J-MAGIC

Returning experience is absolutely the most solid predictor of future defensive success. We could legit field a top 25/30-ish defense next year pretty easily.

Last year the Big Ten West was rated the fourth-toughest division in the country behind only the SEC West, Big Ten East, and SEC East. It was significantly better from top to bottom than the Big 12, Pac-12 and both ACC divisions.

Certain people want to act like advanced stats don't matter, and I get that they're not everything, but we finished 32nd in SP+ this year. We were 55th last year and 49th in '18. Riley's best team was 33rd and he left the program ranked in the 70s. The numbers would say we have massively improved, we are just a mostly young team playing one of the toughest schedules in the country and make young-team mistakes. I am also frustrated there haven't been more wins, but some fans are being wildly, overdramatically negative about the state of the program and the coaching that is happening. We have improved a lot and are right on the doorstep of being a good team. The wins are coming if we just stay patient, and some of Husker nation needs to get a grip before we sabotage ourselves into being actually bad.

I mean, you need both. The best receiving corps have a mix of sizes and speeds to handle different responsibilities.

This can be shades of grey. I think if COVID doesn't happen and give his mom a health scare Wandale is still here. I also don't think if he had 1,100 receiving yards last year he'd be transferring regardless of his mom. It's probably some mix of both plus alleged pressure from his dad and trainer, but we can never really know. The "I want NFL touches" thing is a little nonsensical considering he's probably going to transfer to an absolute offensive wasteland in Kentucky, but he's a teenager. It's going to suck because he was a clearly talented player on the outside which we desperately need, but best thing to do is just wish him well and hope the younger guys can replace him. I don't think this is a total indictment of Frost or how things are going, but it's also probably not a good thing and he's probably not blameless here.

Our starting QB just completed 71.5 percent of his passes. We have issues throwing down the field and in the red zone but we are not "the least-efficient passing attack in the country". And if Wandale thinks he's going to run NFL routes at Kentucky, which just fired its OC because it's passing attack was so bad and was running the single-wing with Lynn Bowden last year, he's in for a big shock.

If he transfers to UK I will be fairly confident it was just a family thing because their passing offense was objectively much worse than ours. As a whole though, I'm sure he was sold as being a De'Anthony Thomas-type dude in that Chip Kelly Oregon spread and instead has spent most of his time in single-wing offense. If this is the style SF wants to play, then we're not going to get many talented dudes on the outside to come here. Triple option teams don't have good receivers for a reason.

Tom Herman is a decent offensive mind, sure, but counterpoint: Tom Herman sucks extremely hard and I do not want him around this program in any way.

Callahan and Bo were actually remarkably good special teams coaches by the numbers, and even Riley was decent. Here are our national SP+ special teams rankings as far back as the numbers go: FROST 2020: 87 2019: 124 2018: 80 RILEY 2017:46 2016: 36 2015: 36 PELINI 2014: 51 2013: 8 2012: 32 2011: 16 2010: 3 2009: 8 2008: 36 CALLAHAN 2007: 4 2006: 35 We were actually blessed with some very good special teams for 10+ years. Now ... not so much.

I've heard some reporter say that in JC he basically just blitzed every play and had to learn how to play actual football. Would still be nice to see him get in there situationally.

Snapping is like free-throw shooting in basketball. You can practice it with no pressure all you want, but you can really only get better at it by doing it with the bullets flying and once your confidence in it is gone, it's always in the back of your mind. I also need to go back and watch to be sure but I think they may have had Jurgens dead-ball snapping after the Iowa game which would explain why there was improvement.

Agreed. Adrian's two most impressive throws as a Husker (the body turned parallel to LOS pass to Allen vs. Northwestern in 2019 and the fourth-down throw against Purdue in 2019) were both him scrambling outside the pocket while keeping his eyes downfield. I also wish that some people understood that just because you see a wide receiver in open space doesn't mean they are "open" and the QB missed them. Sometimes it's just not physically possible to get the ball to someone because you don't have arm strength or are scranbling. Sometimes you may not be able to reasonable assume you can protect long enough to get the ball on-time to a certain route. Sometimes it might be a decoy route last in the progression and the defense is ignoring it as such.

Some quick research, people are getting the "fifth-round grade" from NFL Draft Scout. But this site seems a little sketchy and I remember it also listed JD as a second-round pick last year, so maybe not the most reliable resource. They also have him as the No. 12 TE. The Draft Network has him as the No. 429 player, ESPN does not give him a draftable grade and Walter Football doesn't have him in its top 19 tight ends. So I think he's probably a UDFA guy with this one outlier place saying he's a fifth-round pick. Which is fine. He was a good dude who played his a$$ off for NU. If he wants to be done for whatever reason that is perfectly understandable and valid and we should all wish him well.

Tons of good head coaches also call offensive plays. Off the top of my head: Lincoln Riley, Ryan Day, Mike Leach, Jimbo Fisher, Lane Kiffin, Jamey Chadwell, Chip Kelly (and Tom Osborne!) from college and Sean McVay, Kyle Shanahan, Jon Gruden, Andy Reid, Frank Reich, Doug Pederson (maybe not this year but he did win a SB!), and Kliff Kingsbury in the NFL. I would rather our coach do what he's good at and the reason we hired him (the offense!) instead of mean mugging on the sideline watching the kickoff team or whatever to appease certain fans.

