redtrout

That's interesting, I hadn't heard that before. I found an article which had this to say:

LOL! Dave Bartoo said that Riley was a good hire back in December. Heres a link: A LOOK AT THE HUSKERS UPGRADE AND BEAVERS LOSS

Oh yeah, that QB coach would Steve Calhoun, the same coach that helped Martinez with his improvement between his sophomore and junior seasons.

I think I remember reading that USC had offered him and tried to get him to commit before his visit to Nebraska. Not totally sure about that and I don't think we have any way to really know. If players don't publicize their offers the recruiting services won't show them. Regardless, he is having a fantastic senior season and has looked great. According to MaxPreps his passing stats are 148/185 for 1998 yards, 21 TDs, and 4 ints. Thats 80% completion percentage, 10.8 yards per attempt, and 142.6 QB rating. And his rushing stats are 64 carries for 478 yards (7.4 yards per carry) and 5 TDs. Those are through 7 games. Those are some pretty crazy stats and are a huge improvement over his junior season. They also indicate a strong work ethic and desire to get better. I can't wait to see what he becomes once Riley and Langsdorf get ahold of him. OC Varsity named him the mid-season offensive player of the year. He got the nod over the very highly rated Stanford QB commit KJ Costello for that. That article also says he has 8 rushing TDs which is more than MaxPreps. I also saw a video from MaxPreps in which they mention him as a player to watch for their player of the year award. Like MattyIce said, his recruiting ranking have really risen since his commitment. At least among the services that have bothered to update them. 247 now has him in their top 100. He hasn't been playing QB all that long and his high school is his actual local school. I think this is only their 8th season. Those two facts contributed to him being under the radar for most of his career. A lot of reasons for a lot of excitement here!

There is basically zero correlation between a team's average penalty yards and their winning percentage during a season. Here's a scatter plot of the two for all FBS team seasons from 2005 through 2013. The R2 was about 0.01

Wow, what a sh**ty piece of clickbait garbage. This guy says: And then he says: These two statement directly contradict each other. Nebraska is a blue blood and belongs among other blue bloods, and is simultaneously crazy to fire Pelini? Firing Pelini and trying to hire a better coach was a "prayer and a pipe dream?" 9 wins a year and no championships is success even though Nebraska is a blue blood program and belongs with those other 4 programs? Jesus Christ. A few months ago this guy wrote: Soo... this guy sees Nebraska being a worse team and having a worse record than before? And he thinks better days are ahead, despite that? And we have to be patient? But now we need to fire our coach after year one? What happened to needing to be patient? This clown is contradicting himself again. Clickbait trash.

I really prefer yards per play to yards per game or totals. Our defense is tied for 94th in yard allowed per pass attempt and 25th in yards allowed per rush. Minnesota's offense is 118th in yards per pass attempt. Northwestern and Purdue are tied at 116th.

Gabe Miller was injured and retired. Deandre Wills left after less than a month here.

Dwayne Johnson didn't make the 105 for fall camp. Lorenzo Stewart and Jaevon Walton didn't make it to campus.

Riley really did do great things at Oregon State. 538 had an article this year about which teams outperform their recruiting rankings. From 2005-2014 OSU averaged 4th best in the country among P5 teams at that. That doesn't happen without good coaching. A short series of articles about positive coach effects on footballstudyhall included one about Riley. From the article: It's his first year. We haven't had to the chance to see his main strengths as a coach. His W/L record is deceiving. We are talking about a program that had 26 straight losing seasons and averaged 2.2 wins a year during that period before Riley was hired. And nearly every year he faced tough schedules. Over the past 11 years the Sagarin rankings had OSU's SOS ranked 2, 31, 15, 16, 8, 23, 1, 19, 13, 18, and 47. The 2010 team had the second toughest schedule in the 17 years of the Sagarin rankings. That team finished #29 in the Sagarin rankings. But because of the brutal schedule schedule the team finished 5-7. A bad record but not really a bad team. But it stalled out and they had two bad seasons over the past five years (yes, two, not four, according to computer rankings that take SOS into account). I still think there's a great chance that he'll do well at Nebraska.

bump. Please listen to the man. All these meltdowns accomplish nothing.

