Nebraska Running Game - Part 1 (Intro)
There have been many great rush oriented offenses over the past few decades in college football. I grew up watching the tail end of the wishbone era and spent a lot of Saturday afternoons watching split back veer style attacks and I Formation rush oriented teams as well. The passing game has evolved so much and become so dominant in recent times it seems that great rush attacks don’t get their share of attention any more. Option style attacks in particular are the rare exception now days and coaches like Paul Johnson are far and few between. As current the Georgia Tech Head Coach once noted - why is it in today’s game that a 300 yard passing attack and a 150 yard rushing effort is seen as “balanced” while a 300 yard rushing game and a 150 yard passing effort is not? He makes a valid point in my opinion.
According to the 2008 CFB NCAA stats teams averaged approximately 67.7 plays per game this past season. The “average” team ran the ball 36.73 times and passed 30.97 times. On a slightly different tangent here is a histogram breaking down how many yards per game teams gained on the ground and how many yards they gained by pass. Only 18 teams in Division I averaged 225 yards per game on the ground this past season. 73 teams however gained 225 yards or more passing the ball.
I don’t have the long term trends but certainly over the past couple of decades the incidence of passing in college football has relatively increased while the number of running plays has gone down. Gone for now are the days when a single tailback carries the ball 51 times in a game like Ricky Bell once did for USC. I suspect in the short run the trend will either stay where it is at or even tilt more towards the passing game. Please note I am not arguing the superiority of running versus passing - the R-squared is quite low for either of these metrics in terms of predicting winning (scatter plot and regression stats for rush attacks / scatter plot and regression stats for pass attacks). BCS champion teams tend to be balanced in their attacks (click here for an old article on that dimension)
Football is a cyclical game however and I suspect great rush offenses and rushing plays that worked in the past will continue to work now and again in the future for very good fundamental reasons. Already we have seen some of that with the University of Florida offense under Urban Meyer and a few other teams in recent years.
If I had to pick one great rush offense to study it would probably be the Nebraska Cornhusker rush attack of the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s. Until this past decade it was extremely hard to come by detailed information on the topic of football offenses. The internet has leveled the playing field though in terms of acquiring knowledge. Articles, books, videos, and clinic talks that were once extremely difficult to locate are much more accessible than in the past.
For the next month or so out of personal curiosity I plan on just looking at the Nebraska running game of the 1980’s and 1990’s. For the duration of the Tom Osborne coaching era this offense regularly averaged over 300 rush yards per game and frequently ran over teams with more than 400 rushing yards (or more) in a single afternoon. The Cornhuskers threw the ball perhaps 15-20 times a game as needed but it was a rush dominant offense.
Here for example is a composite of the Nebraska Offense at the end of the 1996 college football season when it was near its peak. Nebraska won back to back national championships in 1994, 1995, and finished undefeated in 1997 as well. As you can see Nebraska ran the ball 733 times out of their 984 total plays that season. It was also a very versatile rush attack as well and not one dimensional at all. From the list below the Cornhuskers ran an impressive number of inside run plays, outside run plays, options and reverses. The number of different running plays out numbered the passing plays by a significant margin in this breakdown.
In a perfect world I’d have an example of every run play in the Nebraska in the playbook. Unfortunately I don’t but I have been able to track down quite a few examples in either old game film, coaching clinic material, or presentation materials. I’ll take some of the inside runs, outside runs, etc. and post what I can for those interested. Once I get through the basics of the old Nebraska running game I’ll circle back to the current USC running game. In particular I’ll look at the inside and outside zone runs of USC and the bootleg passing game off of those runs.
Nebraska Running Game - Part 1 (Intro)
Nebraska Running Game - Part 2 (Formations)
Nebraska Running Game - Part 3 (IZ Runs)
Nebraska Running Game - Part 4 (OZ Runs)
Nebraska Running Game - Part 5 (OZ Options)
Nebraska Running Game - Part 6 (Trap Plays)
This is great stuff, and I’m looking forward to the rest of your breakdown. On the issue of balance, I completely agree that it’s completely out of whack to look at it purely in terms of yards or even attempts. I wrote a little bit about this a few years ago (sorry for the self-promotion, delete if you feel appropriate), with some reference to Nebraska during this time. It’s a bit rudimentary (I fleshed it out more later), but the basic idea is that it is optimal to maximize yards per attempt (either rush or pass) with some premium for passes to take into account their risk.
