
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Is this the first serious call for the 3rd string QB? Or you're just saying you'd like to see him in garbage time? If it's the latter, I'm curious too. Illinois is our best shot this year to be able to do that. 

 
Husker in WI said:
I don't like flip flopping the starter, so I'd probably stick with Luke. I do think there's room to play both though - you've got to be smart about it and not kill any momentum one of them is building, but if it truly is that close both should play.

Whoever is playing, I expect it to be our best offensive game this year just by nature of not playing a good defense. So it's actually pretty big for perception of who should be playing - if one guy gets significantly more playing time, the media narrative is going to be "the offense is finally turning the corner with so and so at the helm!" even though the other guy would likely have played at a similar level. 
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Luke is going to do well against the worst defense we've played with the actual good receivers playing a higher percentage of the snaps and then media and fans are going to be like "See, he should have been starting all along."

 
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