LAblackshirt

I would love it to see a blowout. I hope I'm wrong but I think this will be tougher game than many think. Shenault will be the best skill player we play all year, and Montes can get the ball to him as he proved last year. Montes is a gamer. Mel has a great Defensive mind, and the cupboard isn't bare. I think we may win, but close game. 35-28.

Yeah, I'm of the opinion Stanley wasn't a game breaker or game changer. As already mentioned his separation against talented DBs was minimal. I'd take it one step further and say I wasn't always that impressed with his hands either. I think why he originally captured scouts attention is his overall athleticism. He was all around a good WR at the college level but didnt stand out in any one category. That being said I think he played a key leadership role for this team, and without him the season could've been even worse. Call me crazy but the tape for kanawai noa makes me think he's got better hand, is more physical, and runs better routes than stanley. I guess that's what highlight tapes are for though, haven't seen anything but highlights.

I disagree with everyone saying there isn't an upside to firing a coach who has lost control of the team. Its been seen before where a firing points the team in a unified direction (which we are lacking) for the remainder of the season. It can then be apparent to the players that instead of blindly following a dead man walking you are playing for the future, and the film the next Head Coach will watch. That is for sure an improvement. I also believe it gets the attention of the recruits who are on the fence or recently decommited. None of they guys he had committed were committed to Mike Riley, they were committed to the University of Nebraska. We still have so much of what they liked, they need to know we are moving forward. Seriously how great would it be to watch a Parella lead Huskers with nothing to lose? Sounds pretty fun to watch.

Id love to see a Husker team lead by Parella to finish the year. They literally could not be less effective on Offense no matter who is coaching. We could send Larry the Cable Guy out their with a magic 8 ball and 10 fortune cookies and we would get better play calling.

I was born in Omaha, but outside of that I never lived in the state of Nebraska. Spent most my life in Georgia and So-Cal. I'm a Husker fan because they represent to me everything that's right with America. They represent a state of people that bust their ass to get what they get and don't expect handouts from anyone. Just like my parents and their parents. The Husker have always represented the "good guys" to me. Not in the sense that every fan feels, but in the sense that I have always felt they were a clean program who didn't represent drunk rednecks living vicariously through their team, but hardworking families. I have been to plenty of So-Cal and SEC game-days and there is nothing to this day like Lincoln, NE. My sisters boyfriend went with us for the Oregon game a year ago, as a die hard and lifelong Georgia fan he admitted to me that he had never been to a game-day like that day. Its a one of a kind team for a one of a kind place. I have faith they will be back. No good program has ever avoided having down periods and we are no exception. We will be back because Nebraska is special, in its fans, facilities, traditions, culture, and prosperity. I go back every year for a game for the last 8 years. This year will be no different.

Embrace the pain. It will make you stronger

Touche' sir, you just need to watch them 220 times and bam it's Saturday

The season is close, but not close enough. Enjoy these few videos while you wait for the soon to come glory (or doom depending on who is reading this).

My cup floweth over with KoolAid

I have Vue as well. I really enjoy it with all the major game carriers.

Mike Riley doubters frequently point to the fact he was a .500 coach while at Oregon State, and this means he will always be a.500 coach. Gary Andersen (Remember the guy who destroyed us when we were ranked 10th?) took over a 5 - 7 Oregon State football squad and has proceeded to be .25 at Oregon State. Does this change your perspective on Mike Riley's record at OSU? This is Andersens 3rd year with OSU and he has his own guys, but they just started out with a blowout loss to Colorado State.

Lots of good points here. I really wish I could know specifically what is was they saw in one scrimmage that made them feel confident enough to stake publicly that they had pulled away from the rest of the B1G west.

Saw that noted as a quote from Gerry Dinardo after watching a scrimmage Friday. McKewon even noted he thought that Wisconsin was a playoff contender this season. I gotta be honest the last few years I have written off everything that the BTN crew has said as just a guess. Last season though I noticed that despite our 7-0 start we ended up about where the BTN crew said we would in the divisional rankings. I went back and looked at their quotes from our training camp and saw them pointing out a "softness" that at the time I excused as bias, but there is no arguing we saw that later on in the season during the blowout losses. This season I decided I would take their evaluations further into account when setting my expectations and was pleasantly surprised with the feedback that we got. Now I see this though and I wonder if thinking we can beat Wisconsin (which until now I gave us a 60% chance) is realistic at all. What do you guys think? Beating Wisconsin realistic this year? Do you believe the BTN crews evaluations are accurate?

