If you have been reading or watching much of anything lately in the world of college sports, you already “know” that Colorado is going to beat Nebraska by 40+ points; that Travis Hunter will win the Heisman Trophy; and Shedeur Sanders and Dylan Edwards will be the runners-up. There is no firm decision yet as to whether or not last year’s Heisman winner, Caleb Williams, is likely to be in NYC for the award presentation.
If this seems a bit premature, there are many matchups to consider in this week’s game that lean in Nebraska’s favor. There are only two that truly matter.
1. Colorado’s Speed Offense vs Nebraska’s Big Ten Defense
Do you remember when Scott Frost said that he hoped that the Big Ten would have to adjust to his offense? (I have a hunch that you do.) It didn’t take long, did it? Colorado’s offense is built around the exact same principles:
A “hurry-up, no huddle” (HUNH) offense with a foundation of Read-Pass Option (RPO) plays;
fast small Wide Receivers (WRs) everywhere;
instead having a play-calling coach playing chess by anticipating what the defense will do and calling a play to attack it, the offense is a relatively small bundle of plays with almost limitless options that allow QB to make quick simple reads in order to take what the defense gives them;
the QB is expected to get rid of the ball quickly, which takes the pressure off of the offensive line.
What happened to TCU?
Whatever TCU’s defensive plan was for Colorado, Scott Frost wishes that he would have seen it against his offense’s debut in 2017. While both Nebraska and TCU will technically be described as running a 3-3-5 defense, it is hard to imagine more opposite defensive philosophies. Besides the questionable defensive gameplan that TCU employed, the entire team seems much more likely to finish at .500 for the season (or just slightly over) than to come anywhere near the 12-0 regular season that they had last year. Despite being in the playoffs and making their way to the championship game, their defense was statistically atrocious last year. It was the strength of their offense and a great deal of breaks that went their way during the year that made such a Cinderella season possible. Against Colorado their defensive backs apparently were scared that the Colorado receivers might have Covid because they gave them nearly a 10-yard cushion at times, which made it easier for Shedeur Sanders to get the ball out quickly. Besides that they tended to line up quickly and NOT change their defensive formations pre-snap or post-snap, which, again, made it easier for the QB to read the field and make quick decisions. The TCU defensive backs rarely were physical at the line-of-scrimmage (LoS) with Colorado’s smaller-than-average WRs. TCU would have done better by adapting any of the schemes used by the B1G West teams against Scott Frost’s offense in 2019.
Weaknesses of the HUNH Offense
An inherent problem of a HUNH offense is that it does not allow for a lot of nuance in play-calling. Gus Malzahn, who literally wrote the book on the Hurry-up/No Huddle offense, laid out very clearly that the tradeoff of having an offense that goes uber-fast is that it doesn’t allow the sorts of sophisticated play-calling that comes with a more traditional type of offense that makes use of a huddle and numbered routes to communicate specific WR routes, blocking scheme adjustments, etc. Most HUNH offenses end up adapting a lot of RPO plays as their foundation because those plays have choices built into them that give more options to the QB while taking them away from the play-caller. Most HUNH teams running a lot of RPO plays will also include a lot of Option Routes in their passing scheme so that the QB and WRs can adjust to a defense that shifts its alignment pre- or post-snap from what was expected. It all sounds pretty good, right? Frost was not wrong when he claimed that his offense had an answer for everything that the defense threw at him. So why didn’t it work in the Big Ten?
Defensive Coordinators (DCs) tend to be smart guys who like wrecking the plans of Offensive Coordinators (OCs) who think that they are even smarter. The Big Ten has had (and still has) a lot of very smart DCs. When a DC watched film of the Frost offense, they identified the following:
Frost used formations and personnel to set up specific RPOs;
certain RPOs tended to be called in specific situations (1st & 10 vs 3rd & 5, etc.);
almost everything depended on which defender the QB was “reading” to determine where the ball would go.
Once a DC had a pretty good idea of those three things, he could look at how his individual defenders matched up with Frost’s offensive personnel, and–here’s the clever, ornery part–they could set up the defense so that the QB would make the read that the DC wanted him to make: when correct, the offense would lose all of its advantages. Do you remember how that looked?
