Postmortem: Nebraska's Offense, Full Circle

T

TheCheshireCat

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Halloween: Nebraska is 7-1, ranked in the top 10 in both major polls and in the top 20 in total and scoring offense. The Cornhuskers have just easily dispatched undefeated Missouri, 31-17, a week after snapping Oklahoma State's 6-0 start in Stillwater. Both have come on the heels of dominant road blowouts over Washington and Kansas State. The 'Huskers are averaging 38 points on 459 yards per game, making speedy redshirt freshman quarterback Taylor Martinez is one of the breakout stars of the season.
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Here's the rest:

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/Postmortem-Nebraska-s-offense-comes-full-circle?urn=ncaaf-309316

 
Full circle? Our offensive output was more like the trajectory of a bottle rocket. The sky's the limit at first. Then came crashing to the ground.

 
Funny how an unbiased outside party looks at our season and draws a line at Martinez' injury. It's almost as if that's where all of our trouble started this year. :dunno

 
It really is that simple.

Once opponent DC's didn't have to worry about Tmart blasting 50 yd runs on them we were......2009.

 
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being one deminsional made it easy for any team with half a defense, the decline goes deeper than the injury to Martinez.

 
assuming it was the injury (we'll never really know how he would have done the second half if healthy) - why is it so easily written off? Frankly...I'd like to go into a season knowing a single injury won't take us from a top 20 offense (or defense) to #80. A single play ended this season, and we missed our goals because of it. Suh was equally important to 2009's defense...had he gone out I admit our defense wouldn't have been top 5, but I don't think it would have fallen off to the level that our offense fell off this year. Defensively we have a system, offensively we had a Watsonified player...take that out and we're done.

 
I would say our run defense rating this year is a direct result of not having Suh. The problem with the offense is the type of players we had, what we have now, and where we want to go. On defense, you for the most part want aggressive guys going to the football. On offense, you could have a pro style passing offense; power running offense; spread option offense; etc. We have absolutely zero depth behind Martinez for what we're trying to do. Cody Green has very limited experience and is not much of a zone read threat. The same can be said about Lee. We had our third starting QB in three years. It appears as though in those three years we've completely changed the offense.

Here's the real question: how would Auburn's offense have dealt with Newton getting injured? Would they have never missed a beat? How would Florida's offense have dealt with losing Teblow? These are NC winning teams that would have looked rather average without their star QB's.

 
junior4949 said:
I would say our run defense rating this year is a direct result of not having Suh. The problem with the offense is the type of players we had, what we have now, and where we want to go. On defense, you for the most part want aggressive guys going to the football. On offense, you could have a pro style passing offense; power running offense; spread option offense; etc. We have absolutely zero depth behind Martinez for what we're trying to do. Cody Green has very limited experience and is not much of a zone read threat. The same can be said about Lee. We had our third starting QB in three years. It appears as though in those three years we've completely changed the offense.

Here's the real question: how would Auburn's offense have dealt with Newton getting injured? Would they have never missed a beat? How would Florida's offense have dealt with losing Teblow? These are NC winning teams that would have looked rather average without their star QB's.
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Newton certainly - my guess is Meyer could have executed enough of his gameplan and/or adjusted to the backup. Which we didn't do. And I think we've had a new starting QB every season for about as long as I can remember. Any of them gone 2 full years?

 
and Meyer/Tebow were Heisman caliber guys...I'd argue Martinez (while hyped for a short time) ultimately is no where near at the level of either...so why center your offense ENTIRELY on him. Especially since he'd never proven to be able to handle the pressure.

