*takes a deep breath*
*takes a shot*
*takes another deep breath*
So let's look at the positives. The defense maintained their momentum from the second half of the Oregon game, and aside from the lone touchdown drive, played pretty damn well. Mind you, Northern Illinois was playing their back up QB and sans their top receiver. But that is super promising heading into Big Ten play if they can maintain that level of play. The coverage looked significantly better, so it looks like those memos I keep sending about not giving receivers 7-10 yards of space at the line are going through. Yay.
What ISN'T super promising, is what was supposed to be decent this year, and that's the damn offense, the play calling, and just about everything associated with it. HoLee shit. Only the third game in and I'm already saying Tre Bryant is their offensive MVP because Nebraska absolutely took a nose dive without him in the game. I will save some of their face briefly though, and that is with the first drive. The first drive looked extremely promising and about what I expected would have been the general flow of the game as Nebraska moved the ball very well. Until they got to the red zone, and well, most of you reading this know what happened. But let's break that down. Is that entirely Lee's fault? Sure, he threw the ball after all. But that was a damn good read by the defender, and mind you, the one thing I did praise Northern Illinois for was having an above average defense, especially in the against the pass department.
BUT, I still say if Lee had better awareness, he doesn't make that throw and the pick six doesn't happen. If the pick six doesn't happen, do you think the game goes differently? I think so. What I've seen from Tanner thus far is a much worse Tommy Armstrong. "Well how can you get worse than Armstrong?" Tommy at least had his legs as a viable option to bail him out of shitty situations. With Tanner, that is not the case, no matter how much yelling we all do to tell him to run and pick up a few fucking yards instead of forcing a YOLO Bomb. And that's extremely problematic. Lee is a fucking statue in the pocket, AND when you combine that with his shitty decision making skills and his likingness to stick to one receiver/failure to improvise, ESPECIALLY under pressure or behind in the game, you get fiascos like Northern Illinois. Personally, if the first pick six doesn't happen and Nebraska winds up with (most likely) a touchdown, maybe field goal, Lee wouldn't be playing from behind and trying to play hero. Because when Tanner has tried to play hero these past three games, there has been more bad than good. You see with Legstrong, he could roll out, run around, and as long as he stuck to running, mostly good things happened. His YOLO Bombs on the run were (somehow) magically better than his normal "go deep, Westerkamp" YOLO Bombs, and I think I'm starting to miss that improvisation. Lee for whatever reason just loves his pocket on this worn out pair of jeans that we're calling the offensive line.
Which brings me to problem #2, the offensive line is doing zero favors for Lee to be comfortable in his pocket that he wants to be comfortable in. Either Lee needs to learn to not be a statue on the other side of a crumbling wall (very unlikely to happen), or the offensive line needs to get better at protection. WAY too many times I've seen defenders just blow by the line, or the line just completely misses their assignment. Another thing Bryant is good at is picking up blocks when he is not involved in the play. Good RB. And speaking of RBs, the line has been ok at creating holes for our RB, but right now I'm putting that more on Bryant's ability than the line's ability. Wilbon went pretty much nowhere againts Northern Illinois (90 yards on 24 carries, 3.75 average), where one of his runs was a 25 yarder. So if you take that out you're looking at a 2.82 average, which barely gets you first downs if you ran the same play four times. Not the greatest.
Which leads to problem #3, personnel issues. WHERE THE HELL WAS OZIGBO?! I'm seriously missing some memos here, because I never heard he was hurt. What happened to where the very successful backup/sometimes starter from last year, in line to start this year, gets demoted to THIRD STRING? I initially questioned why he wasn't starting in favor of Bryant, but that got answered because "oh shit, Bryant is pretty damn good". But how in the hell does Wilbon hop Ozigbo? Wilbon is a great pass catching back sure, but he is not ready to be an every down back, and he is CERTAINLY NOT a power running back. Way too many times where it was X and <2 where all Nebraska needed to do was have Ozigbo push it through. NOPE. Wilbon. Loss or no gain. You'd think after a half of minimal success with Wilbon running, you'd make a change, right? Ozigbo only saw two carries, back-to-back, in the third quarter. Crowd went nuts when he went into the game so it sounds like I'm definitely not alone in this opinion. But then poof. Whatever though.