Let’s say that you’re Iowa, and you have future NFL Cornerbacks who like to come up and smack people: you put a numbers advantage in the Box so that the QB chooses the “Passing” part of the RPO. You also shade your deep Safety towards the most dangerous WR so that the “P” will go away from him. What was often the result? Nebraska ended up throwing a Bubble Screen or Swing Pass to somebody not very big who ran into an Iowa cornerback (CB) who was big, strong, and fast, and who arrived with evil intentions. It didn’t hurt that many of those Iowa CBs would end up playing in the NFL. While the fans (and announcer Matt Millen) would bemoan all of the sideline passes that Nebraska was calling, it was actually the Iowa defense that was “calling” those plays by loading up against everything else in order to force the QB to go to those options. It meant that either undersized WRs were blocking very good defensive backs so that a Tight End (TE) could have room to run with the ball, or it meant the TE was hurrying out to the flat to block a speedy defensive back who was lining up to break a small WR in half. If you don’t recall that working very well, your memory is fine.
Now we see a matchup where Colorado has the speedy and undersized WRs, and Nebraska has some NFL-caliber defensive backs who would really like to break them in half. It is impossible to keep those players from reading all that has been printed this week, such as this, or to keep them from hearing lazy analysis, such as this gem from Keyshawn Johnson.(Related to the last link, be sure to check out and subscribe to Chancellor Brewington’s channel on YouTube. He’s very good.) While playing angry rarely helps a player’s performance, one thing that it does is adds a little bit more pop to the tackles when the defenders finally get to hit the people who have been talking a little too loosely.
Win Some Jump Balls
Shadeur Sanders likes to throw up 50-50 jump balls on deep passes, expecting his WRs to make plays. Against TCU, they did. When Travis Fisher was recruiting CBs for Nebraska, he placed an emphasis on height, or “length,” because he didn’t recruit CBs who couldn’t run. Everybody is talking about how fast the Colorado WRs are–and they are fast!--but it seems to be assumed that Nebraska’s CBs are slow. They’re not. They’re fast, and they’re technically very sound. They need to use their height/length advantage to win some of those 50-50 deep balls.
Nebraska’s Defensive Strategy
If Nebraska feels confident that they know who the safety-valve receiver will be on a blitz–it was often Dylan Edwards (the RB) coming out of the backfield against TCU–they can all but force the QB to throw to that receiver by blitzing from that side, but then Nebraska can rotate a Safety or Linebacker over to pick up the RB immediately. While Edwards is very fast–he tore up the TCU defense on Saturday–he also weighs in at 170 lb (which might even be an exaggeration), which matters when/if he catches the ball and turns around to meet a 225 lb defensive back coming at him full speed. TCU played off the LoS most of the time, and their LBs had a hard time getting out to cover in the flats when the RB was there. Nebraska will not make the same mistake.
Another key element of the Colorado offense that is ripe for a DC to manipulate is hiding coverages and shifting Safeties so that the WRs and/or the QB misread what the defense is doing. If the QB and his WR need to be on the same page as far as what route will be run, what happens when one or both are wrong? Generally, the offense will not like the outcome. Colorado WRs coach Brett Bartolone said, “We’re expecting a little more off-man coverage this week, a little more zone coverage this week. So we’ve just gotta be where the quarterback expects us to be.” That seems obvious, but it’s not as simple as that. The job of the Nebraska defense is to make it as difficult as possible for them to correctly read what they’re doing. TCU rarely ever shifted their defense after setting up because Colorado’s fast-tempo offense goes so quickly (about 8-10 seconds between plays) that a defense that doesn’t get set up quickly will sometimes leave somebody open, which happened last weekend, and Colorado made them pay for it.
