How much offense is enough?

Let's do some level setting for Nebraska in 2024, assuming the Husker defense is good again.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

“We’re going to be good on defense here for a while. The stark reality, and maybe people like it, maybe people don’t, is everywhere I’ve been, we’ve had a good defense.”

So said Matt Rhule in late November last year. Nebraska still had the Iowa game remaining and needed a win to finish 6-6. The Huskers came up three points short and remained bowl-less for a seventh consecutive season.

It wasn’t due to defense. The Blackshirts would finish sixth in defensive SP+, an opponent-adjusted power ranking from Bill Connelly of ESPN. They allowed 2.97 yards per rush, also sixth nationally, and recorded 76 tackles for loss, the most at Nebraska since 2014.

Accordingly, defensive coordinator Tony White attracted interest as the coaching carousel started to spin last November, which was the context for the above quote. Rhule stumped for White and the job he did in 2023 before noting, accurately, his previous teams’ track record on that side of the ball.

But the Huskers held on to White, and, with the bulk of last year’s defense returning, expectations are even higher in 2024.

As I noted in that story, following up last year’s defensive blockbuster with an even better sequel might require more of the offense than it does the Blackshirts.

Or, as Rhule put it in November: “Everywhere I’ve been, we’ve had kind of a middle-of-the-pack offense. We’re not quite middle-of-the-pack yet on offense, I’d like to get to be more dynamic.”

Also accurate. There wasn’t a lot to highlight from 2023. Nebraska finished second in the Big Ten in rush yards per game (176.8), an oft-cited positive but it wasn’t really real for a few reasons.

• Last year wasn’t a banner year for running the ball in the league. In every season since 2011 at least two Big Ten teams averaged more than 200 yards per game. In 2023, no team did.

• Nebraska ran the ball 62% of the time (5th nationally) yet had just a 42% success rate¹ (84th nationally). With a three-man weave at QB, gobs of turnovers from them and banged up receivers most of the season, there just often wasn’t a better way.

• Of the 2,122 rushing yards gained, 44.2% of them came against the four defenses on the schedule with the worst rushing success rates allowed. Those happened to be the Huskers’ first four opponents—Minnesota, Colorado, Northern Illinois and Louisiana Tech. Nebraska also scored 43.7% of its rushing touchdowns in those four games.

And this was the kinda good part of the offense. Passing the ball was worse. The lack of consistent success last year, if nothing else, offers something of a clean slate for finding an offense that can at least support what could be another top-10 defense.

To get there I think the Huskers are faced with a big either/or proposition and then there’s one must-have.

Efficient or explosive? How ya gonna do it?

An offense can consistently move the ball in small chunks or sporadically move it in big chunks. If you dumb it all the way down, that’s kind of it, and it’s not that common for a team to be equally adept at both. Think of it like a boxer who is more likely to win a 12-round decision (success rate) versus one more likely to win with a fourth-round TKO (explosiveness). If you can do both, great. That offense probably averaged 40 points per game and didn’t need much from the defense.

But most offenses don’t do both consistently, and Nebraska did neither consistently in 2023, ranking 111th in success rate and 70th in explosiveness.² One of those broad categories has to improve. They’re both so all-encompassing that you can’t really just pick one, so is one better or more likely than the other given how Nebraska is being built?

It’s a “defense-first” approach, Rhule’s words, so let’s start there even though we’re examining the offense. While writing about the Huskers’ “best defense in the country” aspirations a few weeks back, I shared a table that showed just how little support it got from offense and special teams relative to other top-10 defense. This table keeps the top-10 defenses but offers a little more detail on how their offenses succeeded (or didn’t), showing their ranks in success rate (SR), explosiveness (Exp), rush success rate, pass success rate and ESPN’s QBR.

A couple of things to note:

• Six of the top-10 SP+ defenses also finished in the final CFP top 10, Notre Dame finished 16th (let’s call that group the Magnificent Seven) and then you had the Big Ten West teams, which basically didn’t have enough complementary offense. RIP, Big Ten West.

• You can see a bit of the interplay here between efficiency and explosiveness. Alabama was pretty balanced between the two, but the rest of the Magnificent Seven was mostly one or the other. And then you had the Big Ten West teams.

• You can also see the interplay between run and pass efficiency. Better be good at one³ of them. Be good at both and you’re Georgia (and, surprisingly, a little bit 2023 Notre Dame).

If I were a magic football coach given the power to grant any team either offensive efficiency or explosiveness, I’d almost always choose efficiency. It’s less volatile, both within a season and year to year. If the team was 2024 Nebraska—or any other with defense as its knockout punch—I’d choose efficiency. Chew more clock, fewer boom-or-bust drives, better field position—that’s the pitch.

That said, because efficiency is about winning more downs and requires more overall quality, it is perhaps a steeper hill to climb for a team coming off a subpar offensive season.

