Brendan Moran-USA TODAY Sports
Tad Stryker: You See Any Change?
In this story:
Things have changed in Lincoln? You can’t convince me of that, not after another disastrous season opener for the Big Red, yet another one-score loss to a team that has less talent than Nebraska.
No matter how many things change, things look frustratingly the same for the Nebraska football program after a 31-28 loss to Northwestern, which was widely considered to be the team team with the lowest ceiling in the Big Ten West.
The Huskers have possibly the best fans in college football, but they’re still not a physical football team, which is the one thing the 13,000-plus red-clad fans in Aviva Stadium wanted most of all to see. It’s the main thing that earns the contempt of the shrinking number of college football fans who remember what Nebraska once was under Tom Osborne.
The Huskers changed offensive coaches, they brought in a lot of highly regarded transfers, and they created a lot of offseason buzz. They played largely penalty-free, and didn’t self-destruct on special teams. Those things could all be considered changes for the better. But those changes are nullified by one huge truth: Nebraska is still weak up front, which has been its hallmark pretty much since Bo Pelini left the state.
Nebraska’s offense is built around talented playmakers who break down because they play behind a poor offensive line. And speaking of no real change, I could have sworn that Nebraska’s quarterback looked a lot like Adrian Martinez. Casey Thompson played a teasingly Martinez-like game, sparking a Husker touchdown drive with a great individual effort on a broken play, but could manage only one touchdown pass before tossing a pair of untimely interceptions. Like Martinez, Thompson looked utterly unsure of himself with two minutes remaining, but it’s hard to criticize him for that, after an evening of watching his receivers consistently missing passes that hit them in the hands.
Good stats, close losses. Yep, we’ve played this game before, many times. Nebraska can pile up yards, but can’t find the end zone when it really needs to. If you can’t break 30 points against Big Ten opponents, you’re not going to beat many of them. Right on cue, with an opportunity to take control in the second half, Nebraska’s offense stumbled, even though Northwestern’s highest-regarded defensive back sat out most of the game with an injury. It’s not how many yards you get, it’s when you get them.
Frost, with his head no longer in the play sheet, allegedly freed up to manage the game and look his players in the eye, could not get his team to make big plays at crunch time. Northwestern, a two-touchdown underdog, was more fundamentally sound and made more than its share of those big plays.
Not a single player in the Nebraska locker room has proven he understands the concept of breaking the will of an opponent when he has the opportunity. To his credit, Frost tried, perhaps unwisely, to make that very thing happen with the onside kick early in the third quarter, leading 28-17. Is that an example of “No Fear of Failure”? Or was that simply a lack of confidence that his offensive and defensive lines could take control of the game, the gut feeling that he needed to create an 18-point lead with a gimmick? We may never know for sure.
We do know that Nebraska never ran an effective offensive series after that moment. The Huskers finished the game with six consecutive empty possessions — amazingly, all without committing a single penalty on offense. Nebraska once was a sloppy team. It wasn’t sloppy Saturday in Dublin; it simply was not a physical team.
Nebraska was worn down in the fourth quarter by a tough but mediocre opponent. After four seasons to develop your players, I don’t know how you fix that on this team, and that’s the most troublesome thing that Frost has to consider as he contemplates his future in Lincoln. Frost seemed intent on upgrading the o-line physicality during the offseason, and chose Donovan Raiola to bring in an aggressive blocking scheme. I thought it would make a difference. It sure didn’t against Northwestern. Is it simply a matter of Prochazka, Corcoran, Hixson, Bando and Benhart getting more familiar with each other? One hopes so, but it seems unlikely.
Considering it had no penalties, the o-line was not undisciplined, it was simply impotent. Frost and Raiola several times tried stacking two tackles on the same side. It didn’t help. There was rarely room to run. The Huskers ran the ball for only 111 yards, with almost half those yards coming on a single play, an impressive 46-yard touchdown run by Anthony Grant, who could be a good back if he got some blocking. There was only one moment in the fourth quarter when Nebraska looked physical, and that’s when Mark Whipple put Logan Smothers into the game to run an option play that gained seven yards. Smothers immediately returned to the bench and never saw the field again.
It could be argued that Frost’s onside kick was the single worst coaching decision of the game, but if so, Whipple’s decision to pull Smothers was a close second. Northwestern couldn’t stop Nebraska’s option in 2021. Whipple made sure they wouldn’t have to try to stop it in 2022. After so many worthless possessions, what did he have to lose by letting Smothers try to change the momentum?
Whipple obviously has more faith in his passing game than his running game. Throwing the ball 45 times, compared to just 31 rushes, well that’s a recipe for disaster when you don’t have NFL talent at quarterback or wide receiver, and it’s the most disappointing aspect of this season opener, coming against a team that was by far the worst against the run in the Big Ten last season.
An effective power run game covers up all kinds of other problems. The absence of it reveals most of them, and there’s no denying the Husker defense has plenty issues of its own to fix — issues that wouldn’t have been evident if the offense could move the chains with the run game. When the other team runs 85 plays and holds the ball for 34 minutes, you’ll start to wear down. The Blackshirts missed more than their share of tackles, especially in the open field.
There were a lot of changes in the offseason on defense as well, especially on the defensive front. Few of those new acquisitions made a difference in the game. Ochaun Mathis got the quietest 10 tackles I’ve ever seen, but you’d have to say that double-digit tackles means he was a factor. Sadly, he was not a difference maker. Garrett Nelson and Caleb Tannor weren’t, either. The edge rushers were supposedly the strength of this team coming into the season, but they were dominated by Peter Skoronski and and Ethan Wiederkehr, Northwestern’s pair of NFL prospects at tackle. No Husker edge player got a single tackle for loss. Nobody got a push up the middle on defense, either, so Northwestern quarterback Ryan Hilinski was free to sit back all day and search for receivers at his leisure. So yes, the Blackshirts did their share to lose the game.
Everyone knew going in that this was an absolutely, positively must win for Frost, who is on the hottest of hot seats coming into his fifth season, and now has lost twice as many games as he’s won at Nebraska. This is Frost’s prove-it flight at Nebraska, but he’s used up 90 percent of his runway. He had all off season to fine tune his operation, but sadly enough, it just became distressingly evident that his plane has the same basic problem it ended last season with.
- More coverage & commentary: HuskerMax game page
