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”
If you’ve ever seen a Mike Riley/Danny Langsdorf game, whether in Lincoln, Corvallis or anywhere in between, you’ve no doubt seen the inside zone. When Riley and Langsdorf have had productive interior offensive linemen, they’ve often based much of their run game around the inside zone play. Inside zone is a downhill, vertical displacement play, designed to get you at least one double team on the DL to knock them back off the line of scrimmage. Once the double team is secured, one of the OL will slide off and attack the next playside LB.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the Huskers’ bread-and-butter running play, as well as some common variants that you’ll see the Huskers run.
Continue reading “Inside Zone, the Mike Riley/Danny Langsdorf Staple”
Coming into the year, the largest question on offense was how Riley and Langsdorf would use Tommy Armstrong’s legs. At Oregon State, they never had the luxury of a QB who could get into open space and make plays with his feet. In Lincoln, that’s exactly what they had in spades with Armstrong, AJ Bush and Zack Darlington. With the offensive coaches talking in the spring about incorporating the QB run game, the BYU game featured a handful of designed QB runs outside of the standard zone read variety. Here are a few of them:
Nebraska’s first game of the year against BYU introduced fans to the basic tenets that appear throughout Mike Riley and Danny Langsdorf’s offense. Inside and outside zone, a lot of motion (jet, H, Y return, etc.), shotgun, under center, tight end and fullback wings, detached and flexed tight ends. This was a lot of variety for BYU to deal with, and to their credit, they handled it pretty well.
A team’s first drive often gives you a good glimpse into the offense’s core principles, largely because offensive coordinators want to see how defenses plan to answer those principles before opening up more of the playbook. I’m not sure whether Langsdorf is a script play caller, but the first drive showed a lot of things that Nebraska leaned on throughout the year. Perhaps most importantly, it was Nebraska fans’ first real introduction to something they had heard about in spring and fall camp: the jet sweep. Or as Riley likes to call it, the “fly” sweep. With that in mind, let’s take a look at Nebraska’s first drive against BYU, which featured two plays with jet motion.
Continue reading “Nebraska’s Introduction to the Jet Sweep – BYU”