Because explosiveness is more volatile—like hitting a bunch of home runs or 3-pointers one year, then regressing to the mean—a team can just have “one of those years” in a good way. Iowa State went from the 98th most-explosive offense in 2022 to the most-explosive offense in 2023. The Cyclones didn’t hire a new offensive coordinator. The most noticeable difference from afar was a redshirt freshman quarterback who completed fewer passes but for more yards and cut down on interceptions from his predecessor and the addition of a big-play running back who led the team in yards while ranking third in carries. Iowa State’s success rate dropped from the year before, 98th to 122nd, but the Cyclones improved from 4-8 to 7-6.

That can be the magic of explosiveness. Find a good bottle and a bolt of cooperative lightning, and a bad offense can all of the sudden be off and running. Is it the most sustainable approach? Probably not.

When you’re Nebraska coming off a 5-7 season despite a top-10 defense, however, it’s hard to be picky. Bottom line, the Huskers need to climb into the top 50 or 60 nationally in one of these categories. They were closer in explosiveness (70th last season) and that’s the easier path, but with wand in hand, efficiency is more in line with how this program is being built.

But either would work.

Now for the elephant behind center

Quarterback play was the other the big differentiator among last year’s top-10 defenses. Who could’ve guessed?

Among the Magnificent Seven, the lowest total QBR⁴ for a team’s primary starter ranked 27th nationally. Four of the remaining six ranked in the top 10. Remember Kyle McCord, the guy once thought to be a sure thing to transfer to Nebraska? Ohio State fans didn’t see, sad to see him go (he landed at Syracuse), but he ranked eighth in QBR.

Heinrich Haarberg was Nebraska’s only QB with enough action plays⁵ per game to qualify for ESPN’s rankings. He ranked 108th, but his rating (39.4) was better than Jeff Sims’ (20.5), the guy who won the job in the offseason. Chubba Purdy put up a 74.8 almost exclusively in two starts against Wisconsin and Iowa, a pair of top-10 defenses, but he transferred after the season as did Sims.

That leaves Haarberg and a pair of true freshmen, Daniel Kaelin and Dylan Raiola, battling it out for the top job this spring. It’s obvious the Huskers need better play at quarterback, but, no matter who takes the snaps, how much better?

If you’d take the early Vegas win total—7.5 wins—as acceptable in 2024, average might be enough. That’s what Tanner Mordecai was in QBR for Wisconsin last season. His 61.9 QBR (61st) translated to about 300 rushing yards with four touchdowns and 65% completions for 6.6 yards per attempt with nine touchdowns to four interceptions. That got the Badgers to 7-5 and a bowl game.

Aspire to more for the Huskers this season—and it’s April, why not?—and we’re probably talking a top-30 QBR to get it done. It’s worth noting, though not in a leading way, that no true freshman got there in 2023. The closest we had was Josh Hoover, TCU’s starter over the second half of the season, putting up a 77.1 (17th) as a redshirt freshman, and Appalachian State’s Joey Aguilar, a junior college transfer in his first FBS season, posting a 73.2 (24th). He’s probably a better example of what Nebraska could start this season, and Aguilar’s rating produced this in real-world numbers: 245 yards rushing with three touchdowns alongside a 63.7 completion percentage on 8.2 yards per attempt with 33 touchdowns to 10 interceptions.

Back in a Nebraska context, whoever the Huskers start probably needs to look something like this as a baseline: better than 60% completions (52.1% as a team last year), a yards per attempt greater than 7 (coming from 6.2) and a touchdown-to-interception ratio of 1.7 or better (-1.6 in 2023).

Any of that sound reasonable to you? Maybe we should at least see the spring game first for our first real look at two of the three QBs on the roster.

The purpose of this intentionally zoomed-out look⁶ at Nebraska’s offense was mostly to level set under the assumption the Huskers’ defense is close to as good or better than it was a year ago. It doesn’t take a ton of offense to support a group like that.

At Iowa in 2023, it took almost none at all for the Hawkeyes to go 10-4, so that sort of thing is possible.

I just wouldn’t recommend it.

1. Success rate measures how often a team stays “on schedule” by gaining 50% of the yards to go on first down, 70% on second down and 100% on third or fourth down. The numbers in this story remove garbage time and are from collegefootballdata.com.

2. Definition from CFBD: The average EPA on plays which were marked as successful.

3. Why didn’t this apply to Wisconsin, which was highly efficient running the ball while scratching its way to a mildly disappointing 7-6? Well, the Badgers threw the ball 53% of the time while ranking 98th in passing success rate. That’s at least a start.

4. Chose this because it is not just a passing stat.

5. Rushes plus pass attempts.

6. As for how Nebraska could actually affect any of these changes…well…the offseason is long. Plenty of time to dig into more specifics.