It's simple, really
Nebraska OC Dana Holgorsen immediately tried to simplify the offense last year. What has he done with an entire offseason?
It’s not that hard to be complicated, and complicated is what Dana Holgorsen found in Lincoln when he arrived last November.
“What I saw when I first got here was a lot of cluttered minds,” he said late last week in an interview with BTN. “They just weren't playing free, they weren't playing fast because it was a big playbook. They had everything in and it's just hard in the college game to be able to do that.”
With only a bye week and a week of game prep to be ready to call plays in an offense he didn’t design, Holgorsen didn’t install anything, he de-installed, simplified the menu. The Husker offense, with a new menu, only broke 21 points once in four games, dropping 44 points on Wisconsin to become bowl eligible, which produced a win over Boston College for NU to go 2-2 after its unconventional November switch.
Holgorsen, hired full-time last winter, has continued to hone, spending the spring “fine-tuning” the offense.
“What I'm looking at right now is a lot different,” he told BTN. “It's a lot different schematically. It's a lot different with players. And it's flowing a lot better as well.”
Simplicity is one of football’s eternal struggles. I’ve only ever tried it in video games, but I’m sure it’s intoxicating to be a white-board wizard. You draw up the plays, every X and O does exactly what you expect and, if so, you win because you put in the work and one of the prestige writers still working shows up to do a profile of you. College football loves a wizard. We almost incentivize this level of detail, though the pursuit doesn’t need much of a push. Just hypothetically, think of how powerful it would feel to have the answer for every possible question an opponent could pose.
Less celebrated? Simplicity. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about the Air Raid guys. They were basically counter-culture weirdos less interested in having every answer and more interested in just passing the test. This turned out, more often than not, to be a good approach in football where each weekly test is essentially pass/fail.
When Hal Mumme, the new head coach at Iowa Wesleyan, showed up at Mount Pleasant High School in 1989, he sent a note to an English class asking to speak with a senior wide receiver, Dana Holgorsen. According to S.C. Gwynne’s excellent book on Mumme and the origins of the Air Raid, Holgorsen sent a note back saying he’d rather finish his English class.
Wesleyan, an NAIA Division 2 program at the time, was bad. Worse than some of the local high school teams, according to some. And, to be fair, Holgorsen was already committed to St. Ambrose, where he’d spend his first college season before joining Mumme at Iowa Wesleyan in 1990. When Holgorsen was reunited with the coach he initially told “thanks, but no thanks,” he’d learn what Mumme’s first class of recruits had a year earlier—there was no playbook.
According to Gwynne, Mumme’s big idea wasn’t to throw the ball a ton, but rather simplicity being an advantage in a game that had become increasingly complex for decades…while throwing the ball a ton.
Mike Leach, who was on Mumme’s staff at Iowa Wesleyan, took up the Air Raid torch and arguably ran with it further than anyone has yet from that coaching tree. In 2005, Michael Lewis, of Moneyball fame, showed up in Lubbock to profile Leach. Prestige writer and it’s easy to imagine this story being pitched as one of the “white-board wizard” variety. But the passage from that story I’ll never forget, is Leach basically dismantling any such notion:
“There's two ways to make it more complex for the defense,” Leach says. “One is to have a whole bunch of different plays, but that's no good because then the offense experiences as much complexity as the defense. Another is a small number of plays and run it out of lots of different formations.” Leach prefers new formations. “That way, you don't have to teach a guy a new thing to do,” he says. “You just have to teach him new places to stand.”
The next sentence notes Texas Tech has no playbook.
Holgorsen came up under those guys. After his playing career at Iowa Wesleyan, he followed Mumme and Leach to Valdosta State to begin his coaching career. He spent eight years with Leach at Texas Tech, and then went on to produce big numbers of his own.
When Holgorsen talks of simplicity, it’s not just1 a talking point. It’s baked in.
As we draw closer to the season ahead, I become more convinced there’s no bigger question for 2025 than what simplicity can mean for Nebraska’s offense.
I’ve already explained—in perhaps too much detail, as a I think about it now, writing a story on the beauty of simplicity—how and why I think Nebraska needs about 12 points more per game from the offense. Maybe you could shave 2 or 3 points off that with improved special teams play, but that still leaves a 9-ish point jump.
That’s big, but not completely unreasonable. Last year, 13 teams saw their points per game average jump by 9 or more points. The two leaders in this category were the two out-of-nowhere playoff qualifiers, Indiana and Arizona State, both picked to finish in the bottom two of their conference races. The Hoosiers, with an entirely new staff and revamped roster improved by 19.1 ppg. The Sun Devils, having undergone their roster revamp a season earlier, brought in a new OC for 2024 and improved by 15.1. Pittsburgh, Iowa and Baylor2 all made double-digit leaps with new OCs as power-conference programs, Miami did it with a Heisman-finalist QB via the transfer portal and Syracuse did it with an entirely new staff.
In 2023, four power-conference programs improved by at least 10.5 points per game. Georgia Tech (+13.9) and Colorado (+12.8) did it with entirely new staffs, LSU (+11.0) had the Heisman-winner at QB and Texas A&M (+10.5) had a new OC. Virginia Tech (+10.2) got there the old-fashioned way, I guess, without a major coaching change or upgrade at quarterback.
Point is, change agents can be significant agents of change in today’s college football. Of course, some new OCs over the past two seasons came nowhere close to a double-digit-points improvement, but the examples of power-conference teams who did make such a jump almost exclusively includes teams with some sort of major change (staff, coordinator or QB).
None of which guarantees that Nebraska is primed for something big offensively, but I like the conditions here for the Huskers. Given the circumstances, I’m considering Holgorsen a “new” OC in 2025. His four-game preview at the end of last year now feels like a Broadway play opening in Detroit to work out the kinks. It still got the job done—getting NU to a bowl—and knowing Rhule wanted to make this change on offense in January of 2024 only deepens the plot. That means Nebraska played its first nine game with an offense Rhule tried to replace or at least rework, which is honestly too much to unpack here.
But Holgorsen was ready in November of last year, and now, by his own admission, he’s had time to reduce things down even more.
Only two Rhule-coached teams have averaged more than 30 points per game. Two of his best teams—2016 Temple3 and 2019 Baylor. Nearly all (15-of-17) of Holgorsen’s offenses since 20074 have.
There’s no more interesting push-and-pull for Nebraska entering 2025, simply put.
That Holgorsen calls games from the sidelines is yet another interesting data point here. Most coordinators prefer to be up top, to see the entire chess board, so to speak. Holgorsen? Nah, I’m good here.
Baylor’s offensive coordinator in 2024 was Jake Spavital, who Holgorsen took under his wing early. Spavital spent four of his first five seasons at the college level with Holgorsen, following him from Houston to Oklahoma State to West Virginia.
The Temple team in 2015 was just under the line at 29.8.
Not an arbitrary year—it was his first as sole offensive coordinator.