The Big Red Breakdown:
That leads us into this weekend, on the heels of firing Eichorst finally. That was a move that needed to be made a few years ago, yet somehow I was surprised at the timing of the firing still. On a Thursday? Like, after a game or on the following Monday I can understand, but a random ass Thursday three games into the season? Ok. I'll take it, but still surprised. But that puts Riley in a very interesting situation, because if we look at the schedule; Nebraska has Rutgers, @Illinois (on a Friday), Wisconsin, and Ohio State before heading into a bye week. Pre-season Nebraska would be looking at 3-1, maybe 2-2, maybe 4-0 for that four game stretch. But we have entered some Twilight Zone timeline where Nebraska could very well go 0-4 in this stretch. And it starts with Rutgers on Saturday. Personally, I think Riley keeps his job through the next year for recruiting purposes, but definitely behind the scenes Nebraska needs to be considering their coaching options. BUT. If Riley keeps losing the games he's supposed to be winning, then an end-of-year fire, or even mid-season if it gets that bad, could be in the realm of possibility.
But let's look at Rutgers since they're up to the plate first. Afternoon game, homecoming, and I'm still slightly concerned that Rutgers has a legit chance of winning. Because this year's Rutgers team doesn't suck for once *confetti*! Mind you, of the three games they played, two were against inferior foes BUT, instead of losing badly to them like normal Rutgers fashion, they lost closely to an underrated, up and coming G5 team in Eastern Michigan, AND ACTUALLY BLEW OUT AN FCS TEAM WHAT?! The Rutgers I'm used to seeing keeps it close with FCS teams, if not losing to them. This year's edition actually blew one out of the fucking water, props to you Rutgers! And they played very competitively against Washington, who right now is leading the Pac-12 in "Most Competent Team" points.
The part that really REALLY scares me, is their apparently good run defense. With Bryant confirmed to be out, this could get problematic if Nebraska is still dumb enough to play Wilbon over Ozigbo. And even then Ozigbo or Bryant might see some struggles. Rutgers ain't fucking around this year. Like we're talking 20th best run defense in the nation type shit. Yikes. As it stands, Wisconsin is the only team on Nebraska's schedule that has a better run defense, but that's expected for Wisconsin, not so much from Rutgers. (For reference, Northern Illinois currently ranks 23rd, but I'm betting Nebraska helped with that with their shit show performance). What is Rutgers tradition though, is a really shitty offense, as Rutgers only returns their third/fourth string RBs and WRs as their starters, so they're experienced, but not exactly flashy, something the seemingly new Nebraska defense can put away modestly. Hopefully. It's weird how much of a 180 Nebraska has taken from praising the offense and hating the defense. Oh well, so goes life.
The Matchup:
Nebraska O vs Rutgers D: Edge Rutgers. The way Nebraska has been playing, there are two problems. Without Bryant, they cannot lean against the run if this Rutgers defense is as advertised. Which then means Tanner Lee can't suck. Which means the O-Line needs to not suck at protecting him. Too many variables on Nebraska's side if Rutgers puts up a fight here. Even with a healthy Bryant, this might be a doozy.
Nebraska D vs Rutgers O: Advantage Nebraska. Thankfully, Rutgers isn't special on offense, and since the second half of Oregon, the only glaring weakness I've seen from Nebraska is defending the edges, as is tradition. That's been a consistent issue that hopefully can get mitigated, but I do not see Rutgers taking a huge advantage of that.
Special Teams: A little less De'Mornay please. Seriously what were you doing bro
Prediction: Please don't fuck this up. For the sake of every Husker fan. If they do, then Riley's ass is probably on the way out the door. Nebraska has too much talent to be at the bottom of the conference, let's not start by losing to the perennial basement dwellers, despite how possibly decent they've gotten.
Nebraska 31, Rutgers 20
The Rest of the World in College Football:
So I said I would maybe hang on to releasing some personal rankings, but I've enjoyed what the Regression formula has spat out; so I'm posting that! Even though it is not perfect as there are still teams that have only played two or even one game, I like the direction that this is shaping out to be. I also cannot give win estimates still as again, with the small sample size and the lack of competitive games across the board, the regression is still giving numbers that can't be possible. Which, for right now, is a flaw, because how this works is that we run the stats against the wins, and since I can't technically set a hard limit on how many wins a team can get, we still see some weird things (I.e, the only 20-win team in Air Force got filtered out finally, but the Top 25 all have 13+ wins, which is mathematically impossible for ALL of them to achieve 13 win seasons. The maximum for one team is 15 or 16, 12 or 13 regular season games, championship game, then winning the two playoff games. Additionally, the bottom 5 teams have negative wins, which again, isn't possible, but damn if it was they probably would achieve that.)