 
Florida didn't manage too well with Teblow's backup this year. The last two year starter I can recall was Zac Taylor. Before him, it was Jamal Lord. Consequently, we did much better in each of the two quarterbacks mentioned second years starting. With first time starting QB's this decade, we haven't exactly been stellar with Lord going 7-7, Dailey going 5-6, Taylor going 8-4, Keller going 5-7, Ganz going 9-4, Lee going 10-4, and Martinez going 10-4. Lee and Martinez are the only first year starting QB's to have their team ranked at the end of the season. Clownahan's best year here at Nebraska was with a two year starting QB. I'd venture to guess Bo's best year here to date will be next year with a two year starting QB.

 
kchusker_chris said:
and Meyer/Tebow were Heisman caliber guys...I'd argue Martinez (while hyped for a short time) ultimately is no where near at the level of either...so why center your offense ENTIRELY on him. Especially since he'd never proven to be able to handle the pressure.
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I'm not sure we ever meant to focus our offense entirely on Martinez. Take Mizzou for example, it wasn't Martinez that picked the MU defense apart. It was Helu. Most of the teams we faced where their defense had a pulse forced us to make Martinez our entire offense. I can't say that I blame them. With a freshman QB coming in, I'd make Martinez beat me if I were a DC rather than proven commodities like Helu.

 
knapplc said:
Funny how an unbiased outside party looks at our season and draws a line at Martinez' injury. It's almost as if that's where all of our trouble started this year. :dunno
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The writing was on the wall even during those games. Lest we forget about the offensive performace against SDSU and texa$$ when T-Mart was healthy. And even when we were hanging 40-50 points on some happiless scrub team, the majority of those scores were big plays. Rarely did this offense have 8, 10, or 12 play sustained drives end in touchdowns, even against the scrubs.

T-Marts injury did not make our offense fail. The injury just highlighted how inept this offense is when everything is not 100%.

 
junior4949 said:
Here's the real question: how would Auburn's offense have dealt with Newton getting injured? Would they have never missed a beat? How would Florida's offense have dealt with losing Teblow? These are NC winning teams that would have looked rather average without their star QB's.
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Without Newton Auburn is a marginal top 20 team. They have a fine defense but the same, so-so offense:

2010 - 7

2009 - 17

2008 - 111

2007 - 84

2006 - 56

Chizik came to Auburn in 2009. Last year they went 8-5. We'll know the answer for sure next year without Newton. I'm guessing they go back to 3-4 losses.

 
kchusker_chris said:
and Meyer/Tebow were Heisman caliber guys...I'd argue Martinez (while hyped for a short time) ultimately is no where near at the level of either...so why center your offense ENTIRELY on him. Especially since he'd never proven to be able to handle the pressure.
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The offense shouldn't depend on Martinez alone, but we got caught with our pants down this year because it's a new system and we're still trying to find the personnel to run it. Behind Martinez, Cody Green and Zac Lee aren't fits for the spread option that we were trying to run. Our offensive line and WRs aren't good fits either, but a healthy Martinez could make up for that.

Now you're seeing a lot of smaller, faster guys coming in on the offensive side of the ball, like Jamal Turner, Brion Carnes, Aaron Green, etc. They're a better fit for the system we're trying to run, and they're going to give us better depth at those skill positions should Martinez or someone else go down.

I'd like to think our coaches could have made the changes mid-season to adjust our system to the strengths of Cody Green or someone healthy. Obviously, they did for Colorado and Iowa State, but maybe they just thought they couldn't get away with that for A&M or Oklahoma... I don't know.

 
I would say that the injury was the turning point of the season. Shouldn't have been but it was. I think T-marts play will improve as well as CG. CG was starting to look a bit better at the end. The biggest thing that depresses me is that we still aren't going to have our own offensive identity. Now we are pushing more on the spread-zone read like Oregon. When is it going to occur to people (coaches) that you have to have a "GOOD" front line and receivers that can catch the ball first. HINT HINT everyone knows our QBs are run first pass second and our running backs are good they know we can't receive balls so we are one dimensional. So our "multiple" offense is Run or hand-off and run. Yet we refuse to play power football. Sorry for the rant I'm just sick of the power-option play calling without the power o-line.

 
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