ya know, that whole ball control offense, is how you mess up teams like Texas Tech...
They're ready for a sprint, not a marathon...
Trouble is, unless you are demonstrably physically superior to the opposition, a ball control offense - presumably, a run-based offense - becomes easy to defend. Load up the box. If the offense can't pass to open up the defense, it becomes easy to stop the offense.
When NU was winning championships, and in the years it contended, it did so with a run-based offense that benefited from players that were physically dominate over the opposition.
But think to those games when we ran up against teams that were as good as us physically. Those teams stopped us, and we had no other way to move the ball. Seemed to happen every year until the championship years. We would dominate most teams, then eventually run into one that was as physically talented as we were. They'd load the box, stop the run - and NU would lose a heart-breaker.
Yes, we have been running well, but notice also that no one is loading the box - they have to at least respect the pass.