Husker in WI

My read on it was he insisted his defense was sound, and that if players did their jobs he wouldn't need to change. Problem is their jobs in his defense were really difficult against teams like Wisconsin. I know there were rumors players weren't doing their assignments in the infamous B1G championship game, but even if they were asking Sean Fisher to chase down Melvin Gordon on a fly sweep is a big ask. Drawing up a "sound" defense isn't difficult, drawing up a sound defense that the players can execute is. I think Pelini's was sound across the board, and was almost revolutionary in how well it put players in places to succeed against the spread. Against other offenses, it asked a lot more of the players and we didn't have LSU-level talent other than Suh.

I mean 4-2-5, Big Nickel, whatever you want to call it - based on how much spread we see it's run as much as the base defense. In our our case it's a 3-3-5 with Domann as the nickel/peso/whatever. And Alex Davis is basically a DE, so it's not that different than what we're doing now. If Alex Davis falls forward so his hand is on the ground, this is a 4-2-5.

Because 3 of those departures were out of our top 6 commits, and it really wasn't a class with a lot of highly rated talent. Dropping 495 "points" isn't a ton, but it is when you only had ~1600 to begin with. Obviously take it with a grain of salt, but it does give us a ballpark of how much of the highly rated talent has been walking out the door. I think it's more helpful than looking just at the number of departures.

Where'd you get the 2017 numbers? I've got 36.4/116th. But in any case, super interesting!

I know I drink way too much kool-aid, but yall are depressing. Year 3 revealed the problems Riley created. I believe year 3 will finally show the progress Frost has made.

I mean the first highlight in this video against USC Suh is celebrating - best I can tell we were only down 7-3 at that point, so not quite the situation you're talking about. To answer your question, I don't know whether they would've celebrated or not because they weren't in those situations. I look forward to the day when we don't have to question whether or not they should be celebrating because we're always winning/competitive.

I just don't know how you measure that because that's not an either/or thing.

See fair enough, I shouldn't have even thrown that in. This year, there's plenty of data to guess at what's going to happen. I just have a problem projecting next year in the same way.

Not to pick on you specifically because a lot of people are throwing out projections, but we have no idea what most of these teams will look like next year. You might not be able to name a player from this year's Iowa team that will still be there next year. As bad as we are this year, we beat NW and Illinois - do we think they will definitely improve more than us? What if Fickell leaves Cincy, does that change your perception of that game? Wisconsin will lose their top 2 LBs (Baun and Orr), Jonathan Taylor, and probably a couple lineman. Quite possibly they reload, who knows. We have no idea at this point. Also, (not that I believe this), but say we turn a corner and take Wisconsin down to the wire, smash Maryland, and beat Iowa by 2 touchdowns. How much would that change your assessment?

I don't disagree with you overall, but let the guys celebrate. Since last year, I haven't seen them celebrating clear situations where they shouldn't, like a hard hit 20 yards downfield. I agree it's better to celebrate when you're winning, but I don't agree with saying they can't show emotion because we're not winning. And I don't think it's a "selfish" move - we've got some expressive players, as we did in the 90s.

There are obviously exceptions to recruiting rankings, but there are just thousands more low rated players coming out of high school. If you take a random 4 star and a random 2 star, the odds are astronomically higher that the 4 star will turn out. And recruiting rankings back to Brady's time aren't great. According to this article, Brady was probably a high 3 low 4 star. Again, the NFL has the benefit of waiting to see how the guys develop in college. If you fill out a college team with 2 star players, you'll end up with maybe a handful of decent players. You will not end up with Aaron Rodgers throwing to Jordy Nelson. You are much, much more likely to get Beau Davis throwing to Santino Panico.

So we've reached this point in the season, huh? Predicting wins and losses at this point is absurd. Injuries, departures, freshmen/transfers are impossible to account for at this point. None of these teams (including us) will be the same next year, so we're just randomly guessing. Outside of Ohio State, they will probably crush us no matter what. One example, Iowa - they're better than us right now, but they're still a bad offense. They will lose their 3 year starter QB and a handful of other starters.They could also lose 2 first round OTs, their first round DE, and their best DB - in that case the team is gutted and I think we should win. If all of those juniors stay, it's a different story. Although I still expect their offense to regress even further without Stanley, and they're already very bad.

At Wisconsin, Orr is very generously listed at 6' and the others are 6'2, 6'2, and 6'3. Other than Chenal (250) they are listed between 224-232. So it's really not the size - an extra inch or two would be nice, but they're not that much taller or bigger than our guys. They absolutely play faster though, and are actually assignment sound. I really thought they'd take a step back there this year, but they just churn these guys out.

