And the work it took was fun

A warts-and-all win at Purdue showed where the Huskers are after five games while also underscoring what it needs to keep climbing.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Nine times. Nebraska crossed Purdue’s 40-yard line nine times on Saturday. That was every drive minus the last one, when the Huskers were just running out the clock on a 28-10 win.

Eight of those sequences would be considered “scoring opportunities” because they included a first down inside the Boilermaker 40. The best offenses¹ average close to 5 points per trip on those opportunities, the FBS average is around 4 every year. Nebraska entered Saturday 110th nationally at 3.3 points per trip.

Bottom-third production would’ve been better than nothing, which is what the Huskers had at halftime despite moving into Purdue territory on all five drives thanks to a missed field goal, two blocked field goals and a penalties.² Get even the below-average season average of 3.3 points on those drives and the Nebraska is up something like 17-0 at halftime and everyone’s having a different week in Husker Nation.

Instead, Nebraska needed a near-perfect second half in the scoring department to make this game look as expected against the struggling Boilermakers. To the offense’s credit, it delivered that, scoring three touchdowns on three scoring opportunities to finish the game at 2.6 points per trip. Not great, but thanks to a defensive touchdown, the final margin looked respectable.

The Huskers’ tale of two halves Saturday is a decent summation of any uncertainty some may feel around the Matt Rhule era after 17 games. I think the hope going into any game is to see a team that maximizes the return on what it earns. That’s what good football is at a basic level, and even for a team still in its climb toward that, you hope to see it earn a little more each time out.

That wasn’t Nebraska on Saturday. The offense got what it earned only for a half. The defense maximized pretty well throughout, but that’s only one of three phases and we know special teams was closer to zero than full capacity. While I’m not ready to say the Blackshirts are back based on a more-typical Tony White-coached performance against what has been to this point the Big Ten’s worst team, the Illinois game stood out a week ago because it was a rare instance where you came away from a game thinking the defense wasn’t good enough. That unit had the benefit of the doubt going into the game against the Illini, and, for the purposes of this column at least, it earned it back on Saturday.

The offense, while undoubtedly improved from a year ago, is still leaving a lot of points on the field in specific ways. Combine it all, and the first-half struggles in West Lafayette underscored a few of the areas Nebraska will need to improve as the competition continues to ramp up.

A Pedestrian Run Game

Nebraska’s rushing attack isn’t bad. It’s decent enough at keeping the offense on schedule while lacking some explosiveness, but isolating a few things is the only way to get a true picture of where things stand.

First, wide receiver Jacory Barney Jr. led the team with 66 rushing yards on Saturday. Against one of the nation’s worst rush defenses, Nebraska’s best option was a true freshman wideout. Whatever works, of course, but Barney accounts for 14% of the Huskers’ total rush yards on the season on just 4% of carries. Take him out of the equation, and the rushing numbers get average quickly.

Looking at just running back carries across the Big Ten, Nebraska’s Expected Points Added/rush (.2059) ranks 10th in the 18-team league. Of the 22 conference backs with at least 40 touches this season, the Huskers’ primary ball-carriers Dante Dowdell (60 carries) and Rahmir Johnson (31) rank 12th and 22nd respectively in rush EPA.

Drop the qualifying threshold to 20 plays, however, and something interesting happens. Emmett Johnson (21 carries) ranks fifth out of 42 Big Ten running backs at .408 EPA/rush. That puts him in league with some names you should know: Ohio State’s TreVeyon Henderson (.517) and Quinshon Judkins (.492), Minnesota’s Darius Taylor (.498), Oregon’s Jordan James (.472) and Michigan’s Kalel Mullings (.408).

From a numbers-only perspective, it’s a compelling case for Johnson to get more touches. Maybe there are situational considerations, or even behind-the-scenes factors, that have limited his usage thus far, but can those be altered to get Johnson on the field more? He was Nebraska’s second leading rusher Saturday with 50 yards on eight carries, and he seems, based on his EPA, to scratch a specific itch for this offense.

Nebraska’s run blocking has been OK through five games, ranking seventh in the Big Ten in line yards. It ranks 12th in second-level yards (rushes between 5-10 yards where a running back’s ability starts to take over) and 14th in open-field yards (rushes of 10+ yards where all the credit is given to the ball-carrier). It paints a picture of a run game where the backs aren’t generating a ton of value beyond what the line provides, which is only slightly above average to begin with.

Emmett Johnson has provided the most value on relatively few opportunities. Might be time to find out if he’d provide the same value with more.

The Penalties Problem

Per a subscriber request—always happy to get those and do my best to fulfill them—here’s a look at penalties impact on points. For a half Saturday, it looked like penalties were again having an outsized impact on Nebraska. A false start on fourth-and-1 prevented Nebraska from going for it early in the game and lead to John Hohl’s missed field goal. While it was a bad call, the offensive pass interference wiped out a touchdown. There were infractions anyone could point to and say, “these hurt.”