538 did an analysis of which teams have outperformed their recruiting rankings over the past ten years and Wisconsin finished first out of P5 teams. Oregon State finished fourth. My prediction is that Wisconsin will fall and Nebraska will rise in these categories.

I think that what we've seen so far in 2015 is fairly similar to what we saw at the end of 2014. Let's compare Bo's last 3 games to Riley's first 3 games. Bo: 59-24 loss at Wisconsin. As bad as it gets. 28-24 loss at home to Minnesota. This game was pretty close. DPE had the ball around the Nebraska 5 or so at the very end but Minnesota forced a fumble. 37-34 OT win at Iowa. Iowa's first three drives: all got inside the Nebraska 10 but the first two came away with nothing and only a FG on the third. Iowa left a lot of points on the table here. They were up 24-7 in the end of the third quarter but basically just decided to punt the game away to DPE. Nebraska came back to tie a game that they never should have been in and won in OT. Riley: 33-28 loss at home to BYU. Lost on a hail mary. 48-9 win at home over S. Alabama. A blowout of a bad team. 36-33 OT loss at Miami. Nebraska came out flat for most of the game and Miami left a lot of points on the table in the middle/end of the game. Nebraska came back in a game that they never should have been in thanks to some poor coaching decisions by Miami but lost in OT. Don't those Iowa and Miami games sound fairly similar? BYU is ranked in the low 20s just like Minnesota was after the win. Those games sound pretty similar as well. Nebraska gave up 471 yard per game in those 3 games in 2014, giving up tons of rushing yards. Nebraska gave up 511 yards per game to Miami and BYU, giving up tons of passing yards. My two favorite computer ranking systems are the Sagarin Rankings and the F/+ Rankings by Football Outsiders. Nebraska is currently ranked #30 in both. At the end of 2014 Nebraska finished #29 in Sagarin and #30 in the F/+ rankings. Again, about the same. This team obvious has a lot of issues, some of them very serious. But that's just the type of team this was at the end of last season. It hasn't gotten better yet. There are just different issues. But the difference is that we are in game 3 as opposed to the end of year 7. I'm excited about what Riley's teams will do once they are fully comfortable with the new schemes and consist of more players that were actually recruited to play in them. GBR.

Here is a list of all teams from power 5 conferences which have lost at least 4 games every year over the past 7 seasons: B1G Minnesota Purdue Indiana Maryland Illinois Nebraska Rutgers PAC Cal Washington State Washington Arizona Oregon State Colorado B12 Kansas Iowa State SEC Vanderbilt Ole Miss Kentucky Tennessee ACC NC State Virginia Duke Boston College Miami UNC Wake Forest Syracuse

What I want to see is progress. The kind of season that makes us all expect great things in 2016. Not just hope for them, or expect them in the sense that they better do it (or else!), but expect them in the sense that we actually predict that a great season is more likely than not. Realistically I just don't see this years team competing with tOSU for the B1G title. Possible, sure, but it would be a pretty big upset if it were to happen. But I look at the distribution of scholarships, see who is leaving and who will replace them, and I think the 2016 team could actually compete with teams like tOSU. So when I approach the question of whether I would prefer 9-4 with all close losses or 10-3 with a blowout loss with this perspective in mind, my initial thought is that I would prefer to see the 9-4 with all close losses. Because my guess is that that 9-4 team is closer to great things than the 10-3 team is. A team that comes to mind for me is 2012 MSU. They had 6 losses, 5 of which were very close. And then the next year they won the B1G and the Rose Bowl. Some Nebraska teams that come to mind for me are the 2009 and 2010 teams. Both 4 loss teams, but the rankings to begin the next year were #8 and #10. Those 2009 and 2010 had 4 losses but they were almost all close losses, and the country looked at those teams and expected top 10 teams the next year. Bo's next few 4 loss teams? The expectations following those seasons were not nearly as high. Progress is what I wanted to see from Bo last year. I didn't care about the record all that much, I just wanted to see a team that if they didn't bring home a championship at least made us halfway expect one the following year. I didn't see that and supported his firing. And that's what I again want to see from Riley this year. A team that makes some people actually pick Nebraska to win the B1G in 2016. A team that makes us excited about the future and honestly predict great things to come.