Can Nebraska execute its grand plan with the RBs it has?
The Huskers kept running it in 2023 despite injuries and diminishing returns. Does this year's group have the chops to pull it off?
Six running backs, eight combined seasons, 345 total carries. It’s a strange running back room at Nebraska in 2024.
Maybe the best guy has yet to reach 40 carries in any of three, injury-shortened seasons. The fastest guy is a better pass-catcher than runner. The guy we got the longest look at last year is often overlooked. There’s a wildcard via the transfer portal and a redshirt freshman and a backdated freshman.
There’s promise among the Huskers’ scholarship running backs, but it’s tough to prove much about the group entering the season. But Matt Rhule isn’t worried.
“We’re gonna be able to run the ball,” he said last week. “We’re not gonna be able to run the ball against some of the boxes we saw last year, and we couldn’t last year without running the quarterback.”
That’s the big-picture question for the run game in 2024: Can Nebraska get more help from the QB’s arm and need less help from his legs? Last year the Huskers ranked second in the Big Ten at 176.8 rushing yards per game thanks to volume1 and a big assist from the guys behind center.2 But as injuries took down the top two backs and it became more apparent that the passing game wasn’t a reliable threat, over the back-half of the season Nebraska was often left to hand the ball off, increasingly to a third-string freshman, knowing the box was loaded up against the run in the toughest run-defense conference in the country. It was suboptimal.
But it’s something of a credit to the staff3 that the Huskers squeezed out the rushing success they did given the circumstances. The numbers came down in conference play, as they always will, but Nebraska still ranked fourth in the conference in yards per game, sixth in yards per carry, against Big Ten opponents. Again, that was with a heavy contribution from the QB run game. If things go to plan, that won’t be the case this season.
“We’ll be able to run the quarterback, but we don’t want to live on that,” Rhule said. “We want to be able to line up and run the ball against two-high safety looks.”
Reasonable enough, but if Nebraska gets the looks it wants does it have the running backs to do it?
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