Undone

Bring back the eye roll! Haha. Oh I agree with that. Just pointing out that it doesn't typically work like that in our free market job society we live in. Now, giving bonuses for doing well? Hell yeah. I could see that maybe, and that could be some good incentive. Probably not even within the "rules" (and we all know there aren't even any rules really anyway). Coaching contracts should work like that but they don't.

Is that how it works at your job?

Agreed there. But nevertheless it's kind of in conflict with Rhule's statement of basically saying "Well, shucks...a good QB costs a lot of money these days!" Because if money isn't the problem, you buy the best players you can get and you develop them. It's an arms race. Don't f*** up with another Jeff Sims, coach. And if Purdy is the guy, make him significantly better than he is right now by week 1 next season.

I can't say there's any direct correlation with this stat and NIL funding, but I saw data prior to this season starting that we are top 5 in football net revenue. That's net revenue. We ranked ahead of Alabama. Again - maybe doesn't correlate to NIL funding. But just throwing that out there.

Oh, so this is how this works? Because I'm pretty sure somebody will write a check.

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.

The bold is what I noticed all season long. And Satterfield was pretty fond of going to these types of pass plays after converting a first down. That was hard to watch.

I hear you. Couple things though. I imagine "total plays per game" ranks towards the bottom of FBS either way with how we run the play clock down on every damn play and then also had so many drives get killed with turnovers. So you combine that with not having a QB who can even remotely reliably throw the ball until game 11, and yeah, not surprising that's where we ranked. Sometimes we asked our QB to run the ball on third down when 1st down was a pathetically executed "stand in the pocket and scan the field on slow-developing routes" plays that resulted in incompletions or sacks. I noticed this happening a lot. I guess we'd file this under 'play calling.' So it's not abandoning the run, but it's situationally bad.

I think this largely happened because it turned out that we didn't have a QB that could reliably find open receivers and/or hit them in the passing game. Sims couldn't do it and Haarberg couldn't do it. I thought the best conference game on offense was against Wisconsin from a play mix & execution standpoint. I'm not going to count the Purdue game because they're just a horrible team. We got a dynamic QB in there in game 11 against a decent opponent (obviously Wisconsin is way down from where they've been), and then things looked different when Purdy was finding guys as they were breaking open and actually hitting them. I mean, hey...the criticism over "no good QB is going to want to come here out of the portal" maybe has legs. Maybe. Iowa is currently in this doom loop with offensive skill player recruiting.

He did? Ok: we're a zone read & RPO offense. Think "Philadelphia Eagles" but with just a bit more 12 man personnel mixed in there.

Yeah. I don't know if there are stats for what percentage of 3rd downs were yardages of less than 5. So somebody can disagree with this if just the eye ball test I'm going off of is inaccurate. But one thing I maybe should have added to my list of negatives was being in 3rd & long what seemed like a lot. The QB scrambles tend to increase the yards per carry stat. There's nothing wrong with this. But you also have to run the ball well on 1st & 2nd down. Sometimes Satterfield would go away from the run after picking up the first - I definitely have an issue with that. I think it played some kind of role in setting up 3rd & longs because Haarberg couldn't handle a lot of those types of called passing plays. I think this is a legitimate gripe.

I don't know why it matters so much to be able to put some kind of concise sounding label on "what kind of offense do you have?" What we need out of our offense is literally anything that can put up at least 24 points in any given conference game, at this point. It's probably more beneficial and more accurate to talk about what we did well and what we didn't do well. I think it's a short list: -At least in terms of yards per game, we ran the ball pretty well. -We were really bad throwing the ball. -We were completely atrocious with turnovers. Ok. So does a change in scheme change those two things we were bad at? I say "no," but lots of people on here seem to think it does.

I normally start the blame with the staff and then work down to the players. I think you could maybe lay quite a bit of blame on Satterfield for Sims' problems, but then again he only played two games. We were probably one false start by an offensive lineman and an Anthony Grant fumble away from winning that one regardless. But yeah, since the staff pretty clearly saw Sims as the starter from even before the spring game, I can lay some blame on Satterfield for Sims not being ready. But also Sims is just not a very good player. It's harder for me personally to lay much more blame on Satterfield for the stuff Haarberg struggled with because he was actually the 3rd string QB but played as the 2nd string guy because of Purdy's injury.

