The fact that you keep arguing against things that literally no one has said makes this discussion pointless.
Pre-Fall Camp Presser - August 3
- Thread starter Mavric
- Start date
Landlord
Banned
Literally more than zero people have said or implied that Langsdorf and Riley lied when they said they would cater the offense to the personnel.
Both parts of this sentence have changed significantly since your original argument. So you may be in the ballpark now.
Landlord
Banned
they don't seem terribly different to me
"Never let Tommy run" and "cater the offense to the personnel" are most decidedly not the same thing.
When you open the door to "implied", you can basically make anything you want fit that, especially when you can say "that's how it was implied to me." I don't recall anyone ever saying they lied. Perhaps they did but I doubt they meant it literally. But I think it's more likely that you're implying the lying for the most part, particularly "lied through their teeth". I don't think they lied in that lying implies an intent to deceive. I think it was more a creation of the media who asked the coaches about adapting and they of course agreed that they would. The fact that it didn't happen doesn't mean they lied, simply that they didn't do it to nearly the degree that how they spoke about it implied that they would.
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It'sNotAFakeID
All-American
Isn't that last sentence an implication some fans made about how Riley and Langsdorf were going to adapt their offense to fit Nebraska's personnel, a disconnect between what the coaching staff meant by adapt and what the fans meant by adapt?
You can't say they didn't adapt their offense to fit Nebraska's personnel. I think, like dissecting the difference in Tommy's run/pass split between 2014 and 2015 seasons, it's important to take a look at the run/pass splits of QBs that Riley and Langsdorf coached at Oregon State. With Riley and Langsdorf controlling Oregon State's offense, QBs had a 90/10 split, they passed the ball 90% of the time and ran the ball 10% of the time. That differential might even be greater because I'm not sure how many of those run plays were actually sacks. In 2014, Tommy's pass/run split was 70/30. Last year it was 80/20, oddly enough the halfway point between what Riley and Langsdorf did with OSU QBs and what Pelini and Beck did with Nebraska QBs.
Saying they didn't adjust at all is unfair, and probably shouldn't be based on just one season of work. Saying they didn't adjust enough is a warranted criticism, and hopefully we see Tommy (and Nebraska) run the ball more this year. Riley and Langsdorf are smart guys--they didn't get to where they are because they don't know what they're doing.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty fair assessment. And you're right that's pretty much what I was getting at in that last sentence.
I think it was mostly the stories that the media guys wanted to write and fans jumped on. The media was asking questions about "are you going to adapt" and of course the coaches are going to say they would. Then a lot of fans were quick to jump on how these coaches were going to do such a better job of playing to the players strengths, putting them in positions to succeed, etc. Now that's changed to "well, they did change" but not necessarily the same thing as "putting them in positions to succeed."
If we had done a lot of the same stuff but had better results, I would buy the "they adjusted their system" a lot more. That may sound like second-guessing but the point is I think way to much has been made of us being "unlucky" at the end of games that many are ignoring a lot of the bad play calls, decisions, etc. earlier in the games that go us to that point. They may have adjusted some but we threw at least 3 interceptions in four different games last year including three of the last four regular season ones. At some point I was expecting a learning curve that said "we'd like to do this but we can't so we have to do something else" but it didn't come until the bowl game. Maybe it will continue, maybe it won't.
I think Riley especially is good at saying the things that people want to hear. It's a lot of "we'll try to do that", "we should have done that", "we're looking into that" etc. It sounds really good but so far I'm not sure a lot of it has actually gotten done. Hopefully things will be better going forward.
It'sNotAFakeID
All-American
So, as usual, wins dictate evaluation. The narrative would have changed had we gone 9-3 with 3 close losses rather than 6-7 with 6 close losses. But wins are really [or should be] ancillary to any discussion about adapting their system. Coaching staff A could have set a 70/30 pass/run split with Team A and then a 50/50 pass/run split with Team B because they determined that Team A was a better passing team and Team B was a better running team. That's adapting their system, regardless whether they won 10 games with Team A and 6 games with Team B. That's the point LoMS was making.