I'm pretty bullish on the offensive line. After re-watching each of the games last year the perception that our O-line wasn't good typically comes from in part the following things: - Starting 2 guys who were not starter quality, due to injury - Tommy's pocket presence/ lack there of (seriously I re-watched every game multiple times and don't recall one time he stepped up into the pocket effectively) - Inability to run the ball at times due to 7-9 guys in the box because the defense knew we weren't throwing it successfully This year with a healthy O-line and a QB that keeps defenses honest and understands the pocket I think we will see a lot of improvement.

I think on the Stanley Morgan play Tommy had said something to Morgan about running a poor/incorrect route. My opinion is it was just a (very) inaccurate pass, and apparently Stanley felt the same and wasn't too happy about Armstrong putting it on him.

As has been said many times, this list is the least credible list I can imagine. Clearly made using some arbitrary mixture of recent success and proximity to talent. Reality is there is much more to it than that. Things like resources, facilities, pay, consistency, fan support, tradition, and culture. Nebraska is top 10 in every single one of those categories.

Prototype is just the ideal mold for the position. Those guys you listed aren't prototypes they are outliers at the position due to their physical freakishness.

After reading up on the 3-4 scheme I figured it would be interesting to see how what experts consider to be ideal player traits for each position lineup with our first depth chart released for spring. I only did the front 7 since the secondary prototypes don’t seem to be as different between the two defensive philosophies. Forewarning – this website lists ideal prototypes for the NFL, so take that into account. Also I am aware that Diaco will not run the standard 3-4 and so this needs to be kept in perspective. I have literally no motivation of making a good or bad point I just thought it would be interesting to see. Formatted as: Position – Ideal – our listed starter(s) Defensive End – 6’3 300lb – 6’4 270lb, 6-2 300lb Nose Tackle - 6’2-6’4 350lb – 6’5 315lb Outside LB – 6’3 225lb – 6’1 235, 6’5 255 Inside LB – 6’3 240lb – 6’1 230, 6’3 240 Edit: The prototypes also listed additional characteristics like 40 times and 225 bench press reps. I couldn't find much of that for our players though so I left it out. If anyone knows where I can find that info for all our starters I will include it.

Really??? Because if I'm a defense and I know the QB I'm playing against doesn't make good decisions and isn't a strong passer, I might favor the run heavily... Bottom line, Tommy could not throw like a QB should be able to, teams knew this and keyed their defensive schemes around it. And shouldn't have an offense ranked 90th no matter who we have at QB is the most idiotic thing I've read on these forums (congratulations on that). Could have put Drew Brown at QB and had a better offense than we had last year by your logic. So you think Nebraska's talent is 90th in the country? If the QB was sooooo bad, then why not use one of the other QB's? Plenty of true freshman QBs have done very well in college football lately. Do you think all of our QBs are 90th or worse in the country? Osborne won with Matt Turman for goodness sakes. Do you think any defenses ever stacked against our run, ever? Or do so now against any rush heavy teams? Spot on. There is no excuse for offensive performance this poor. There really is. We finished 78th in scoring offense (not that it's that different) and we played 2 top 5 scoring defenses, 3 top 15 scoring defenses, and 5 top 25 scoring defenses. We had a quarterback ranked as the worst in the conference (the B1G was not even a good QB conference) in passing by Pro Football Focus and that was before his worst games. We ran a vanilla offense this year to help Armstrong which of course makes it easier to stop. Look I get why many people blame Riley for our offensive struggles, there is really no one else better suited for it. I just believe the circumstances prevented him from having a fair chance of a good offense.

Yeah, not a great year talent wise. Anyone else feel like 9 wins isn't so bad now?

I appreciate you doing all of these analytics. Do you have a comparison of NU? Be interesting to see our perception, vs statistical reality. Regardless, those stats look pretty good. ND seems to have a pretty tough schedule every year as well. No problem, Diaco vs. Pelini 2009- 14th - 20th 2010- 23rd - 19th 2011- 15th - 31st 2012- 10th - 19th 2013- 23rd - 46th At first when I saw Pelini's 2009 defense ranked 20th it made me second guess these rankings. Then I recalled going to the Oklahoma game that year and watching Suh time and time again make big plays to stop drives. They actually moved the ball somewhat against us, but when they got in scoring range Suh would force a pick, or sack Landry (they finished with 325 yards offense and 3 points). That was a great defense to be sure, but Suh was the centerpiece and made it look better than it was. Banker this year was 59th for the record.

