While fingers can be pointed all over the offense, I can't fault the plays called - I can fault the fact that we can't seem to put a complete series together without some silly penalty on the line (jumping the count seems to have been the major one) or the inability to open a hole or prevent a pass rush at critical times. A lot of that has to do with the injuries - but a lot has to do with mental focus and technique as well.
With a dominate line, a lot of the problems simply disappear.
Right here. It's hard to do much of anything with an INEPT O line. Yes yes, our QB had a severed limb in his throwing arm... Yes our two main weapons at RB were disintegrated for a good portion of the year.. etc etc. It doesn't matter a hill of beans with the O line performance we had. I assume most of us saw what was going on, on the sidelines with Bo and Barney? There is the problem on the O and Bo knows it. Look at what we're doing with recruiting, notice the massive influx of bodies going to the O-line? There's a reason for it. This team's offense, whether it's ran by Watson, or Osborne, begins with the O-line, and last year, our O-line performance from the players and the coaches was wretched. Fix it and this team is fixed, even with a questionable QB.
Someone above said "Next year is Watson's 'make or break year'". And that if he has another bad year Bo will fire him. This is one of the single most stupid things I've read from a fan on a message board. I guarantee you, if we have another year as bad or even worse, offensively as we had this year, Bo won't be firing Watson, T.O. will call Barney into his office and have a nice prestigious administrative opening with his name on it. Bo AND Dr. Tom both know they've got quality in Watson. I think that would be evident from T.O. ASKING Watson to please stay on after sacking the last regime. As well as Nick Saban offering Watson the big bucks to go work for him. Yeah.... Saban and Dr. Tom.... two clowns who should be reading the message boards to really find out what they need to be doing.
I'm happy with Watson. He believes enough in the power run game we all love. When we finally get back on our feet as a program, I feel that most other Husker fans will too.
I still don't think we can sit here and blame this on the O-line. Our O-line did just fine in the bowl game. Now I don't know if we returned anyone from injuries for that game, but I'm going to go ahead and say it was essentially the same O-line we saw all year. I find it hard to believe the line was that bad the whole year. We dominated that game on offense because we FINALLY mixed it up a little bit. We finally did something that defenses weren't used to seeing. The difference showed and everyone saw it. Yes, we suffered many injuries. We also had either Helu or Burkhead, neither one was not healthy enough to play if the other was down. We should have been able to do what we did against Arizona all year long but we couldn't because of the predictable play calling. Tell me Arizona came in expecting to see the Wild Cat and taking shots down field. They didn't and that's why we looked so good.