The point that you're making, and the contention among some fans is that Riley and Langsdorf, though they adapted their system, didn't do the best job of putting players in a position to succeed. Which, I agree with, but the more I think about it, the more I think that it's hard to base that on anything but the QB. Yeah, the staff could've done a better job evaluating Tommy's strengths and calling a game based on those strengths. But again, I wonder how much they limited Tommy's running because of the lack of depth behind him.
I also think way too much has been made of Nebraska being unlucky. If we were to play the exact same schedule the exact same way, I think we maybe get two more wins: BYU doesn't complete that Hail Mary, and Tommy doesn't pass the ball to the RB against Illinois. The other 5 losses, with the exception of Purdue look like we were on the wrong end of just 1 or 2 plays, but a more in-depth look at the game shows that we shouldn't have been in that position in the first place.
Luck is very situation-specific. In isolation, a tipped INT could cost a team a win. In the course of a full game, that tipped INT, combined with other plays, probably minimally influenced a team's chance to win.
Well ... I mean ... yeah. You can ask Herm Edwards about that. How can the narrative NOT change based on wins? Do you often hear people talk about how terrible a coaching job the guy who just won the national championship did?
Coaches can only do so much. But having a bunch of close games should be where coaching makes the most difference, shouldn't it? If we repeatedly lost games in large part due throwing the ball too much, how is that not a valid criticism of the coaches?
And it's kind of glazing over the point to say we were 50/50 on the year (which we weren't). We lost all five games that we threw it more than 40 times. We were 4-1 in games we threw it 30 or fewer times. We may have been close to balanced for the year but decidedly not from one game to the next.
Running the ball more and not having TA run more are not mutually exclusive.
It'sNotAFakeID
All-American
The Team A/Team B analogy wasn't related to Nebraska, just used to show the semantics of the argument and how wins don't factor into an evaluation of whether a staff adapts their system or not. I'm actually not sure of Nebraska's run/pass split last year.
It's convenient that Nebraska lost every game in which we threw the ball 40+ times and only lost once when we threw it under 30 times. It brilliantly illustrates the point that Nebraska as-is is more successful running the ball than throwing the ball. But it's almost too simplistic, no? Surely there's more to winning or losing than how many times you throw the ball? A lot of codependent variables that factor into every decision that's made during the course of the game. It's really hard to pinpoint a single causal factor.
You're right, running more and limiting TA's running game are not mutually exclusive. I'll note that about half of the drop in running attempts from 2014 to 2015 (91) came from TA alone. He had 145 attempts in 2014, but just 98 attempts in 2015. So RBs got just 44 fewer carries in 2015 as they did in 2014.
BigRedBuster
International Man of Mystery
I think you are taking one data point and assuming a lot.
You would have to look at each individual game and decide if the passing was the cause of the loss. In other words, WHY did we pass so much? Was it that they shut down our running game? I remember games (not sure which ones) where our running game was shut down early and we fell behind. Well.....I would expect to pass more in that situation. Was it a game where we were behind by a decent margin late in the game and passed quite a bit trying to catch up?
There are a number of scenarios where we can lose a game, pass a lot during the game but it's not the passing a lot that lost the game.
It is a simplistic view but the trend is pretty obvious.
The better stats to see what we "should" have been doing is to compare ourselves to others around the country.
We were #87 in completion percentage. We were #66 in QB rating. We were #123 in interceptions. Yet we were #42 in pass attempts.
We were #44 in rushing yards per attempt. We rarely fumbled. Yet we were #69 in rushing attempts per game.
So - relatively speaking - we were noticeably less efficient throwing the ball compared to how often we threw it. And we were noticeably better rushing the ball compared to how often we ran it.
I'm not assuming anything. I simply didn't go through the whole argument (again).
To some extent that is true. But considering how many close games we had, the argument about falling behind doesn't even hold much water out of the gate. Miami is probably the one game that would be a valid argument for. Many have tried to make that claim about Purdue but I would argue that passing too much is what got us in the hole to start with. Purdue only needed 38 yards to score two TDs off turnovers on called pass plays. Against BYU, Northwestern and Iowa we were never far enough behind that we "had" to pass. There are other factors that contributed to those losses but not holding the ball as long, not wearing out lesser-depth teams and throwing pick sixes were definitely factors.
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