10 thoughts from Big Ten media days
Matt Rhule embraced expectations, the battles at WR this August should be epic, Curt Cignetti isn't messing around and more.
Matt Rhule is doing his best to make it OK to have expectations again. Some might argue they never faded at Nebraska, that expectations can’t fall away at a place with so much history. There’s probably some truth to that. There was certainly the expectation that Scott Frost would succeed when he was hired. Despite a 4-8 debut season, expectations only increased as the offseason consensus in 2019 was that Nebraska would make a leap.
Instead, the Huskers only managed a step, and every offseason since has felt fractured. There’s always optimism, but it wasn’t growing at the pace the feeling of “fool me twice” was as Nebraska never turned the corner. Outscoring opponents 1324-1308 over the 47 games of the Frost era and having only 16 wins1 to show for it will convince even those with the sunniest outlook that these clouds might just be here permanently.
Rhule, unburdened by that past, wouldn’t say the clouds are definitely going to part this fall, only that he expect them to. He said in various ways over multiple interviews this week at Big Ten Media Days in Indianapolis. This was maybe the punchiest of those:
“I expect us to win. I expect us to be relevant in the conference…I won’t say, ‘10-2 is good’ because if I 10-2 is good or 8-4 is good, I’m telling you I think we’re going to lose four games. I want us to try and go out and win every game because that seems right to me.”
At this same event five years ago, when Nebraska was last trendy, then-AD Bill Moos was asked to define success for the program in Frost’s second season. He said, “six wins.” Not only did Moos put a number on it, it was a number that felt low given the tone around the program. It was also uncharacteristically meager for a guy who almost always pushed the “bold” button when in front of a microphone. It was confusing from almost every angle.
In retrospect, I guess the confusion was just foreshadowing an era of Nebraska football that made no sense.
When presented with the expectations question this week, Rhule gave a less concrete answer and it was all the stronger for it. This was a good place to leave the offseason and move into the actual season.
But before we turn all of our attention to fall camp, here are a few more thoughts from Big Ten Media Days.
Maybe there’s hope on the turnover front
“Very few of our turnovers last year were bad luck,” Rhule said, addressing the elephant still in the room from 2023. The Huskers were -17 (132nd) on 31 giveaways (132nd). Changing that is the quickest way Nebraska improves upon 5-7.
Bad-luck turnovers exist, but, from a numbers perspective, Rhule’s right.2 Based on national averages over multiple years, teams lose 50% of their total fumbles. Nebraska lost 15 on 31 total fumbles (48.4%), basically what a team “should” lose based on how often it coughed the ball up. Want to lose fewer fumbles? Start with fewer fumbles. Rhule said the staff has drilled this hard in the offseason, which is about all any coach can do. Remember the mantra: Fumbles Are Dumb.
On the passing side, about 20% of passes defended are interceptions on average, meaning for every five times a defense gets a hand on a pass, one of those is an interception. The Huskers threw 16 interceptions while opponents recorded 53 passes defended, a 30% interception rate. Bad luck? It’s a tough argument to make when you dig a little deeper.
Nebraska threw the ball 261 times last season, fewest in the Big Ten. The passes-defended rate on those attempts was 20.3%, last by a lot3 in the Big Ten. Translation: Nebraska’s quarterbacks put the ball at hazard a ton (not luck), which naturally resulted in a lot of interceptions (not luck) though maybe a few of them, less than five, were outside the norm (maybe luck).
That’s a turnover problem you can do something about with better accuracy at quarterback. Not to put another thing on Dylan Raiola’s plate, but keeping the ball away from harm is big for any young quarterback. Given Nebraska’s history here, it might be especially important for him.
Rebuilt receiver room gets a bonus
Injuries hit the Huskers hard at wide out last season. Nothing a team can do about that, other than try to address it through depth. Since last season, Nebraska added two veteran transfers (Jahmal Banks and Isaiah Neyor), got another veteran back from injury (Isaiah Garcia-Castaneda) and moved yet another (Janiran Bonner) back to wide receiver after playing in the backfield. There are increased expectations for second-year receivers Malachi Coleman and Jaylen Lloyd, a pair that combined for 376 receiving yards and four touchdowns in 2023. After a strong spring, early enrollee Jacory Barney Jr. looked ready to play right away, and another ready-to-go true freshman is joining the room.
Carter Nelson, the second-highest-rated recruit in Nebraska’s 2024 class, will start his career at wide receiver rather than tight end. This was perhaps always the quickest way for Nelson to see the field this season, and probably infers some good things about how the coaches feel about their tight ends as a whole. On the cusp of fall camp, the battles at receiver are going to be some of the most fun to watch this August.
What is success in the new Big Ten?
Conference commissioner Tony Petitti was asked for his definition of success for the Big Ten in the 12-team playoff era. “We want as many teams competing as late in the season to earn a spot in the playoff,” he said. Simple enough. Makes sense. This is our new reality.
I’m still curious how this is going to go the first time out, however. For basically all of college football’s history, even through a decade of the four-team playoff, the sport was about avoiding losses. Winning a championship is still about that, but the threshold for being in the hunt for one is about to change dramatically. Two losses was still disqualifying in our four-team past, but now even three losses might not be under certain circumstances.
This isn’t a bad thing, but, man, we’re all going to spend a lot of time collectively looking at a committee’s rankings4 late in the season. At the end of the year all we’ll remember is the excellence of the champion, but up to that point we’ll be focused on relevance more than ever before.
