Undone

The thing is that you don't have to wait for coaching changes in the offseason to judge whether or not Rhule can get it done in Lincoln. We have three winnable games left (yes, winnable): -UCLA -Wisconsin -Iowa Rhule should be able to make some adjustments on offense to put up some points against those three teams. But most of the talk is about the offense. White needs to get back to creating chaos and being more aggressive in those three games - there is absolutely nothing to lose anyway.

Another underrated thing that has happened this season though is that the schedule wound up being way tougher than the majority of fans (including myself) thought it would be in the offseason. From the fans' perspective, the "chasing 3" thing was predicated on the idea that if we went 5-7 last year and lost several of those games by 3 points, all we needed was a QB with a pulse and that record would go to either 7-5 or 8-4. Well we got the QB with a pulse, and he's actually good even as a true freshman. But it turned out that Illinois and Indiana are actually good. That part will be huge in factoring into the final W/L column. This year's team probably doesn't lose to last year's Minnesota, Maryland, or Michigan State. But it turns out that this doesn't mean anything for this season at all.

Just some random discussion here. In the Illinois game, if you take out sacks as negative rushing yardage we had 397 yards of total offense. Raiola had 297 yards passing. There was nothing wrong with that, passing to move the chains was fine. It was in the short yardage situation where we were really exposed in that game as not being able to run. I was told that "Rhule wants to run zone read and dual threat QB's." It seems that went out the door when we signed Raiola, maybe because Dominic said "you aren't running him in zone reads" or whatever it is. I have absolutely no problem with that and actually have wanted to try something different and have the pass-first guy, and we have him. But how the hell are we at this point where we averaged 3 yards per carry but Indiana averaged 6.5? What this staff put together for an offensive plan seems to have really fallen apart in the last two games. What will the plan be in these last five, just throwing post route bombs to Neyor and seeing what happens?

Yeah. It was spread around that Satterfield had bad YPC rushing stats in 2022 at South Carolina. I just don't get how we slumped to this place in the run game.

Yes, that whole drive was full of great adjustments by Satterfield and that play was excellent. But Dowdell - and his usage - contributed greatly to us not getting on the board earlier. It didn't really matter though because our defense was garbage for four quarters. Yeah, I think we're on the same page there. The thing is that sometimes when we're in 3rd & long, our passing game looks so good when we can spread a defense out a bit more, because Raiola is pretty stellar as a passer. But the staff wants the short swing passes on 1st & 2nd downs and also a lot of inside zone runs. Teams are playing us close to the line of scrimmage on 1st down and what we've been doing the last couple games just looks very ineffective. I don't think our offensive line is as much to blame as our backs & our coaches.

I think this might be a good summary of what happened in this game: The staff came into this one underestimating just how inept our running game was, especially with Dowdell as the starting back. The staff also came into the game not understanding how easily Indiana could drop dimes over our corners if we didn't get good pressure on their QB. We made an adjustment to our offensive strategy & play calling and attacked the perimeter and got on the board, almost making it look easy on that drive. After that point our defense just entirely fell apart and there was basically no coming back on offense. Our staff just looks bad from this result, like really bad. We weren't competitive at all, and it made us look like we're not competitive whatsoever with the top half of the conference in any way.

Aside from it being a blowout, for me this win stings so bad because we lost to Illinois. Look at how Illinois beats Michigan today. We were maybe a missed field goal away from that one. Our schedule is tougher than last year. It's still possible that we could pick up 2 - 3 wins. Rhule needs to stop looking so confused and get involved with the defense and go back to what was working last year, which is probably tighter coverage and more blitzing.

Yep, it's painful. I also wonder if the staff felt like they had to focus so much practice time attention on the passing game to get Raiola into a place where he could be successful as a freshman. Again though, we couldn't have reasonably won this game really no matter what we would have tried to do with how bad our defense was. In theory Rhule calls Marcus into his office and helps him dial up some better running plays heading into the next two weeks and we see it pay some dividends against the 2 or 3 games that are technically winnable out of the remaining 5. If the two of them together can't figure out some way to be better with first down success rate and running the ball and we don't fire Satterfield, we're probably f***ed.

Agreed. With as bad as we looked against Rutgers and Indiana on offense we're going to be pretty lucky to even get two more wins. If we somehow got to 8, it would be incredible.

That part hadn't been clear to me in your post. You said "Prime needs to be in the conversation too."

He actually had a great adjustment on our touchdown drive where he stopped with the vanilla handoffs up the middle and instead went with quick hits to the edges of the field. He's had moments where he's had us looking good this year. But our run game is all of a sudden looking like Mike Riley ball. I wonder if the staff feels trapped between doing what they want to do and what they think will keep Raiola from transferring. Probably a dumb theory there.

I don't think it's in-game play calling nearly as much as the staff really didn't figure out a way to maximize what we could do in the run game in general. This feels like 2017 Mike Riley levels of rushing failure from this game. We come into this game against a good team. We run these slow zone rushing handoffs to Dowdell in the first half that just do nothing. Dowdell doesn't fire off his mark when he takes the ball, he doesn't hit the hole hard, and he doesn't have good moves & vision. I'd just really love to see what's happening in practice & in scrimmages that got us to this point today. I thought we were going to see quite a bit of under center stuff. We aren't doing much pulling with our linemen, and for as big of a deal as it was for so many that Rhule brought back the fullback last year, we aren't seeing those kinds of lead blockers as much this year. The staff failed to get the entire offense into a position where we could maximize our ability to run and I do think that falls on Satterfield, but it also falls heavily on Rhule.

Please tell me this is a joke.

In 2022 after Georgia Southern beat us 45-42 at home and Frost got fired, so many people said that it wasn't Chinander but that we had no talent on defense and had to start over with a different defensive roster. Then in 2023 Tony White takes the same starters except for Sherman and one other guy (I think a safety), and we completely turn around the defense. So like...wtf has happened to our defense this year? I think that White has wanted coverage sacks and has kind of lost the plot in the passing game after that strategy worked against Colorado.

Then you're going to have to start doing something in the run game other than slow handoffs out of the shotgun to Dowdell. Because that looked like s***, too. Counters, misdirections, pulling your guards, using a fullback, power tosses...something other than what we saw in the first half.