Then Purdue said, “hold my boilermaker” and ended up with 165 yards in penalties. Tough to say Nebraska (95 yards) got the worst of it with a number like that, but we can still try to quantify what flags have cost NU on the year.

To do that, I chose points per drive.

The Husker offense is averaging 2.88 points per drive through five games. On drives that include an NU penalty that drops to 2.25 compared to 3.10 on drives without a flag. That’s not a huge decrease, but it’s noticeable at nearly a full point.

The big gap is on defense. Nebraska is allowing an excellent 1.06 points per drive…except when it’s flagged. On drives that included a penalty the Blackshirts’ average jumps to 2.45 points per drive, a 260% increase over drives without a penalty (0.68 points per drive). To put it another way, the defense has only allowed 14 scoring drives on the season while holding four of five opponents to 10 points or fewer this season. Eleven of those scoring drives included a defensive penalty.

Pretty strong incentive to play as clean as possible on that side of the ball in particular.

The Continuing Kicking Conundrum

Tristan Alvano missed his second straight game, and replacement John Hohl had a nightmarish day in the spotlight, though it wasn’t entirely his fault.

“He’s about 50/50 from the 15-yard line, he’s also about 50/50 from the 45-yard line,” Rhule said. “He’s a young, developing kicker who’s got a big, big leg and had a great week of practice. He just missed the first one. The second two were just bad snaps. Those balls were in the ground. You can’t put those on him.”

Fair enough, though that points to special teams struggles overall. As we’re points-focused today, let’s limit things to just the kicking part of the equation. Nebraska’s struggles there after five games (4-of-9 on FGs) has already cost it more than it did over 12 games in 2023.

Last year, Alvano (9-of-15) had a Points Added Above Replacement³ (PAAR) of -4.6. That ranked 118th nationally, but it felt manageable going into 2024. If Alvano had been exactly at expectation, it would’ve meant five extra points over 12 games.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

This season, however, Alvano and Hohl combined are -10.2 PAAR over just five games. We’ve already seen a miss potentially cost Nebraska a shot to win in the Illinois game. The Huskers’ misses to this point have been more damaging because—given the state of the kicking game—Nebraska isn’t being all that aggressive with its decision-making. All of the misses/blocks have come with the line of scrimmage inside the opponent’s 30-yard line. They were kicks with an average PAAR of 2.236, meaning the average FBS kicker would be expected to make those kicks about 75% of the time.

Nebraska’s hitting 44.4% on field goal attempts with the LOS inside the 30, which is all of its attempts so far. I’m not sure the Huskers could attempt anything outside that range given the state of things. That’s a big limiter for a team that needs every edge it can find as it continues a rocky climb in search of a flatter, more consistent perch. Call it the Good Football Plateau.

The Huskers are closer, but not there yet, something Rhule said more plainly after the game Saturday.

“It might not be for everybody, but we are a growing team,” he said. “We’re just growing. People can spend all their time trying to think what we’re not. I choose to see what we are.”

Fair enough, again. So, what “are” the Huskers after five games? More on that below.⁴

B1G Things

For this week’s look around the conference, I wanted to revisit something from the offseason. In January I took a look at hypothetical 12-team Playoff fields using the current selection criteria paired with the actual CFP rankings from the past decade.

That research found that, on average, it was going to take about a 5-yard margin in yards per point to be a Playoff candidate. Only about 10-to-15 teams are in that range every season, which in most cases is probably the realistic pool from which the CFP committee is choosing most of the time.

Thanks to favorable nonconference schedules, there are currently 22 teams with at least a 5-yard margin in yards per point, including seven teams from the Big Ten.

What “is” Nebraska? In the hunt, warts and all, with a top-20 yards per point margin. You’d expect that group of teams at +5 or better, to be reduced by about half as schedules become more difficult in conference play. The Big Ten has seven teams at that mark right now, it’ll probably be three or four by season’s end.

Can the Huskers be in that group after 12 regular-season games? They’re almost certainly an underdog on that proposition, but a few fixes like those mentioned above would help. At least this team isn’t off the board.

What’s Next?

Rutgers (4-0) and its star running back, Kyle Monangai, bring their seemingly sudden and still surprising Big Ten classicism to Lincoln. The Scarlet Knights narrowly missed out on climbing into the AP poll this week, perhaps because its 21-18 win over Washington Friday night was a bit deceiving. Nebraska opened as a 7-point favorite Sunday, which surprised me though it’s only a point or two more than ESPN’s power ratings (SP+, FPI) would have the line.

1. Ohio State leads the Big Ten and is second nationally at 5.4 points per scoring opportunity.

2. One of which, the offensive pass interference on Thomas Fidone II, was just plain wrong and took a touchdown off the board.

3. From collegefootballdata.com: “an Expected Points model for field goals based on kick distance.”

4. Musical accompaniment: Meat Puppets.