Question: do most on this board feel we were running Banker's defense as such or were we playing something a little different until he had 'his players' in place? Just curious what opinions may be? I don't recall any discussion or comments coming out suggesting we were not but just to be fair to players and coaches alike, were we fully installed in the Riley/Banker defense as they would have ideally preferred? Presumably we were running the Riley & Company special teams game - obviously not so ideal in my view? I would say that most any coach could have found a way to fully install and implement his 'system' whatever that may be in the areas of special teams assuming you have a good punter and kicker on the roster. Nobody seriously has issues with Drew Brown (he has performed pretty well - give him a B+ surely). Punting was an "F" by most anyone's standards. This in turn hurt the defense by poor field position which put undue pressure on them on far too many possessions, and consequently the offense was often starting from a hole. In the end, there are plenty of areas on the team where big jumps can be made with some 'fixes' arguably. Caleb punted much better in the bowl game for example. This bodes well for next fall in my opinion. We must get a big jump in return yardage and find a way to block a couple and make some more big plays in the special teams generally. Those are game changers and can turn momentum and turn an ugly loss into a 'lucky' win. Those really help. Arguably we have the talent to make these improvements without a big change in roster so 2017 can yield real improvement without working miracles. I think we ran Banker's system right away honestly. Defense is a little easier to make changes too, personnel differences aren't as great from Bankers new scheme to what Pelini had. Riley's offensive scheme is much different than what Pelini ran, especially for the QB position which is obviously the most important on the field. An offense with the wrong RB personnel can get by, WR too. An offense who's QB is not a good fit for that system is never good. I encourage anyone to find me an example that contradicts that. That's why our offense was so bad this year and why we couldn't really run Riley's offense. Riley tried to run it with Tommy (why not? he has excellent arm strength) but we all saw that TA just could pull it off. This year was an attempt to find a middle ground on offense with Armstrong and it obviously didn't work out too well. People are quick to blame Langs and Riley for that, but I don't see how that makes sense. Tommy has shown briefly in the past he came make some pretty great throws, it wasn't unreasonable for them to assume he would continue to progress. Unfortunately he did not. Why didn't they pull the Red Shirt? Could honestly be a million reasons, from POB not being ready, to worrying about it hurting team morale. Since we aren't in the locker room we don't get to know. To assume they didn't pull the red-shirt because they don't know how to coach is a pretty big assumption in my opinion.

Interestingly Enough the Football Outsiders have there own Efficiency Index rankings that are even more detailed than ESPN's. They include elements of the ESPN index but add in field position and other things. Here is a link to the description - http://www.footballoutsiders.com/stats/fei2009. These are Diaco's rankings as a DC: 2009- 14th 2010- 23rd 2011- 15th 2012- 10th 2013- 23rd That's pretty damn good. That makes me feel a lot more optimistic.

Ppg they were ranked 2nd in 2012 Considering all the number crunchers out there and all the stats that are kept so maticulously by the sports world and football in particular, it would seem like there would already be some very detailed data and 'factors' in place to determine things like this. These are excellent numbers in my view. I am wondering if adding some data on starting field position for the opponent's offense and average number of plays per opponent's possession, ending field position, number of first downs given up per possession, turnover margin, number of big plays yielded, etc could also be incorporated into a meaningful matrix to yield a 'defensive performance index' or something of the sort? One might find that when taking into account the circumstances, some defensive success may be holding the opponent to just a field goal after taking the field to defend when they get to start in your own red zone. Points given up are an indicator over a long season but there ought be consensus that if you own team's offense is poor and turns the ball over too frequently or punts after a bunch of 3 and outs, the defense will not have a chance to produce superior gross numbers. For example, I feel Nebraska's offense this year punted far too often after only a few plays and poor punts resulted in poor field position for our defense, putting us in a tough spot. Not defending Banker by this but am feeling that our defensive numbers might have been better had we had better offensive line push. Our pass rush was NOT good and we yielded too many big plays and gave up critical first downs when we managed to get our opponents in third and longs all too often. Admittedly there are so many factors that come into play but it would seem a system could be designed to look at down and distance, game circumstances, time of possession, whether ahead or behind, time remaining, etc etc etc. Not being critical here - just asking if anyone is aware of any of this type of 'deep' statistical analysis being done and if not, why not? Seems quite logical to me. Yeah, TOP is often times an element of great defenses. It is definitely not the best indicator though. Another great statistic for more in depth defensive performance analysis is the "Team Efficiency" that ESPN does. "Team efficiencies are based on the point contributions of each unit to the team's scoring margin, on a per-play basis. The values are adjusted for strength of schedule and down-weighted for "garbage time" (based on win probability). The scale goes from 0 to 100; higher numbers are better and the average is roughly 50 for all categories." - That's the description from ESPN. Here are the Defensive Efficiency rankings for Diaco at Cincy and Notre Dame. 2009- 56th 2010- 19th 2011- 23rd 2012- 10th 2013- 49th

I was neither overwhelmed or underwhelmed. I was just whelmed.