What is Our Offensive Identity?

If you don't understand "take what the defense gives us" you don't understand football.

Of course you have your bread and butter plays. And a defense is going to prepare for your bread and butter plays. If they're anywhere near as strong and fast as you are, you're going to have to mix it up. And you'll have alternate bread and butter plays. And some surprise plays in your pocket.

Who wouldn't love to have an offense that can impose its will on a defense? That basically announces what they plan to do, and dare you to stop them?

But that's not an offensive identity. That's a talented and well trained offense, and chances are they have an excellent offensive line, which every team needs regardless of what they want to call themselves. It's a pretty rare thing, too. And even they will take what the defense gives them. Those Osborne teams ran into fast defenses that didn't give them the corner, so the offense would be forced to go away from the short-side option to something else, including (gasp) a passing game.

By the way? The offense we already have, with whatever identity you want to give it, has shown a natural inclination to run for 300 yards and pass for 150. Those 21 passing attempts a game would fit right into Tom Osborne's 1995 championship team. Except Martinez has a higher completion percentage than Frazier.

 
Guy Chamberlin said:
If you don't understand "take what the defense gives us" you don't understand football.
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Um ok, whatever.

Guy Chamberlin said:
Of course you have your bread and butter plays. And a defense is going to prepare for your bread and butter plays. If they're anywhere near as strong and fast as you are, you're going to have to mix it up. And you'll have alternate bread and butter plays. And some surprise plays in your pocket.
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Its one thing to use your "bread and butter" plays and attack the defense where they are weakest. It is an entirely different thing to change your bread and butter plays each week based on what the defense does. Alternate bread and butter plays? Sorry boss, that isn't gonna work. You really think you'll be able to run proficiently a different set of plays each week? Doubtful. Or not even have any bread and butter plays. Like the guy above said, we basically have 320 or however many plays to choose from. Each week we pick and choose which ones we think will work best instead of running the same set of plays each week. Thats the difference between having an offensive identity and not. If you don't understand that, then you don't understand football.

 
Identities for offenses are a waste of time these days. Every team in college ball runs pretty much the same type of offense...Multiple. You can watch any team on Sat. and see them run power plays, spread plays, option, and even play ground ball in one game. How can you put an identity on this besides calling it multiple.

 
I think I have it figured out:

You have an offensive identity when the plays you run work.

You're in need of an identity when the plays you run don't work.

Our bread and butter plays are handing the ball to Burkhead, or Martinez keeping. We run those plays enough to call it our identity, and it's supported by the stats.

Like every other team, our bread and butter plays won't work unless we have misdirection plays to keep a defense guessing. Maybe we have too many of those, but things like the Bell reverse and long bombs to Turner seem kinda fun to me. The players don't appear confused.

What's weird is that this is the offense a lot of people were clamoring for, and now that they have it, they're fretting it isn't something else. We enjoy sustained drives and exciting big plays. We won't against some of the better teams, but that's because of our experience and execution, not our identity and play-calling.

If I had to stick an identity on this offense it would be Young and Fast.

 
Stumpy1 said:
Every team in college ball runs pretty much the same type of offense...Multiple. You can watch any team on Sat. and see them run power plays, spread plays, option, and even play ground ball in one game. How can you put an identity on this besides calling it multiple.
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I agree with this statement. I would say 90% of teams in this day and age are trying to be multiple and they look very, very similar. Of those 90%, about 85% are mediocre teams who never really have any chance of winning a National Title. The other 5% are the teams like Alabama, Florida, Texas, etc who are able to attract the very best 5 star recruits. Nebraska is not in that top 5% which is exactly why we have been so very average the last 10 years.

We can argue about this till we're blue in the face. The fact of the matter is, Nebraska has to be different and unique in order to be among the best teams in college football. That is why we were so good in the 90's. If we continue to just go along with the norm in college football, we will continue to win 8, 9, 10 games a year, and never win another National Championship. Will will just be the nice team that once had an amazing run in history.

 
With Watson, I think our "Identity" was always so important because it was mainly related to people searching for one thing we are good at. One thing that when all else fails you can call upon to be successful. You can look at Watson's entire career here and it seemed we would be good at one thing one year, then completely good at another the next. It kind of explains how you go from a Zac Lee at QB one year to a Taylor Martinez starting as a freshman the next. The two guys have absolutely nothing in common as quarterbacks. Thus our offense really never found that "one thing". Beck speaks of being multiple, same as Watson but you can see Beck has clearly focused on establishing the run first and not asking Taylor to do more than he is capable of. I think Watson always struggled with that. You have to find what your players are capable of executing and then use that to your advantage. Regardless of what that thing is you rely on it and work towards adding more as the year progresses. You can clearly see that we are slowly adding to this offense and improving each week. Wisconsin was a great learning experience for this offense, especially for Beck. We really wanted that one. We wanted to take a huge step that week. Unfortunately we tried to take too big a step and it backfired on us. Beck gets a pass from me on that one. He's a first year guy. From what I can see, he clearly took it in stride and learned from it.

 
In fairness, Watson started with Taylor/Keller/Ganz offenses before inheriting Zac Lee as his starting QB. Lee actually looked like a reasonable successor to the system, but by all accounts he was a different game day quarterback than he was in practice. Watson then had to look down the barrell of another season with Lee at the helm, or adjusting the offense to the strengths of Cody Green, which by then had revealed themselves as glaring weaknesses. Revamping the offense for an untested, high speed freshman was a risky thing to do at that point, but it was the right thing to do. So was pulling Martinez back a notch and getting a featured running attack going. Beck is making the right calls, but Watson wouldn't have done things much differently.

 
Guy Chamberlin said:
In fairness, Watson started with Taylor/Keller/Ganz offenses before inheriting Zac Lee as his starting QB. Lee actually looked like a reasonable successor to the system, but by all accounts he was a different game day quarterback than he was in practice. Watson then had to look down the barrell of another season with Lee at the helm, or adjusting the offense to the strengths of Cody Green, which by then had revealed themselves as glaring weaknesses. Revamping the offense for an untested, high speed freshman was a risky thing to do at that point, but it was the right thing to do. So was pulling Martinez back a notch and getting a featured running attack going. Beck is making the right calls, but Watson wouldn't have done things much differently.
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That's sounds about right to me.

I really doubt SW could be capable of becoming good at play-calling for us (the Wisconsin game sure looked like he was still here) but I suppose it's possible. Good post!

GBR!!

 
We are a running team ....... take what we want on the ground to set up easy passes for servicable passing QB's. BTW I hate the take what they give saying, I don't want to rely on the othe D to tell our Offense what to take.

 
Watson's track record proves that he would have easily found a way to make sure this offense was a failure. Beck is doing a far better job in his first year than Watson ever could have done. Of course, that's just my humble opinion.

PS. Watson was a terrible coach.

 
When a quarterback sees a defense lined up to stop the running play he just called, and he knows they're willing to leave one of his wide receivers open, he -- or a coach on the sideline -- often change the play to exploit that. Some call it "taking what a defense gives you." Others just call it "football."

 
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