Undone

Heh. Borderline hilarious. You need several "ifs" in both of those sentences.

That's a good point. But, we did have many more successful drives in this game (regardless of whether or not Purdue sucks). Drives meaning, picking up first downs, moving the chains. My main takeaway is just how bad our offensive line has been this season at run blocking; really hurt us in the red zone against Purdue.

Our rushing game was particularly bad in the red zone where it mattered most. We actually did try to run in the red zone enough times to satisfy what I personally would like to see, and our line just didn't play well. I do think things would be at least somewhat better in that category if Bryant didn't have the knee injury and was 100% healthy. If two out of our four field goals had been touchdowns, we probably would have a much different outlook on the game. We wound up with 471 total yards. We just couldn't get into the end zone enough once we reached the red zone.

Every head coach at Nebraska will absolutely and unequivocally be compared against Tom Osborne. Especially Scott Frost who has essentially been immortalized into the legend that is mid-90s Nebraska football.

Good post. This is a good summary. Riley could have been what might be called a "bridge hire." He really had that potential. The problem was bringing his average-to-bad staff with him. I still think our final record this season should technically dictate whether or not he is retained. But it probably won't. I would assume we've reached out to Frost in some way to put out a feeler for his interest in the job. And I believe that if Frost reports back that he's interested, it's probably almost a done deal. If he's not interested, then Riley's record at the end of the regular season plays even heavier into whether or not he's retained. But let's say we lose by two scores to Penn State and go 7-5. That makes Riley's first three seasons' regular season records consist of: -2015: 5-7 -2016: 9-3 -2017: 7-5 He'd have a 58% winning percentage, but he'd have failed to even just win his division. I just don't see any indication that he'll actually be competitive at winning this conference because he hasn't even been competitive at winning his own division.

Yes. I decided this season I was going to steer away from making pointed, negative comments about individual players a general rule for myself. But yes. Gates is a good example. A guy weighs what he weighs; Wisconsin's linemen probably weighed 265-275 in high school so they're just big boys. So when they put on even more weight in the Wisconsin program, you're going to see muffin tops in the gut on those guys. They weigh a lot. But that's not the case with some of our guys. A guy weighs whatever he weighs but the higher the muscle content in the body composition, you're going to assume the more athletic the athlete is able to be. I have definitely noticed it with Gates this season.

Agreed, run blocking is still so bad. It was interesting that Langsdorf called some outside zone-ish type of run calls when Bradley came in, wasn't it? He's pretty quick and shifty. I definitely want to see more of him and that in the last four games.

Just now checking into this thread. Haven't read through any of it. I'd just say that continue to see really bad tackling. Our kicker had one of the best tackles of the night and I'm barely even exaggerating that.

+1, BIG ERN. Great post. I was thinking the same thing on Saturday night. And in a scenario where Bryant was 100% healthy, this is a good offense with Lee making good decisions and putting the ball on the money like he did against Purdue. Also, I didn't know where else to put this comment so I'll put it here - That effort by Ozigbo on the comeback drive when caught the ball, turned, got hit, and refused to let his knee touch the turf was amazing. I remember way back in the bowl game against UCLA him catching a screen pass and having good moves in open space. Not the fastest guy, but that move he put on to stay vertical and then spin to make the next tackler miss was some awesome football to watch.

I'd have to see video of the play itself. I can say this: Lee failed to look for the check down to his I-Back almost all of the time in the first six games. Against Purdue, he was doing it exactly like it should be done. To the extent that it's almost like teams had specifically schemed to not worry about covering our back curling into the flat after a couple of seconds on a passing down. Against Purdue, he checked down and it worked fairly well. I'd have to watch the play but our I-Back was probably doing what he should have done at the exact time our line gave way in pass protection.

I've been wondering about this lately - Is this maybe due to how prolific the zone read offense is these days, even at the high school level?

I've seen enough. You're a legitimate troll. There's just nobody that would actually believe the stuff you're saying.

If memory serves, you were then shown Tennessee's last decade of recruiting rankings and how they usually rank in the Top 15ish and then the discussion was over. Apparently for everyone but you...

(s)he's the reincarnation of 'cm husker.' If not literally, then symbolically at the minimum.

^^^^^^That one is just painful to read through in hindsight. When Mike Riley has a quarterback that is his style of quarterback, he’s generally successful...

Pour me some kool-aid, ma'am.

The only thing that actually matters is the examination of a coach's recruiting rankings and the correlations to the output on the field. The only question that really matters all that much is, will our next head coach recruit better than Riley? That's all that matters as it pertains to questions asked in the original post and the landof10 article.

/thread, great research. I understand why we have this thread, but the content is of the stuff you'd expect in the offseason when there's nothing to talk about. It's pretty insane argue on and on about the "toughness and quality of California recruits." As far as drawing any conclusions about recruiting and a team's performance, all we can really do in my opinion is to look at any given coach's recruiting rankings, look at the output of the product on the field, and draw potential conclusions about correlations between the two. But speculating on the quality of the recruit based on where they're from is borderline ridiculous. To such a ridiculous extent that I'd almost say "jessica" is trolling here. I can't imagine anyone actually buying into that concept, seriously.

When you're dealing with a kid that is potentially good enough to make millions of dollars in the NFL someday if his talent gets developed properly, it is absolutely potentially about the coaches. We at Nebraska want it to be the way you phrased it, because this is Nebraska, damn it. But it just really isn't reality.

I thought you were more of a believe in Navy's offensive system...

I'll tell you exactly what I said, and it's probably searchable somewhere on this board: I said that I felt like Eichorst was hiring a "nobody" that was too nice to fire. And that there's no such thing as "too nice to fire" in Lincoln. Eichorst's tunnel vision for Riley was complete stupidity. He openly talked to the press about how he was even looking at him when he was at Miami. I wanted to spend big money on a coach that had consistently competed for or won at least conference titles as a head coach of a Power 5 conference. It seems slap-you-in-the-face obvious that it's what we should have done. I would have even put up with 1-2 more seasons of Bo's inability to win a conference title to find that guy. Now that Frost does have head coaching experience and is obviously (at least somewhat of) a burgeoning success, the idea of him as our #1 target has really grown on me and I'd be thrilled to bring him in for 2018. Absolutely thrilled.

Wow. Just wow.

Agreed, except for one caveat - The chance that we'd pay huge money to draw "the big name" in. I still absolutely believe that money is everything with regards to attracting the right coach. I'm fine with someone making the argument that we don't have "huge money" to spend. That could be possible. But the very nature of the amount of guaranteed money that goes along with contracts is very alluring to any potential coach. We see the "very few coaches want to swim in our fishbowl" argument here, but the fact is that we don't spend Top 10 coaching salary figures. I can't figure out why we don't do it.

That's an interesting discussion point. I agree with what you're saying to a degree. What I really liked about Beck's offense was the element of the power run melded with the zone read. There was a lot of outside running - Power tosses, jet sweeps, outside zones. I loved that. Langsdorf's rushing concept is almost entirely limited to putting (often times) seven bodies on the line of scrimmage and running an inside zone where the I-Back has to basically just get lucky to find a hole in a huge mixing bowl of bodies. I'm sick of it.

Good research, +1. That compilation is pretty much astounding. Imagine our program doing that...