J-MAGIC

The individual games the past few years against Iowa were close but when the rubber hit the road in all three games Iowa turned their play up a notch while we wilted and lost. They were also a significantly better team than Nebraska outside of the individual games against NU. To beat them we are going to need to either be better than we're currently expected to be or play very, very well. Reasonable minds can disagree, but to me that qualifies as a likely loss. Same with Wisconsin. Those teams are currently better than us, and until we show we can play with them for four quarters I'm not calling those games winnable or toss-ups.

Wisconsin and Iowa both look like top 15ish teams. Those two games are a lot more winnable than OU and OSU but I think we're still gonna be a 7- to 10-point dog against each and would need to play really, really well to win.

We have three very likely Ws and four very likely Ls and five games that are essentially toss-ups. Getting to eight wins means we are winning 100% of our toss-ups, which is usually not how things go!

I couldn't find anything for 2008, but from 2009-2014 Bo Pelini's special teams: allowed one total kick return TD in six years, were ranked in the top 25 in total opponent kickoff return yardage allowed per game in four of those six season, and scored eight punt or kick return touchdowns. They also blocked 16 kicks in that span (though six of those came in '09 with Suh so I'm not going to credit him with that too much). His punt coverage units were pretty meh but overall he was a good special teams coach (in addition to recruiting and developing good specialists).

When It's wild how good Pelini was at special teams. I think we all really took that for granted.

I could see him passing Johnson for sure because Johnson has had a lot of opportunity to do something and I think would have popped by now if he were going to. But Scott and Sevion both have pretty impressive hs film in their own right and as freshman during the COVID year probably weren't put in a great position to be immediately successful. I think the jury should still be out on them and practice footage has at least shown them getting reps with the top unit, which seems promising. I don't see Ervin redshirting though, either.

Running out of patience with the cranks on here who continue to actively not read or understand posts about statistical rankings and choose instead to counterargue points no one is making and operate in bad faith. I have never seen a post suggesting things are all-good because of our SP or EPI or FPI ranking or that those don't ultimately need to translate into winning games. People are excited about them because they show things might not be as bad as internet rando crybabies on this board like to suggest.

Really? All the practice stuff we've seen has Scott getting a large share of the carries with the 1s.

I was curious so I looked up how many players each of the four schools mentioned had drafted in The Athletic's latest seven-round mock: Iowa: 4 (Nixon, Golston, Niemann, Jackson); Minnesota: 2 (Bateman, St-Juste); Purdue: 2 (Rondale, Barnes); Illinois: 2 (Green, Hobbs) ... Nebraska: 1 (Jaimes). A mock draft is obviously subjective but by the clearest indicator of how talented your team is ("Do people at the next level of the sport want your players?") we were very arguably the least talented of the four. 60 completions for 570 yards is 9.5 yards per completion, which would have ranked 11th nationally over the full season. Maybe we should all get back to the Logan Smothers talk?

Against Illinois, Iowa, Purdue, and Minnesota Adrian Martinez was a combined 60 for 81 (74 percent) for 570 yards and four touchdowns passing and no interceptions with another 177 yards and four touchdowns rushing. I'd hardly call that "dogs#!t". Additionally, all four of those teams have a skill position player who's going to be drafted in a couple weeks (in Purdue's and Minnesota's case, within the first 50 picks) while we started Kade Warner for a good chunk of the season and our best draft prospect is a Day 3 offensive tackle known for his footwork. Recruiting rankings are not the only factor in talent.

They also could be giving the backs rest days so they don't get beat up. Stepp is the only one we know who's definitively hurt. We only have info from two practices.

It looks like Haarberg has a naturally stronger arm than Smothers but I would warn anyone against making definitive proclamations based on players we haven't seen take a collegiate snap yet!

For what it's worth OWH said after the practice that Smothers looked good on deep passes and seemed to direct traffic well but misplaced some short throws.

Going to be nice to see teams having to keep a deep safety over our X receiver instead of completely ignoring Kade Warner and putting another guy in the box.

The Athletic NFL podcast had line-play guru Brandon Thorn on today to discuss line prospects and Jaimes was the first guy he mentioned as a sleeper. Full interview is here and he starts talking Jaimes at the 5:00 mark. I'm not going to transcribe all of it but some highlights: "A little bit undersized guy; 6'5, barely 300 pounds and below the 34-inch arm-length threshold teams want ... but he's very athletic. His foot-quickness is certainly there, not just the foot-quickness but the patterns that he's executing in his pass set are very efficient. His hands are very good. He's consistently using his hands to reestablish position on pass rushers, and he just gets guys locked consistently. ... Now, guys who are able to convert speed to power are able to get into his chest and lift him up. I like to say his anchor is like he dies slowly. He's really going to have to work hard against elite-type power rushers with prototypical length, but I think his technique, his fundamentals, I think are really starter-caliber, and he's a guy I just wound up liking more and more as I continued to watch him. I think he reminds me of a Joe Thuney in college, an undersized guy playing left tackle. ... Terms like 'sophisticated, efficient, savvy', these are the things I kept thinking of when I watched his tape, and he was just a blast to watch because of that. I just wanted to see how he was going to figure out how to do the next rep. So he was somebody that I really liked and was pretty high on." He also did a film room where he interviewed Jaimes here.

I think that the best things for Martinez this year will be: 1) cutting down on turnovers 2) a few other skill guys emerging so that he doesn't feel like he has to do everything

I'm sure the idea was for him to bulk up to withstand hits better after his freshman season.

100 percent. I'm not actually worried about Smothers and this offense doesn't need a bomber. This is peak fan/media bologna. He's fine and I'm excited to see him play.

We almost completely skipped the Smothers hype cycle. We're reaching critical mass.

Martinez (in the red sleeves) missed the deep cross over the middle but otherwise completed everything else we saw and dropped a couple of really nice dimes. The QB in the black sleeves (I think it's Smothers) threw one YOLO bomb and missed an open deep pass. Regardless, it's a handful of the hundreds or reps they're going to take in practice and drawing any meaningful conclusions from them is very silly.

The wind here the last 10ish days has been just absolutely brutal.

It's sad that our coaches are drilling home the finer points of technique on fundamentals, something that every college football program at every level does in the first week of camp? Dear lord, some of you guys just look for stuff to get mad about.

I actually love this. That's good coaching.

My biggest frustration with Frost is the grab-bag nature of the playcalling. He's always wanted to get tricky -- I remember one Oregon game I watched he called a receiver screen double pass on a 4th and 1 -- but Oregon could do it's base stuff really well and mixed in the exotic stuff. Some of the best offenses in football like the Chiefs or OU can be "grab-bag" so I don't really mean that as an insult, but we aren't consistent with our base concepts so the grab-bag stuff we do just feels unearned. Like we bust out the flexbone against OSU the last two years and then never do it again. Why? Playing that way makes it feel like we're trying to do 1,000 things OK instead of just doing 100 things really well.

I just saw a short giant guy bust through a hole in one of the spring practice vids and was like "WHO is that" haha and rewound a few times to get the name