That's fair. And I wouldn't be against Lubick having a bigger role as a situational play caller i.e Bienemy in K.C. (if Lubick already doesn't have that role, which I think he probably does?). But I also think it's very dumb to not want Frost calling plays so that he can cosplay some "classic CEO coach" or whatever. You can be a very successful play-calling head coach if have the right people and infrastructure around you. The solution here should be making the people and infrastructure around him better, not stripping him of the thing he does best in a largely symbolic move.

Can someone explain the logic behind not wanting Frost calling plays? He's regarded as one of the best playcallers in the country and that's a big part of the reason we hired him. We want him to not do what he's best at as a coach so that he can what ... give the kickoff team a pump-up speech before it runs on the field?

The fans who think Adrian is a bad quarterback are the fans who don't actually understand what is happening on a football field. He needs to work on the turnovers and he can be inaccurate at times, but he showed a lot of improvement this year and helps our offense far more than he hurts it. I'm excited to have him back.

No, I'm always legit. BTW, Buzz Aldrin told me the other day the moon is made of blue cheese.

Just because someone types something in the little box at the bottom of all of our screens doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. I get this guy has hit on some stuff in the past but that doesn't mean everything he's saying is true. Anything that opens with "Players are leaving because of this extremely specific complaint that fans have" is automatic skepticism from me. Wandale's twitter likes are full of pro-Huskers stuff including this from two weeks ago: Anything could happen but this doesn't seem like a guy unhappy with where he's at or who thinks his coach's ego is out of control. Warner wouldn't have gotten a shot to play at almost any other P5 school so I don't buy that. Stoll has been passed by Allen and Vokolek and the TE room adds Fidone next year so I wouldn't be shocked by him transferring. Feels like we're getting cranked here.

Points scored matters. But it doesn't tell you all or even a significant part of the story. You could take our exact same offensive personnel this year, have them play a Sun Belt schedule, and probably finish around 20th in points scored. Would it be because we had the 20th-best offense in the country? No, of course not, it would be because we played a bunch of Sun Belt teams. If you would prefer get mad at binary end results with no context, be my guest. But college football is an incredibly complex sport played by over 100 teams in vastly different situations, so I think that is pretty dumb, my dude! I can guarantee you Moos understands the quality of defenses we've played in four of our seven games!

"No, it's not my personal biases that are wrong, it's the objective statistical evaluation system honed over a decade and a half." Our points and yards per game rankings are bad because in our seven games we've played the Nos. 2 (Northwestern), 3 (Iowa), 10 (OSU), and 25 (Penn State) defenses in the country. SP+ is supposed to provide actual context for opponent to bad stats like points and yards per game. Points and yards per game in themselves are indicative of almost nothing. I don't disagree with the larger point here: The offense needs to be a lot better for Frost to achieve success. But even if you quibble with the numbers, it's pretty clear that it is at least not regressing. And absolutely lol at your last sentence. Were you not a Nebraska fan in 09??

Our offense by SP+ rating: 2017: 85 2018: 42 2019: 41 2020: ... 36 It has not been nearly good enough for the way Frost wants to play or what we expected. It is also not on a "definite downward trend."

Dawg ... Martinez went from throwing to Stan Morgan and JD Spielman his freshman to a bunch of guys outside of Wandale who wouldn't see the two deep at any other Big Ten school. The snaps have got to get fixed but Jurgens is our best offensive lineman. Stoll hurt his knee in the first game and didn't play for six weeks. Mills also got hurt. Individual players don't succeed or fail in a vacuum. Come on. If this is your argument, you don't have an argument.

We burnt our program to the ground and started over with young players. Those mistakes you're talking about aren't "culture" or "trends", those are growing pains from having to start and play freshmen and sophomores who would not be seeing the field until they were juniors or seniors in a healthy program. I know people are impatient to win and I am also so, so sick of losing in this way, but unless you're Alabama or Clemson, rebuilds just don't happen overnight. These things take years, plural, like full recruiting cycles, and the progress isn't always linear. They should have won Saturday and what happened against Illinois is inexcusable, but people need to be patient and use their brains instead of melting down every time we lose a game. Regarding improvement, if you want an objective perspective, all three of our offense, defense and special teams have improved by SP+ this year, and we're probably going to finish in the 30s this year instead of the 50s as we did in Frost's first two years. If you want my subjective opinion, our new front seven that was supposed to be this team's biggest liability has now become a strength; our offensive line is a vastly improved run blocking unit and isn't giving immediate pass rush up the middle any more despite starting two freshmen for most of the year; our quarterback who looked completely wigged out for most of his sophomore season has been improved as both a runner and a passer while throwing to (outside of Wandale) a set of MAC receivers, and overall our team is noticeably physically stronger and more competitive against teams that used to beat us by 30. That's progress. If people would rather whine about the binary wins and losses, it's a free country and I guess you can do that, but I personally think that is incredibly lame and I am going to choose to focus on the pretty clear positives here. I am a KU alum and attended there in the early 2010s. After Mangino was rightly fired for abusing players, Gill came in and tried to rebuild from scratch. He wasn't immediately as good as Mangino in his first two years, so they canned him. They brought in Weis and Weis started over again. Same thing, two and a half years, not as good as Mangino, gone. They bring in Beatty. Everyone agrees beforehand: "We gotta give this guy time." After three years, fans get impatient, Beatty feels his seat heating up, brings in a bunch of JUCO guys and transfers to try and get some wins to save his job, doesn't work, fired in his fourth year. Now the same thing is happening with Les Miles. I'm relating this story because this is the road we're heading down if a certain part of this fanbase doesn't put on its big kid pants and give this the time it needs. Things can get SO MUCH worse.

Mills is averaging 3.5 yards per carry. Scott is averaging fewer. Where is this coming from?