Guy Chamberlin
Well-known member
The question I asked myself and others when this would happen though is, how many times does Satterfield have to see it to say to himself "you know, maybe we should just take the 3 yards on 1st down and go from there."
If things like this happen again next year and we're losing games 14-13, it's going to be a new level of suck.
But we did rush on first down. More often than we passed. Occasionally the pass worked. Sometimes the run got stuffed. The same things that worked for a couple series didn't work on the third series. It's hard to say this offense needed to get safer and more conservative.
I do know what you're talking about, though. My NFL team is the 49ers, and Shanahan operates an incredibly complex playbook, but he likes nothing better than getting that three or four yards on first down. With Christian McCaffrey. Running behind perennial All Pro Trent Williams. Even then he'll call a first down pass a couple times a game, which tends to soften up that first down defense.
We just need to do everything better.
Here's a fun rabbit hole if you have a few hours to kill: go back and read HuskerBoard from the Pelini years. We had two offensive coordinators named Shawn Watson and Tim Beck, and virtually every exasperated criticism you find here about Marcus Satterfield is identical to the criticism of Beck and Watson from those years we yearn to get back to.