Defending the coaches/players

[HskerFever73]

Wats and TMart

 

I agree the future looks ok.

[NUance]

So now that a Nebraska offense struggling with injuries has a bad half against arguably the best defensive coach of the past ten years in Bob Stoops, Watson's got to go? Did he get dumber after leading the offense to 20 points in the first half? Is that why Nick Saban tried to hire Watson away from Nebraska? Or why Vanderbilt is interviewing him as a head coach?

 

Injuries are not a trivial consideration. Martinez went from being a player that was a threat to go 80 yards to one that couldn't go 20 after his injury at Missouri. Keith Williams was limping around Jerry World and couldn't pull fast enough to get in front of the defender he was supposed to block. Mike Caputo is a nice kid, but he's 275 lbs. He's not built to man up on OU's defensive tackle (just like he struggled against the linemen of Texas and Texas A&M). Jeremiah Sirles will be a nice player, but he's a freshman. Having to block Jeremy Beal is a mismatch. When three-fifths of your line is struggling, how much success are you going to have? How good is your injured quarterback going to look? Nebraska tried to address the center position with Mike Smith, but he got injured. Yoshi Hardrick was brought in to help immediately at tackle but as is usually the case with junior college linemen, he'll need another offseason to learn and develop.

 

Blasphemy. I suppose anyone who acknowledges these things is an apologist in the eyes of some.

[zoogs]

Excuses, excuses

 

The numbers don't lie. We were 35th in total offense, 28th in scoring, when we were down 2 quarterbacks for the last four, plus CCG, games of the season. Just cannot get any worse...to use a phrase that's actually been thrown around.

 

In 2007, we said: when you can score 51 points and still lose a game, that's the sign that your defense sucks. Now if the only times we lose games is if we can't score more than 20, I'd say that's the sign that our defense rocks, more than it means anything else. To beat us, teams will have to stop the offense, because they aren't going to score on the defense. Because of that, we haven't lost very often. And two our three losses this year, seem to coincide with games where we had injury issues at quarterback.

[Hammerhead]

It's not hard to have good offensive numbers when you've played against some of the defenses we've played against. Remember how Zac Lee looked before Nebraska started conference play last year? What I want to know is, how would we rank nationally if our offensive numbers against Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma were average for Nebraska this year?

 

I am fine with the defense of Taylor Martinez, because if you look at last year then look at this year, it's clear that Taylor was the biggest reason why we thought we saw a better offense this year.

[The Dude]

Since when is having an undersized center a problem? That's extremely common. He needs to be quick enough to get to the second level. If he's really one on one with a defensive tackle, that's on Cotton.

[Hammerhead]

Since when is having an undersized center a problem? That's extremely common. He needs to be quick enough to get to the second level. If he's really one on one with a defensive tackle, that's on Cotton.

 

That's a good point.

 

Aaron Graham was only 280-something if I remember right, and he's one of the best centers ever to play at Nebraska.

[The Dude]

If Keith Williams was limping around, where's A-Rod? ya know the kid Bo said is going to be "one of the great ones to ever play here". Why even burn his redshirt?

[zoogs]

It's not hard to have good offensive numbers when you've played against some of the defenses we've played against. Remember how Zac Lee looked before Nebraska started conference play last year?

 

I agree with that. Numbers are often inflated. So, let's compare the Big 12 numbers, this year and last year. I think it has really been an improvement in leaps and bounds.

 

What I want to know is, how would we rank nationally if our offensive numbers against Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma were average for Nebraska this year?

 

This is an interesting question, but if you are taking only offensive numbers against high-ranked defenses for Nebraska, you have to put that up against only offensive numbers against high-ranked defenses for every other team. Hard for me to say exactly where in the rankings we'll fall there. I suspect more teams than not have had pretty low outputs against the higher-ranked defenses.

[huskers1]

They were talking about watson on 1620 the zone today and I agree exactly with what they were saying. When watson plays against a defense that just doesn't have the athletes that his offense does he can tear them apart. Even teams like Washington, KState, Okie State on defense, Colorado don't have close to the athletes that we do on our offense. On top of him taking advantage of scoring a lot of points against lesser defense which pads his credentials, he breaks out trick plays to make it look like he has an imagination. Is anyone telling me that we couldn't have beaten Colorado without running two wildcat passes? It sure would have been nice to see that in the texas a&m game! As was mentioned before, every year he completely pads his credentials in the non conference games-oh wait he only scored 17 against SDSU and his offense only scored 24 against Idaho. In addition it only scored 20 pts against KU. So he's down his starting gamebreaking at QB? Heres a thought-adjust and create a gameplan that puts your QB that's playing in position to succeed!

 

My gripe isn't that he's a bad OC, it's that in big games against top defenses he goes into a shell and doesn't adjust throughout the game. Please someone name me five games since 08' that his offense has played a top 30 defense and scored more than 24 points.

[cscott2win]

I shudder to think about Watts as the oc and Cosgrove as the dc........ wait......