Which honestly to me looked like it was actually elevating his play above Haarberg's instead of hurting things. Just talking about him doing this in general against Wisconsin & Iowa.

I think the tackles started doing a better job specifically at working guys to the outside instead of letting them get inside leverage in the back half of the season. We had times Haarberg would get a little flushed out of the pocket but was totally fine on the roll out. And he'd have a guy open...and we saw some Jammal Lord-esque moments at times where the ball just didn't go even remotely where it was supposed to go. But like, sure - if the pass protection is a thing where your QB can stand there perfectly still for 6 seconds, things are better. In the back half of the season pass protection didn't seem to be a huge issue.

On defense I don't know who officially was a captain, but Butler seemed to be a really fiery, vocal leader - both on and off the field. You love to see it and I think he backed it up with his play. On offense, Purdy probably gets the nod after Sims got the ankle injury if he hadn't had an injury of his own. And I can't prove it but I'm better we get one more win than we wound up with if he had started in games 3 - 10. I don't think "lack of leadership" caused us to turn the ball over like we did, but I'm sure I could be wrong on that.

I would love it if Marcus Washington got an injury waiver and came back but it seems unlikely.

There could be an extra sort of jump that Purdy makes in the offseason if he believes he has a decent chance of being QB1 next year. Everybody and their brother has guesses on which QB we pull out of the portal and there's just no way to know what happens with that right at the moment.

That's a good point.

I'm not sure whether this is anything more than just interesting trivia. If you have a good team, you're winning quite a few games by more than one score. 2023 Nebraska was not a good team.

That's what I'm thinking. Back to turnovers: I remember getting kind of s*** on for making comments here after the spring game about all of the fumbles there. I was told it wouldn't translate at all to the season. I can even look up those posts just for fun. Anyway...it was indicative of what was to come. The turnovers existed way before Rhule got here. And yes, then they got even worse. This staff consists of adults who I'm positive are capable of thinking & strategizing; if they don't fix it by the first game of next year, Rhule has to look at firing Satterfield. But let's first get a QB in there who can read a defense and threaten a team with his arm. That guy might be Purdy. That's the starting point for me.

If Chubba hadn't been hurt, he probably gets the start against Northern Illinois. If he does, being that I believe his ceiling is higher than Haarberg's & Sims', I think that by the time we hit the Michigan State game he has us scoring a few more points per game than what we had with Haarberg. I can't prove any of that and I'm not expecting anybody to go off of it as it it's entirely true. The problem this season was turnovers (and earlier in the year dumb penalties were still showing up also). If coaching or scheme is the root cause of those problems, then I'm praying we make a change in either of those areas in the offseason. Like, I really am. I just don't think coaching or scheme is the root cause.

Regarding the Twitter link, I'm sure it really is a thing where if the narrative is that Satterfield can't get any production and everyone believes that, it could be hard to land a good passer. So I'm definitely going to give you that. We could probably have our pick of the better run-first guys. But that's not what we need to get out of this purgatory. So it could be hard to convince the kid that's a good passer in the portal to come to Lincoln. Maybe. If I was Rhule and I'm talking to a recruit that's in Purdy's basic zip code (read: good passer and can also run), I'm going to show him film of the Wisconsin game and say "this is what we want to do, and you're going to have this 6'4" burner to throw fades & posts to."

I haven't seen anybody saying he's a "great" coach. Would have to fact check that I guess. If I really thought he was personally the root cause of all of the turnovers, I would actually agree that firing him right now would be a smart move. I'm just pretty skeptical that's the case though.

The offensive line got measurably better over last season, in my opinion. Defense was obviously hugely improved. Special teams was either flat as compared to last year or maybe went down a ways. Hard to rag on the coaches for missed field goals, but the punt returning was pretty bad for a good swath of the year. Turnovers were obviously so bad that if you weren't already hitting the bourbon out of the bottle, you are now. The culture of the team seems improved. So given all of that, I feel like we're basically the same team that we were in Frost's year 2 (2019). It's just that you'd swap the poor offensive performance with the defense from that year, probably. We weren't "close to being a good team" this season because of the turnovers. But it does seem like we started turning the culture around and that's the #1 thing on the list.