Husker in WI

From his post-game presser, sounded like Ethan Nation might be the punt returner moving forward. Rhule mentioned Bullock fumbling and playing a lot of snaps at receiver, and said he told Nation it was his turn after the game. Now maybe Nation drops kicks all week in practice, or someone talks Rhule out of it - but it was in the context of talking about how pretty much everyone given an opportunity has been making the most of it, and Rhule wants to give more opportunities. Side note, I don't think it's a knee-jerk reaction to Bullock muffing one either. He never even tried to field the subsequent punts in the game - one of which would've been tough and the right call was to let it drop, but the almost-touchback should have been a fair catch and he didn't go for it. And on their last punt we didn't even put a returner back, although that may have been to avoid a blocker getting clipped by the ball if it hung up in the wind. In any case, I think it got to Bullock's confidence and that's hard to come back from as a returner.

That definitely happened, but as I'm re-watching there are at least 3 of each of the following (some were the other Edge, Scourton) Pulling Guard just gets totally deked and barely brushes his shoulder (I saw at least 2 Lutovsky, 1 Evans-Jenkins) Backside TE is tasked with at least slowing the edge down and just fails miserably And the reverse to Lloyd where it was set up pretty nicely but he was able to shed Boerkircher easily and drag Lloyd down. Definitely plenty of plays where indecision gave the unblocked backside defender time to come in, and when they did they hit hard. Maybe they are just so good they made it look easy, and I definitely came away impressed with both of them. But I also wonder if Piper/Nouili wouldn't have made a significant difference, some of those plays with pulling Guards looked real good until you see the ball carrier on the ground and the OL turned around watching the guy who just beat him.

The wording here cracks me up - he hasn't been expected to return since the contract amendment was announced. Barring some "well he didn't fulfill the requirements to roll the contract over, but we're re-signing him separately" BS that is now entirely untenable with the optics overall. If they averaged 21 and won the West that might've worked though.

I think the public shaming and saying you're just going to replace them can work with certain types of players. He wants guys who aren't afraid of that because they just can't envision a scenario where they play poorly enough to be called out. But the portal is already thin on OL and it seems like that narrows your options further. If Colorado were the place to be it might work, but why would a starting caliber OL choose them over Michigan, Oklahoma, or any of the already good teams that consistently grab transfer OL from the portal and place guys in the NFL. You also probably need to worry about how long your position coach will last - he was pretty clearly a Sean Lewis guy rather than handpicked by Deion, so it's not hard to imagine him being gone as early as this offseason. To Deion's credit, he has his opinion and he doesn't change based on backlash. Pitt's coach (Narduzzi) made probably worse statements about his players, then due to the backlash sort of walked them back? But not really, just the coach speak "it all falls on me." So I'd guess Narduzzi is a lot closer to losing his team's buy-in than Deion is, honestly that looks worse to me.

I could see that, but it's another game where if we hit a shot play or two and maybe recover more than one of our own fumbles it could be similar to the Purdue game.

Jenkins made a lot of plays, but it was frustrating how many of them started with being unblocked.

EDIT: Red Five beat me to it.

Nebraska 24 Purdue 13 Passing 140 Rushing 175

I mean I can't speak to mechanics but it does seem like that's the plan at least. Who knows how they'll do, but Kaelin and the 2025 guys we're after (Manske) are more throw-first if that's what you're getting at.

Kinda depends on what you mean by guys like Brock Purdy and Kenny Pickett. Do you mean mid 3-star QBs that no one else is really going after? We can do that, but most of them are not Kenny Pickett or Brock Purdy. If it was easy to tell, they wouldn't be random mid tier 3 stars. As a side note, Matt Rhule's Temple Owls were Kenny Pickett's first offer, at least according to 247sports. He obviously chose Pitt and was in the 2017 class after Rhule had left, but was offered by Temple back in the Spring of 2015. So if there is a secret to identifying these guys Rhule would appear to have a clue.

Minnesota (Sims) - QB Sneak Colorado (Sims) - Ervin Run Northern Illinois - Haarberg Run La Tech - Pass (Sack) Michigan - Grant Run Illinois - QB Sneak Northwestern - Pass (INT) So yeah 0-2 on execution, with both being pretty spectacular failures. I generally like taking a shot first play, usually the worst that happens is an incompletion and if you hit it you're off to a great start. I couldn't tell whether the La Tech one was open or not (and the back/OL just missed the LB blitzing when he saw the back stay in), but the NW one was. Open to the point, IMO, that if we aren't confident Haarberg can make that read/throw he shouldn't be starting. So I dunno, it's frustrating and I would also probably err toward the easier to execute plays you mentioned. But when other teams know that's what we're going to do it gets tough, and I'm assuming Haarberg can do it. So I'm not going to be upset if we come out throwing again.

In Hartzog's defense, we have an unblocked safety blitz so sitting on the short route makes some sense. You can't be bite that hard, but letting Sullivan even get this pass off is also a problem. Jeudy flies right by him, to the point where Sullivan was able to stop, set his feet, and throw. But I do agree Hartzog has been the weakest link in the secondary. And yeah, if you give that up you better at least catch him.