[REDSTEEL]

They were talking about watson on 1620 the zone today and I agree exactly with what they were saying. When watson plays against a defense that just doesn't have the athletes that his offense does he can tear them apart. Even teams like Washington, KState, Okie State on defense, Colorado don't have close to the athletes that we do on our offense. On top of him taking advantage of scoring a lot of points against lesser defense which pads his credentials, he breaks out trick plays to make it look like he has an imagination. Is anyone telling me that we couldn't have beaten Colorado without running two wildcat passes? It sure would have been nice to see that in the texas a&m game! As was mentioned before, every year he completely pads his credentials in the non conference games-oh wait he only scored 17 against SDSU and his offense only scored 24 against Idaho. In addition it only scored 20 pts against KU. So he's down his starting gamebreaking at QB? Heres a thought-adjust and create a gameplan that puts your QB that's playing in position to succeed!

 

My gripe isn't that he's a bad OC, it's that in big games against top defenses he goes into a shell and doesn't adjust throughout the game. Please someone name me five games since 08' that his offense has played a top 30 defense and scored more than 24 points.

This is nothing new this has been happening for the last 5 years.

[ESPY]

Keith Williams was limping around Jerry World and couldn't pull fast enough to get in front of the defender he was supposed to block.

Williams' performance vs OU, aside from his key blocks on Helu's TD run, killed us in the run game. I can recount several plays getting blown up by Williams' man busting right through or around him, and these plays were well blocked by everyone else. He played just as poorly as Martinez IMO, and just like TM he never got pulled from the game. Lack of depth? No. Lack of trust in A-Rod? Yes.

 

It will be interesting to see if Williams can bounce back in the bowl game after 3 weeks rest. It's apparent his knees have been killing him over the last half of the season.

[NebraskaShellback]

Since when is having an undersized center a problem? That's extremely common. He needs to be quick enough to get to the second level. If he's really one on one with a defensive tackle, that's on Cotton.

 

That's a good point.

 

Aaron Graham was only 280-something if I remember right, and he's one of the best centers ever to play at Nebraska.

 

I think Dave Remmington was the best center we ever had, quick off the ball and blocks well. My thoughts.

[kansas husker]

They were talking about watson on 1620 the zone today and I agree exactly with what they were saying. When watson plays against a defense that just doesn't have the athletes that his offense does he can tear them apart. Even teams like Washington, KState, Okie State on defense, Colorado don't have close to the athletes that we do on our offense. On top of him taking advantage of scoring a lot of points against lesser defense which pads his credentials, he breaks out trick plays to make it look like he has an imagination. Is anyone telling me that we couldn't have beaten Colorado without running two wildcat passes? It sure would have been nice to see that in the texas a&m game! As was mentioned before, every year he completely pads his credentials in the non conference games-oh wait he only scored 17 against SDSU and his offense only scored 24 against Idaho. In addition it only scored 20 pts against KU. So he's down his starting gamebreaking at QB? Heres a thought-adjust and create a gameplan that puts your QB that's playing in position to succeed!

 

My gripe isn't that he's a bad OC, it's that in big games against top defenses he goes into a shell and doesn't adjust throughout the game. Please someone name me five games since 08' that his offense has played a top 30 defense and scored more than 24 points.

 

Now when you say he goes into a shell, do you mean running routes and formations that Texas had never seen, do you mean the fake punt against okie stat (although that may be Bo's call), or is this shell include the play action on 4th and1 in the big 12 championship with a qb that gad been cold all game, maybe you're reffering to the pass from Burkhead to Martinez (which was wide open) So I guess the USC guys are right with going into a shell. When you look at all the chances he took to win those games I see exactly the shell that they were talking about.

 

The only way anyone can justify replacing wats is to completly ignore all the circumstances that caused the poor performance. of course there's no shortage of husker fans willing to do that.

[zoogs]

Thank you kansas husker, that was very well stated.

 

The circumstances are what is interesting to me. It is easy to look at the surface of things and get carried away with blaming whomever, mostly out of disappointment/anger/frustration. But much more compelling, not in a who's-to-blame sense, but just in a what-is-happening sense, is the underlying story or stories. This gets into the hearsay realm, and it's fine and I see the value/reasons if it's something anyone chooses to dismiss. At the same time, even the most trained of eyes can only draw extremely limited conclusions from casual, bird-eye's, no-access views. I like taking various qualified opinions, even weighted with a grain of salt, to fill in the blanks - instead of using my own guesses, that would be more or less blind.

 

An example of this is Watson's being retained in '07. People assume he was kept for continuity only, as a gap filler while Bo took care of the D. But Tom Osborne supposedly really sees something in the guy, and what he brings to the table as an offensive coordinator. Coming from a guy like T.O., it really speaks volumes, IMO, to hold that kind of regard for Shawn. And I think the more you dig deeper into the story behind this year's offense, the more you will begin to ask questions instead of drawing conclusions.

 

For a lot of fans, they seem content to look at some stats of (recent) games, make a judgment and say "we should just try canning this guy/starting this guy as I bet it'll fix things." I don't know how you can make that leap. I don't know how you can possibly not be interested in the stuff behind the scenes, a vague sense of which you can start to picture if you listen enough.

 

I guess the last thing I'll add in this post: a lot of times you see things that make you wonder. Oftentimes, there are reasons why things are done a certain way. And the reason is often not "The coach is too stupid to realize otherwise." It's folly to assume so and then dismiss any reasons offered up to fill in the gaps, as if they were excuses rather than potential answers.