You can take this for what its worth, but here is the short version: After you guys beat us 30-3 in boulder in 2005, I was alarmed at what bill Callahan was doing in Lincoln. After he hired Shawn Watson, who we had just fired, I stopped worrying.
Longer version. first, Shawn Watson is not imaginative, either in game-planning or play-calling. When you run the west coast offense, as we did and you have the last few years, the point is to keep teams off balance and beat them to the punch, as bill walsh used to say. In my section at folsom we used to predict what play we would run, and usually we were right. He never ran more than 5 or 6 plays in a game, 10 tops. The year we beat you 62-36, we ran exactly five plays: a toss right, a counter back to the left, and a fake toss trap up the middle, and a couple of bootlegs. Thats it. We got away with it because we had an offensive line that was cutting people down like ripe wheat, and Chris Brown running through the holes. But teams notice when you only run 5 plays. The last year he was here, 2005, he would run mainly three running plays, a counter play, a stretch play, and a run right up the middle. Our passing game was all bootlegs. by the end of the year, teams would just have their DE run straight at where the qb was going to be after the playfake, and level him. Second, he can't exploit matchups. In the passing game, he was simply unable to get fast guys into open space, big guys isolated on small guys, etc. Thats where big plays come from in the passing game, and that's why we always had a 3 yd completion on 3rd and 6. The west coast offense is based on taking what the defense gives you, but the trick is making them give you what you want. Thirdly, he was unable to minimize weaknesses. When we were playing a faster team, he would stick with his slow developing counter plays and sweeps, and we would get killed. When a team had a good pass rush, we would never use sprintouts and half-rolls to make the qb a moving target, or use wham blocks to cut the ends and slow them down. Lastly, when things went wrong, he would never make any kind of adjustments during the game. He would get stubborn and run the same things all game and we would lose big.
To sum up. The scheme was sound, and when we had few weaknesses and dominated the line of scrimmage, the offense rolled, at least until the other teams caught up to what we were doing. When we had good but not great talent and a good but not great o line, we would get by against teams with inferior talent but teams with similar or better talent would beat us. and when we started to go down, we never came back, ever, because we never made adjustments, ever. I don't know how much autonomy Shawn watson had while Callahan was the head coach, so I don't know how much Nebraska's offense owes to his thinking. I'm guessing not much, as Callahan was an offensive oriented coach, but who knows. For what its worth, i'm awfully glad that we have Mark Helfrich and Eric Kiesau running our offense now.
P.S. Shawn Watson was a lousy recruiter, too, if memory serves.
Nice insight and opinion.
