Let’s push things forward
Let’s push things forward
There's was plenty to marvel at in Nebraska's win over UTEP, but don't overlook some of the mundane details. Plus, Big Ten thoughts and What's Next.
The second-best thing to be on Labor Day in college football is 1-0 with a score nobody noticed.1 It means your team played a game it was expected to win big and did.
Missouri beat Murray State 51-0. Sounds right.
Maryland beat UConn 50-7. Of course.
Nebraska beat UTEP 40-7. That’s how it should look.
But the recent history of Husker football is of nothing looking like it should. More often, the non-Nebraska watcher seeing a score crawl by on the bottom of the screen for one of these G5/FCS games more often must have thought, “what are you doing Nebraska?”
The Northern Illinois win last year was 14-3 at the half, and, one week later, it was 7-7 after 30 minutes against Louisiana Tech. In 2022, the Huskers were tied with North Dakota (7-7) and Georgia Southern (28-28) at the half. Nebraska was up 24-7 on Fordham in 2021, but even 17 points felt a little light. It was a 14-0 lead on Buffalo that same season. You have to go back to the Northern Illinois game in 2019, a 30-5 halftime lead, to find the last time Nebraska wasn’t in a curiously close game against an overmatched opponent.2
On Saturday, Nebraska was up 30-7 on an already gassed UTEP team. The Huskers held the ball for nearly 21 of the game’s first 30 minutes. They’d run 48 plays to the Miners’ 21. The game was effectively over, even if the trauma of the past few years wouldn’t allow anyone in red to fully believe it.3
Delight in the highlights from Saturday. There were plenty—most yards gained (507) since 2022,4 most points scored (40) in a win since 2021, biggest margin of victory in an opener since 2016.
But the standout facet of the UTEP win to me was all of those highlights were achieved as part of the detail-oriented, most-physical plan. Those are staples from each stop of Matt Rhule’s career, and this was the first time we’d seen it for 60 minutes at Nebraska.
Maybe this stuff isn’t as exciting as Dylan Raiola’s dazzling debut, but it’s important.
Nebraska still ran the ball 55% of the time, gaining 5 yards per carry with three backs rushing for at least 50. Nebraska had an 11-yard edge5 in average starting field position. Nebraska gained 92% of all the yards6 it could’ve in this game. The average drive consumed 10 plays with just one three-and-out before the game’s final drive.
That kept a potentially dangerous UTEP offense off the field for most of the day. The Blackshirts’ one lapse came on a touchdown drive that started with a 12-yard gain on the first play (coaches call that first play after a change of possession p-and-10, p standing for possession). Do that against a tempo like this and the offense can floor it. The Miners did, scoring two plays later.
“It all starts with a great p-and-10 play,” UTEP coach Scotty Walden said. “There’s nothing about that play that was game planning. That’s our base offense.”
Nebraska allowed 1.9 yards per play on the other 10 p-and-10 plays it defended, applying a parking brake to UTEP’s go-go desires.
Taken as a whole, this was a complete game. This is stuff good teams do. No rush to call Nebraska that after one outing as a 28-point favorite, but don’t overlook the gift this game offered. You can say, “Yeah, but it was just UTEP.”
How long has it been?
Helmet Stickers
QB Dylan Raiola: Probably not a lot left out there to be said at this point, so I’ll just go with this: as good as advertised. There will be bumps in the road this season, but if he can play mostly like he did against UTEP it changes the dynamic for this offense.
WR Isaiah Neyor: He looked like the guy Texas hoped it was getting when Neyor transferred from Wyoming in 2022. Then an injury basically kept him off the field for two seasons. Neyor’s six-catch, 121-yard Husker debut was a nice initial answer to one of the unkowables from the offseason.
The Tackle Chart: No Husker had more than five tackles on the day, but 29 had at least one. This game was a great example of team defense—against an offense designed to confuse—and was an excellent course in the value of leverage as the Nebraska defense consistently directed a bunch of the quick, wide stuff UTEP used back toward the crowded middle of the field.
B1G Things
Some thoughts from the opening week…
>>Neither offense generated much of anything in the first half of Illinois State-Iowa, but the Hawkeyes put up 34 points in the second half for a 40-0 win. True freshman wide receiver Reece Vander Zee might be one to watch. He had five catches for 66 yards with two touchdowns. That made Vander Zee the first Iowa receiver (not tight end) with multiple touchdown receptions in a season since Keagan Johnson had two in 2021. He was also a true freshman.