The other short-term rankings might still need a week. These rankings also lean heavy towards offensive minded teams, but defense still does play a role. Personally, I like how it gives light to some of the more underrated teams in the nation, whether or not that holds any merit is yet to be seen, as again we've barely played three, mostly non-conference games. Expect the level of competitiveness to increase for more accurate results.
Regression Rankings:
**Central Florida is technically #1, but they've only played 1 game due to Hurricane Irma, so they've been cast out**
1. Penn State
2. Washington
3. Maryland
4. Oregon
5. Oklahoma State
6. Wake Forest
7. TCU
8. Oklahoma
9. Wisconsin
10. Mississippi State
11. Arizona
12. Duke
13. Texas Tech
14. Minnesota
15. Miami
16. Virginia Tech
17. Clemson
18. UTSA
19. Alabama
20. Kansas State
21. Vanderbilt
22. Utah
23. Houston
24. Colorado
25. West Virginia
...
44. Rutgers
...
92. Nebraska
...
125. Charlotte
126. Bowling Green
127. Georgia State
128. East Carolina
129. UTEP
There are 130 teams in FBS, and since we're throwing one out as an outlier, we get 129! The only problem with doing a regressional analysis against wins, is the fact that we can't tell it which teams play who, hence why we see Kansas State still above Vanderbilt, despite the upset last week
Should these rankings be reflective, these would be the current championship games!
Pac-12: Washington vs. Arizona (North vs South)
Big 12: Oklahoma State vs. TCU (Top 2)
Big Ten: Penn State vs. Wisconsin (East vs West)
SEC: Mississippi State vs. Vanderbilt (West vs East)
ACC: Wake Forest vs. Duke (Atlantic vs Coastal)
Best G5 Team: UTSA
SMH of the Week:
LSU. Yikes. Unsure if completely exposed, or we just created a new SEC threat in Mississippi State, we will see our Bulldog "friends" later...either way, losing by 30 to an unranked team as a near top-10 team is not a good look for anyone. SMH LSU.
Hero of the Week:
A good number of closely contested "upsets" this week, but we're going to go a different route and call out Oregon as our Hero this week. They have yet to attempt a 2-pt conversion this year, and they're 3-0. Coincidence? I think not. New coach, new direction.
Over(rated)watch:
#5. USC - Being Watched Even More. Double overtime to beat Texas at home is not a good look on ya buddy. Heisman hopefully Darnold with 6 INT already (1 less than Tanner!). Let's see if they can pull away in an open Pac-12, or fall to parity. USC plays California this week.
#11. Georgia - Being Watched. Let's be a little careful with some of these non-Alabama SEC teams. Georgia shows promise, but they have a very young offense that's primarily highlighted by Nick Chubb. Georgia hasn't quite proved themselves yet, but the promise exists at least. Georgia gets Mississippi State in what will be an interesting game to watch.
#12. Florida State - See Last Week. So apparently I can't read, Florida State plays NC State this week.
#13. Virginia Tech - Being Watched. They proved their worth a little bit, but not quite #13 worthy just yet. They get another cake in Old Dominion this week.
#17. Mississippi State - Being Watched. Whoa now. Overreaction much? Sure beating LSU by 30 is pretty damn impressive, but let's pump the breaks and see how they handle Georgia before we're calling them the Alabama slayers this year.
Proven their worth from last week: #6 Oklahoma State, #7 Washington
Properly taken care of, but still being low-key watched: #10 Ohio State, NR Tennessee, NR UCLA
Prediction Center:
Another winning week at 2-1, but at what cost? (Eichorst's job apparently). 9-2 on the year and we got a couple doozies this week with conference play starting
TCU @ Oklahoma State - OK State 45, TCU 31
So Oklahoma State is your typical Big 12 team. High flying offense, minimal defense. Where as TCU is the opposite, not so great offense, but a reliable defense. Their defense isn't as great as it once was however, I think OK State breaks TCU, and TCU doesn't have the firepower to keep up
Mississippi State @ Georgia - Georgia 24, Miss State 20
Battle of potentially overrated teams, but should make for a good game because I think both teams are quality, just not...great. IF one of these teams does end up winning badly, then it is time to take said team seriously
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