Oregon and Dan Lanning are going to be a problem
Admittedly, speaking at a podium on a football field filled with reporters and cameras is a strange setting. Still, I always enjoy the one-of-two-paths approach Big Ten coaches take each year. Some prefer the most rudimentary “opening statement” and getting to the football questions as quickly as possible. Others like to orate, chewing up the bulk of their 15 minutes at the podium with a prepared speech.
Lanning chose the latter, but it was a good statement. If you missed it, I’d encourage watching it. Lanning comes off as young, energetic and likeable. Pair that with his results and recruiting, and my takeaway from his session was, “Oh, that’s why he’s already viewed as one of the best coaches in the game and maybe the sport’s top up-and-comer.”
While Oregon remaining Oregon would be bad for some teams further down the food chain, it’s good for the Big Ten overall. For most of Nebraska’s time in the league there’s only been one team—Ohio State—where I thought you could drop that program into the SEC and it would be fine, no changes necessary. The Ducks might be headed there as long as Lanning is in Eugene.
The Big Ten could use another team or two joining the top end. That’s why I used the “drop them in the SEC” as my current measuring stick. Of the seven teams with the best national-title odds, five are from the SEC. The other two are Ohio State and Oregon.
Does Indiana have its Bo?
The Big Ten podium talk you simply have to see, however, is this one from new Indiana head man Curt Cignetti. After the requisite thank-yous and honor-to-be-here stuff, the coach who went 52-9 over the previous five seasons at James Madison jumped right into where the pollsters picked the Hoosiers.
“Normally at these things, I stand up here and we’re picked to win the league. It’s just usually how it’s been,” Cignetti said. “I have been picked next-to-last twice, which we’re picked 17th out of an 18-team league, and I get it.
“Just, the two times we were picked next-to-last, in 2022 we won the conference championship. In 2017 [at Elon], we inherited an 8-45 team and won eight in a row to play JMU for the conference championship. Now, I’m not into making predictions. That’s just a historical fact. I know you guys have been waiting for me to say something crazy. That wasn’t quite crazy.”
Crazy? No, it’s a chip-on-the-shoulder, straight-from-coach-central-casting work of art. Cignetti suffers no fools. He coaches football, and once you see and hear him you know there is no possibility he could do anything else.
It wasn’t what Cignetti said, necessarily, that sent me back to Bo Pelini. It was more the mannerisms, the looks, the no b.s.5 These were Youngstown vibes, so it wasn’t a surprise when I looked it up and saw Cignetti was from Pittsburgh, just an hour away.
Anyway, I’m adjusting all of my Indiana expectations up for 2024 and I was already pretty bullish on the Hoosiers.
Nebraska visits Bloomington in October.
Four more…up-tempo
I have a problem with writing long, so I’m forcing myself to use bullet points:
According to multiple reports, it looks like we’re headed for a 105-man roster limit in college football and, the bigger news, the old scholarship limits are likely going away. This is a big change, too big to cover in a bullet point, but things are going to get really interesting at Nebraska. Maybe the most interesting for volleyball (in a good way). Rhule said he was content to take a wait-and-see approach as these things are finalized.
Transfer cornerback Blye Hill, injured during the spring game, is ahead of schedule and expected to return midway through fall camp. Hill was on the stock-up list late in the spring and maybe had the inside track on the starting corner spot opposite Tommi Hill. We’ll see if that’s where he reenters the discussion—making the jump from FCS to the Big Ten was already big enough without being sidelined for a couple of months—but good news for Nebraska none the less.
Back to turnovers for a second: “If we had been even, we might’ve won nine games. It’s ridiculous,” Rhule said when asked against about being -17 last season. “And I don’t think we were necessarily a nine-win team.” Nebraska wasn’t a nine-win team a year ago, but say it was even in turnover margin—it was -11 in the five one-score losses—and scratched out a 9-3 record. Nothing else changes from the offseason, just that turnover margin and the record. The Huskers would be in every preseason top-25, people would consider them a playoff contender and the hype might be big enough to actually be something the coaches had to combat against. All for the same team Nebraska will put on the field in about a month. That’s college football.
One more from Rhule: “I’ve just made a decision that, I really like these guys, I’m going to make this my most fun year coaching. That might mean I even yell a little bit more. Who knows? But I really like these guys. I love these guys.” What sort of record comes with the “most fun?” Can’t be bad.
Expected record with that scoring differential over 47 games: 24-23.
Not that I doubted his assessment, more I just hadn’t looked at the numbers for myself until he said it.
Penn State had the lowest rate in the league (9.2%) while attempting the fourth-most passes. Maryland led the league at 477 attempts, and opponents got a hand on just 11.5% of those throws. If Nebraska had thrown it as often as Maryland, while keeping last season’s acumen, the Huskers would’ve flirted with 30 interceptions.
This might be a bad thing. The weekly CFP rankings discourse is one of my least favorite.
A word Cignetti used, unabbreviated, at the podium, which I’m guessing was a first at Big Ten Media Days.
Is there really nothing a team can do about injuries—in this case, to wide receivers? I’ve always wondered about that: is there any causal relationship between injuries and strength and conditioning methods? Practice habits? I would guess that the best minds in football have studied the issue, but I’ve never read anything about systemic injury-reduction plans.
Rhule says the research shows natural grass causes fewer injuries than field turf, and he clearly prioritizes recovery tools, so I wonder if he’d be willing to talk about other ways coaches and trainers can affect injury rates.
Injuries had some to do with the fumbles and the interceptions. The big problem was we could generate no forward pass threat and the biggest threat running was the Qb. Both can work with an option genus like Dr. Oz and hundreds of hours of practice on reading and pitching. With several QB s with throwing skills and a flock of running backs who have played, we might be able to throw it to our own guys. Think about that. Now if we can run it too wow .