Despite the Miami game being a general cluster the point that the offensive game plan was out the window by the second quarter, Nebraska did show a few new looks that were successful. In this write up, we’ll take a look at Nebraska’s Counter OH Read play, the appearance of the Cross/Janovich combination in a Wing T on short yardage, and a dip into Nebraska’s bag of two-point conversion plays. Continue reading “Miami – Power/Counter, a Fullback Sighting, and 2-Point Conversions”
The Miami game was not Nebraska’s finest, either from an efficiency standpoint or in terms of offensive balance. A porous defense coupled with early penalties and untimely drops put Nebraska well behind at the half, and an early Miami TD in the third quarter forced Nebraska to rely too much on passing the ball in the second half to catch up.
Even in the early going, though, Nebraska had relatively little success running their base run plays. Let’s take a look at what did and did not work for Nebraska.
(Editor’s Note: For those of you who like to slow down the GIFs or play them frame-by-frame, I’ve now added hot links before each GIF that take you to a separate page where you can pause or play them frame-by-frame and also expand them to full screen mode.)
One of the interesting things about football strategy is that even among the most basic plays, there are often wildly different ways to coach them. To give you a bit of that flavor, I’ve asked other writers to occasionally provide guest posts to the blog. Most of these guest writers have coached or played in Nebraska, though I’m always open to contributors from beyond the Good Life.
Today’s guest post is part of a series dedicated to the inside zone play. We’ve covered this play in the abstract, but for you guys and girls who really want to know the nuts and bolts of it, I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the blocking scheme itself. Enter guest poster Ryan Reuter, a Gretna Dragon who was stuck with me for most of this year’s Big Red Coaches Clinic. After the jump, Ryan breaks down the basics of the inside zone play. You can harass him on Twitter @Hoss_Reuter if you want more information.
Although Nebraska overwhelmingly leaned on inside zone against South Alabama to move the ball down the field, they did show a couple of new plays in the process, including their first formation-into-the-boundary (“FIB”) look. Here are three new plays that Nebraska unveiled against South Alabama.
The South Alabama game was all about inside zone runs and a ton of different motions. Nebraska showed 4 different inside zone variants, 1 option, 6 outside zone plays, 1 QB Power Sweep, 4 Power/Counter plays, and 3 jet sweeps. Within those, let’s take a look at how Langsdorf and Riley established the run to the tune of 37 carries for 258 yards. Continue reading “Charting the South Alabama Game”
First, as you’ll note the address for the site has changed to huskerchalktalk.com. You should automatically be forwarded from the old URL, but if anybody is having issues, let me know and I’ll look into it.
Second, while I work through the 2015 film over the next couple of months, let me know if you have any requested areas you’d like me to focus on. With the base stuff soon-to-be-complete from the BYU, South Alabama, Miami and Southern Miss games, my plan is to hit each game from that point on with any new looks that we showed, offensively and defensively. That said, if you want to take a look at specific players or revisit offensive or defensive concepts (QB run game, zone pressure coverages, etc.), drop a comment in one of the posts and I’ll get some tape up.
Finally, I’ve spoken to a couple of you offline about this, but I’m always open to guest posts from Nebraska high school coaches or others in that region. Could be about schemes you use, could be drills, hell, it could be how you go about managing your practices to get the most out of them. I envision this whole project as a resource not just for Nebraska fans to learn about the Huskers, but also as a coaching resource to pool the collective knowledge of those coaches who will hopefully send kids to Nebraska down the line. If you have something you’d like to discuss or share, drop your email in with a comment and I’ll follow up with you.
Opening press conference for Spring Ball. What a great time of the year.
Against South Alabama, Nebraska fans got their first extended look at Mark Banker’s blitz package. Perhaps feeling comfortable with the match up between the Blackshirt DBs and South Alabama’s receivers, Banker ran a lot of Cover 0 and 1 Pressures and also mixed in some fire zones as well. Although the box score only showed 2 sacks for Nebraska, the Blackshirts were able to generate consistent pressure all game long from bringing extra men and asking their DBs to win on the outside. Let’s take a look at a couple of Nebraska’s 6-man pressures from that game. Continue reading “Blackshirts Blitz Package – South Alabama”
Because inside zone targets the interior DL and LBs, defenses will start to overreact to it after a few times of being gashed in the middle. Once Riley and Langsdorf see this happening, they mix it up with outside zone (“OZ”). OZ is also known as the “stretch” play. Unlike the vertically hitting inside zone play, OZ is about horizontal displacement: move the defensive line and linebackers toward the sideline and make them maintain their gap integrity. Once a hole opens up in their front, stick your foot in the ground and get vertical. This type of blocking isn’t new to Nebraska; Osborne and Tenopir frequently blocked their option runs with it, and of course Bill Callahan loved that god damn stretch play against USC.
Nebraska runs a couple of different versions of OZ depending on the game plan for the week and the fronts they see from the defense. In this post, let’s look at two of them: (1) standard OZ; and (2) the Pin and Pull.
As we discussed in the last post, one of the weaknesses of Quarters is the flats against a strong run game and especially out of 10 personnel. Because they are run first players, the SAM and WILL have to respect the run game, making it difficult to cover the flats if #2 to their side is immediately out on some sort of bubble or quick out. This is especially true of the weak side away from the back, as the OLB must respect the zone run to his side and thus cannot expand in time to cover his flat.
When that happens, Quarters defenses answer with a trap coverage, designed to free up the CB to play the out-breaking route from #2 while passing verticals from #1 off to the S on that side. This is a Quarters check that operates as the defensive equivalent of a constraint play. Early in the season, we saw a couple of different trap looks from the Blackshirts. Continue reading “Trap Coverages – A Quarters Check”
With Bo Pelini out and Mark Banker in, the Blackshirts were faced with a sizable conceptual shift. Pelini liked to play a lot of bracket coverages, with his safeties 2 High and primarily as pass defenders with limited run support responsibility; he tried to overcome this by mostly two-gapping his defensive line (though he unsuccessfully attempted to move away from this late). This scheme worked great in the Big 12, with offenses using 11 and 10 personnel packages, rarely committing to consistently running the ball and instead throwing it down the field into that bracket coverage. In the Big 10, Pelini’s defense had substantially less success, as teams would often formation Nebraska into a light box and force Nebraska’s OLBs into playing the run from a man disadvantage (6 blockers versus 5 defenders, etc.) while also having to play RPOs like the bubble, Y stick, pop pass, etc. That’s an unwinnable battle, and we saw the Blackshirts get drilled a number of times because of it. Think 63-38 in 2012 and Ohio State running wild on the Blackshirts.
Enter Mark Banker and his Cover 4 (or “Quarters”) base defense. There are a lot of things I like about this defense and how it fits the Big 10. Let’s take a peek at its basic principles. Continue reading “Cover 4 Bankerball – Nebraska’s Base Defense”