Right, nobody wants to win on a net violation. But it's not the first time a game has ended on one, it's just annoying that review even had to be involved.

That's what opponents are sitting on though - even if we could hold on to the slants and hitches, the DBs were right there. And the safeties/nickels were firing up so hard on the options that the TEs couldn't block them. I mean I get your point, I hold my breath waiting for an INT every time we drop back for a deeper pass. But to me it would be more insane to continue to run the same short passing concepts and runs into a defense committing everyone to stopping those plays.

I just don't think you can dial it back much more. That wasn't a super complicated play, seems like we got exactly what we wanted out of the defense. Defenses already seem pretty keyed into what we're trying to do, IMO it would be irresponsible to not even try to take advantage of defenses overcommitting to the run game. We ran the ball 64% of the time. And more importantly, if we just make a slightly better throw the narrative is how great an opening playcall it was by Satterfield. There were a few games in the Beck era where we hit a deep shot right off the bat, this was called well enough to be one of those and it's not an insanely difficult throw.

Different play, he was talking about hitting the option pass. Which was a nice throw but I think an easier read, although sounds like Coleman isn't technically the first look on that play.

I thought he did a good job too, but I think he left a couple bigger runs out there on the 2 counters starting at 9 seconds in the video. It's quite possibly the TEs (Boerkricher?) fault, but both times I think a little more patience from Emmett would have allowed the second puller to handle the guy who ends up making first contact. On the first play Emmett gets through him anyway and maybe the TE is doing what he was supposed to, but if he's totally clean getting up to the safety he might score. And the second one he gets stuffed where there was a lot of space on the second level, and the TE is just kinda waiting to seal the guy Emmett ran right into. Again, could be the TEs fault. Maybe being more "patient" allows somebody else to come free for a TFL. And maybe he's specifically taught to press upfield ASAP and it's just a scheme thing to avoid TFLs on counters. But on the rewatch, those are the 2 I noticed where they could have hit bigger - and I'm sure we'll make some adjustments regardless of who should have done something differently.

I don't have a problem with it. That first play would have been a massive gain if Haarberg hit either of the open guys, probably because NW knew they were a bad run defense and we have a decent run offense. Second drive we only threw on 3rd and 7 (if we ran more successfully on 2nd down maybe could have run on 3rd). 3rd drive the toss to Kemp on 1st doesn't count in my mind. Then its 2nd and 13, where it makes sense to pass. Followed that up by only passing on 3rd downs the next drive. I've not been super impressed with Satterfield overall, but at least for the 1st quarter the issues had nothing to do with playcalling or run/pass splits.

TT hasn't won in a month, so he's probably just checked out. Or maybe he didn't like review deciding the final point.

Yeah, on the re-watch they did a pretty good job of running other plays from empty in general - but you know we weren't going to pass it there. If we don't have some kind of play action pass off of the QB draw by the end of the year I will be very disappointed. It's a weird one to do that with since it's kind of a double fake, but honestly I think they'd still bite in the right situation if he fakes the draw immediately instead of drop back, fake forward, then back to throw.

Well if they're allowed to start 12 defenders this could be a long game: I didn't realize how big they are, I'd assume we see more of the 3-4 than whatever they do (2-4-5, 4-2-5, 3-3-5) for nickel. Some mildly interesting things that I will happily read into too much on our depth chart - Doss is the only slot, and I would think given Purdue's size defensively we'd like to get them in space. It would be nice to have Kemp, guess we'll see what Doss can do. This might have more to do with Hill's play, but it's odd to me that we have Hartzog starting at Safety over Brown (no OR) Curious who shows up out of nowhere like James Williams this week. They definitely have different guys targeted for different weeks, Wallin was a rotational DL early but will probably keep his redshirt, I'd assume we see more Williams in 3 other games. At this point the ORs are definitely not alphabetical, but does that mean they mean something or they just don't bother sorting? It sure seems like the OR now means starter/backup - at least with RB, and I think for the defensive positions as well. I don't think they've touched TE, or QB since Sims got fully healthy.

And now it's PERSONAL

I think the in-state thing is playing a significant role - not in preferring him over Sims, because setting aside all stats and how they've played it's hard to pick the 0-2 guy over the 4-1 guy. But Haarberg is not playing particularly well overall, and a lot of the defense of his play I think is coming from the fact that people really want him to succeed as the Nebraska kid. I think the criticisms of QB play would be louder in spite of the 4-1 record if it was Purdy, or Sims, or Smothers with identical performances.

And one of the healthy receivers is now the 3rd string RB instead...

Somebody asked about them since they weren't listed by Rhule as OL who are ready to step up (Teddy, Lutovsky, JEJ, Knaak) and he said they will likely play, but more thinking about special teams/heavy packages. Not ready to rotate in. Also thought it was interesting - Rhule said their 2 big things in the gameplan this week were Billy Kemp (which he said postgame), and heavy sets with extra OL (Think we had 7 OL on one play). Obviously when Kemp got hurt that took out that piece, but we also couldn't do the heavy stuff. Satterfield still needs to have better answers, but that does explain some of the frustrating offensive futility. Relatively limited gameplans with an inexperienced QB, and then cut out a big chunk of that and it's tough.