What is usually even more confusing for the offense is a post-snap rotation of the defense, which is what some teams did to confuse Nebraska back in 2019. If the QB and WR expect a deep Safety to be on the wide side of the field, but he rotates over to the boundary side of the field as the balls is snapped, both the QB and the WR have to recognize the switch in real time and adjust in harmony. Since the goal is to have the ball out of the hand of the QB within 3 seconds, there’s a lot that can go wrong in that first 2 seconds. Going back again to the Frost offense circa 2019, do you remember those times when Adrian Martinez faked a handoff to the RB then turned to throw the ball and … nothing? It was because nothing was there. The defense had shifted, and when he turned back to make the throw, sometimes the WR wasn’t where he was expected to be, and sometimes it was a defender who was where the pass was supposed to go. In the best case scenarios, a QB like Adrian Martinez was able to tuck the ball in and run for yards, but Shedeur Sander does not look to run very much. If that isn’t an option, the QB will often be forced with the choice of throwing a pass that he doesn’t want to make, or else he is a sitting duck for the pass rushers.
Playing Physical Defense
Shedeur Sanders threw for over 500 yards, and he hardly ever felt contact from the defense. If Nebraska wants to win this game, that has to change. Travis Hunter was in for 130 plays on offense and defense … yet he hardly ever had anybody initiating contact with him. That needs to change. I was willing to believe that it was possible for Frost to design an offense that would allow the skill players to read a play and make it possible for a great offense to work despite having a less-than-awesome offensive line, but Big Ten defenses showed that they could still exploit weaknesses in the trenches whenever they found them. Nebraska must do the same.
If anybody reading this has played football and has ever had the experience of coming out in a game and having someone smack you hard at the start of the game, you know that it goes a long way toward clarifying who you are as a person. I don’t think that Colorado’s skill players like contact. What happens when Nebraska makes their WRs work to get off the LoS? What happens when Shedeur Sanders sees a 320+ pound polar bear coming for his jaw? What happens when 170 lb Colorado players get smacked by 225+ lb Nebraska defenders all over the field?... Nebraska fans know how that worked out for us in 2019. There’s no reason to believe that it won’t be the same today.
2. Nebraska’s Rushing Attack vs Colorado’s Defense
If Nebraska cannot successfully run the ball against Colorado, it is doubtful that anything else would save them. The good news? They’re going to run through Colorado’s defense like this:
Colorado does not have a good defense, even by the standards of the PAC 12. Nebraska’s fans have reasonably questioned the competence of the Nebraska offensive line,... but Colorado’s defensive line is not good, and Nebraska’s offensive line will finally be able to beat up on somebody who is NOT from the Big Ten. This is going to be like those mascots running over little kids at halftime of NFL games….
Nebraska’s offensive line will look good when they’re pitted against a non-B1G defense. Remember the 2020 game at Rutgers? Remember Turner Corcoran flipping more pancakes than IHOP in that game? Why did that happen? It was because Rutgers had an undersized defensive line, and Nebraska was running the ball right at them. Guess what! Colorado’s defensive line is even smaller, and they’re less aggressive.
Do you remember the horrible feeling of Big Ten teams having drives that lasted half of a decade while Nebraska had a 3-and-out that took up less time than the commercials on a typical broadcast? Now the Colorado fans at Folsom Field get to feel that pain. If Nebraska’s drives don’t last eons, it will only be because somebody turned the ball over (in which case it may be time to bring out the pitchforks), or that a Nebraska RB just “tore ‘em loose from their shoes.”
For the love of God, Marcus Satterfield, don’t pass the ball. Run it again and again and again, and then for a change, run it the other way.
Conclusion
Put all of the above together, and I expect Nebraska to win by more than two touchdowns. Don’t buy the hype. Since it’s unlikely that Nebraska will have cleaned up all of their turnover issues since last week–just keep it within a difference of 1 turnover–I am going to have to give in to peer pressure and make it a closer score than I think it will be: Nebraska 31, Colorado 28.
For those of you who like to place gentleman’s wagers, this is a good week to lay a small bet on micro-events within the game. For example, it’s reasonable to think that Gabe Ervin will run for 100+ yards against the Colorado defense. It’s probably reasonable to think the same about Jeff Sims rushing for 100, but just in case the Nebraska coaches want to keep him from carrying too much when the RBs are running wild, it would be safer to bet on him going for 75+. Picking Nebraska to win the game pays $1.25 for every $1 risked (as of the time that I write this), which seems like easy money.