Yeah, it's kind of funny because I feel like the whole year I heard that it's just the fans have been burned before, and it will take a lot to buy back in. But the consensus was if they were undefeated going into this game the excitement would be there - and I'm sure it is for many of them. But that is not a large stadium, and I've gotta think almost every other team in the conference could sell it out in the same situation. Not even supposed to be bad weather, you can't ask for more than 40 degrees in November!

Yeah, some Minny fans were complaining they didn't get gameday. Bad luck that it's the same weekend as LSU/Bama, but no chance if you can't even sellout an undefeated matchup.. That's a little embarrassing.

That one I'll give you haha. Frost does have a habit of making bulletin board comments.

When Domann is out there we're basically in a 3-3-5 - does that count? But yeah, I've gotta think we'd be seeing more DBs if Deontai was healthy. Cam being out last week hurt too - those are the guys I would think would be sub package LBs.

Yeah, and they admitted it and called themselves out on needing to practice what they were preaching. Has there been a similar situation since?

Again, they have not regressed statistically this year. Maybe they will have after the last 3 games, but so far they are still better this year. At worst, it would be similar to year 1 whether it's a slight increase or decrease. Given the turnover and state of our program when he got here 3 years seems reasonable.

Probably. Claiming to know the coaches are making calls out of fear is ridiculous, we don't know why they're calling it how they are. Feels like some posters would fling that accusation unless we blitzed literally every play, and only called deep shots on offense.

Or it could be because he doesn't even have offers anywhere else? Just saying. And nice cherry picking of receivers - Lindsay was a 4 star. So was Wan'Dale. 4 stars are not guaranteed to be successful, but they do have a measurably higher success rate than unranked kids. I hope this kid does well, could be underrated because he's a small town track kid. But there are reasons fans would be concerned offering a full football scholly here.

Yeah, I mean given the result they have to be rethinking calls. But there were a bunch of other issues that drive. That was easily offensive PI on the first completion, the TE extends his arms and shoves Honas back like 3 yards for separation. Still not convinced they got the first down on the sneak. If Barry doesn't completely whiff on a bad running back on 2nd and 6 they have another 3rd and 5 on their own side of the field to convert. The one blitz we ran that drive was a corner blitz, and it resulted in a completion to the receiver Clark came off of. My biggest issue on the last drive isn't the lack of blitzing/aggression. It's that we always had Honas on the TE, which is just a mismatch. And even then, he actually had decent coverage on the long completion. But I don't know of a better alternative without Taylor-Britt - I don't have any more faith in Dismuke or Bootle covering him, and significantly less if it was Barry or Miller. Domann sure, but I don't think they wanted to go straight man because of our lack of pass rush. So I guess you can argue we should've gone down swinging, but I truly believe it would've been easy completions to the TE either way. We are not a good blitzing team - which is more on the coaches as well IMO, but it's not playcalling necessarily. I don't like that I was concerned with the TE going into the game and that's who beat us on the final drive, and to me that is indeed a knock on Chinander. But I am struggling to come up with a better option, and aside from one crossing route where he just ran away from Honas the coverage was pretty tight. So I assume they had thought of it and practiced it, and we can argue whether it was hubris, idiocy, or a lack of other options. For reference, this was Friday:

I don't think we really know if they're coaching scared, or afraid of failing. If they figure blitzing has say a 10% chance of success on a given 3rd down, is it really "fear of failure" making them call a safer defense instead? Or is it being smart? Obviously I don't know the percentages, but there's a fine line between doing things out of fear and doing things because you believe they give you the best chance of success. And I think we're more aggressive than people remember just based on the eye test, we blitz a fair amount and have attempted more shots recently.

Are you including his work as the OLB coach for Oregon? Because I am definitely not, that's absurd. And 4 is enough in one place, but not when you're starting from scratch between years 2 and 3. I think you need at least 3 years for a DC in a rebuild. And what evidence in the 4 years are you claiming means his defense can't work? His defenses have improved every year other than year 2 at UCF, and that one was essentially a plateau not a regression. I don't care if you disagree with me when I think it will get better with Chins. I just want it to be acknowledged that these are opinions on both sides, and saying things like his defense WONT get better and will NEVER work aren't really supported by the small sample we have. I would argue the data we do have leans more towards it getting better, but I'm not going to fault people for not buying it. I will fault people for claiming the opposite when I don't see any proof of that.

Thanks! Also there are thousands more 2 and 3 stars, so when you factor in the raw numbers there are just more of them to go around. If 5% of 2-3 stars turn into pros and 50% of 5 stars do, there will still be a lot more 2-3 stars in the NFL. That doesn't mean recruiting 2-3 stars will get you more NFL talent than 4-5 stars.