>>Minnesota was maybe a little unfortunate in its 19-17 loss to North Carolina. College Football Data listed the Gophers’ postgame win probability at 88% with Minnesota holding an edge in success rate, explosiveness and expected points added (EPA). Meanwhile Wisconsin probably got more than it earned in a 28-14 win over Western Michigan, coming away with just a 55% postgame win probability. My takeaway from the Badgers’ 2023 season was they seemed to be missing some of the momentum I’d expected in Luke Fickell’s first season. It was one game, but I didn’t see it Friday either.
>>Powerful performance from Penn State on the road at West Virginia in a 34-12 win that included a lengthy weather delay. The Nittany Lions dominated everywhere, holding a .446-.013 edge in EPA. (That’s 34x if you’re scoring at home.) Quarterback Drew Allar rushed for 44 yards—after rushing for 74 all of last season—in the Penn State debut of OC Andy Kotelnicki’s offense.
>>A late pick-six made Michigan’s 30-10 win over Fresno State look mostly like it was supposed to, and that actually matched the Wolverines’ 98% postgame win probability closer than the “how things have changed” narrative will. That said, Michigan might have an issue at quarterback. Davis Warren, a former walk-on, won the job in a mild surprise over the bull-in-a-China-shop runner Alex Orji. Warren was fine (15-for-25, 118 yards, 1 TD, 1 INT) and nothing more. Orji’s one completion (on two attempts) went for a touchdown while he also rushed for 32 yards. That was the second-best rushing total on the day for a Wolverine team that, curiously given the last three years, wasn’t able to push Fresno State around.
>>Oregon’s 24-14 win over Idaho doesn’t make a ton of sense. The Ducks averaged a yard more per play, were +1 in turnover margin, 4-for-4 in the red zone and had a 19-minute edge in time of possession while transfer quarterback Dillon Gabriel completed a school-record 83.7% of his passes. I can usually get a good sense from the box score of what happened in a game I didn’t really get to watch, but I’m going to have to watch this one before downgrading the Ducks too drastically.
>>I can take or leave subjective power rankings most of the time, so instead I’ll offer this Week 1 look at how the Big Ten teams performed relative to the spread (actual margin – expected margin = ATS +/-). I like that measure as a basic check of which teams played above, to, or below expectations. For reference, the best ATS +/- team over the past five seasons beat the spread by 5.1 points per game and the worst was -6.2, so that’s roughly the scale over a long span.7
Sorry, Oregon. You were the worst-performing Big Ten team of the week, but welcome to the conference.
What’s Next?
Nebraska’s time to share the national spotlight arrives early as the Colorado game represents one of the maybe three or four biggest games8 of the week. Combine that with the Buffs’ embraced divisiveness plus a strong debut from Raiola and it might mean the lead up to this game gets a little out of control. The atmosphere on Saturday night might be too. The latter is good.
You could find this game at Nebraska -6.5 or -7 most of the summer, and -7 was still the number on Sunday. I’ll be interested to see if it moves during the week when the limits are removed.
The best thing, of course, is doing what Penn State, USC, Georgia and Notre Dame did—winning a fairly even matchup against another power-conference team.
But even that one was two weeks after a ballyhooed, year-two Frost team led South Alabama 14-7 at halftime, and one week after it had blown a game at Colorado.
I couldn’t quite get there either.
Somehow, the 575 yards Nebraska gained against Georgia Southern that year were not the most memorable thing to come from that game.
NU was -3.2 on average in 2023 (108th).
NU gained 37.6% of available yards last year (114th).
This makes Nebraska’s +5.5 in the opener strong but somewhat normal. That’s a nice spot to be.
Texas-Michigan is definitely THE game of the week with Iowa State-Iowa, Tennessee-North Carolina State and maybe Boise State-Oregon in the mix. And, if you’re me, App State-Clemson, but I don’t think the Saturday morning shows will be spending a ton of time on that one.
Ok, that Iowa WR stat is hilarious. I know we've had our own struggles, so glass houses and all of that, but wow!
I was also impressed by PSU -- they were a trendy upset pick on the road.
I'm also on App State/Clemson watch, though I thought Clemson played pretty well against Georgia. Can you imagine the discourse around Dabo if that is an upset or close? Whew.
Maybe only 1 Red team in the B1G can be good at a time? So the rise of N means a corresponding, baffling, fall of W?