Run/Pass Balance and Game Theory
Anyway, keep up the great work.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the message. Please plug away with links to your own or other relevant articles…I try to run this as open as possible for people with an interest in the topic. I wish we could get you writing for ESPN, SI, or some of the major outlets…People looking to learn have to bypass the traditional media and dig for sites like yours. Maybe it has always been that way.
I actually thought about alluding to run / pass balance more in the body of the text as you mention but deleted it as I have a hard time being concise and staying on track…I’d probably go sideways for 8 paragraphs and confuse everyone (including myself). This was just to frame the Nebraska run game and outline the next set of steps.
You bring up a good point though (and I encourage anyone reading this to click the link referenced above and read the article). I have looked at the topic a couple of simple different ways as well before usually abandoning it…What I mean is that YPA in passing is greater than rush yards per attempt so I guess we should all pass more (adjust first for the risk premium, etc.) as is often noted. Bud Goode the NFL stats / consulting guy (Click for example) makes this point all the time although I assume he uses a more rigorous method than I do…The r-squared for YPA to wins for 119 teams in 2008 is 0.40 where as the r-squared for rush average to wins is just 0.19.
I think though the difference in the result noted above is smaller in reality though since sacks are recorded as run plays at the NCAA level (2 per game?). Also there are a couple kneel downs (1-2 per game) to end the half. Also some teams just opt to ram it in once inside the 2-3 yard line??? Etc. Anyway I always wanted to net those types of plays out and see what happened to the above .4 vs .19 difference out of curiosity. (The gap is about the same most years I have checked). That is too much data to “adjust” so I never have done it…
The other angle I keep meaning to do is just define runs plays as +4 as successful and pass plays as +10 (or some other number) as successful and see what the percentage says and how close they are in that regards. The next step as you also suggest would also be to see how many times a run or pass play designed to gain a certain number of yards succeeded and compare the percentages (e.g. rushing for 3 yards on 3rd and 2 = success. Passing for 6 yards on 3rd and 7 = fail, etc.)
Somehow I lose my steam when I get to this level (LOL). As a staff for a team I help we do look at run plays and what they each average and run plays versus fronts and what they average / or pass plays and what they average and pass plays versus coverage and what they average, etc. Then we watch the film on the bad plays and our position coaches and coordinators slap their knees saying…”Damn we just got to drill and execute that better next year.”…
There is also Prof. Rockerbie’s angle of analysis of the topic for anyone interested (click here for link to the abstract) that attacks the problem from a more rigorous math and economic angle. He concluded in the end that an overall running premium existed for most (not all teams) when analyzing the 2006 NFL data. (Warning: Not for the faint of heart). Read Chris’s article first!
Great analysis! Those Nebraska teams were something special. That run game was about as devastating an offense as there ever was.
Truely the way college football was intended to be played
Great Stuff on all three of these breakdowns. Thanks, it shows what a dominant rushing offense can do - and how complex it really is.
96 NU lost two game and had Frost in his first year. A down year compared to the run from 93-97.
Note: 1996 is the season from which I have some of the coaching film (end zone & side line - not the TV stuff). I have a couple games from other years as well. Here is a link to the Nebraska record during the Osborne era for anyone interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Osborne. The 11-2 record of 1996 is down in comparison to the small subset mentioned above (e.g. 13-0 record of 1994, 12-0 record of 1995, and the 13-0 record of 1997). By historic norms for the entire Osborne era however 1996 is about average and something few teams can match. Coach Osborne averaged 10.2 wins and 1.96 losses per year across his 25 seasons as Nebraska head coach. My guess is that most Nebraska fans would take a 11-2 record in 2009 as a big step back in the right direction…but that is a topic for fan chat boards and not something for this site.
This information is hitting Huskernation by storm. Good job!
With defenses getting lighter and more emphasis put on speed to stop the spread I expect a large physical running attack similar to Osbourne’s offense to make a come back. I’m interested to see with Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech can do when he gets linemen with the size and experience in blocking to run his offense well. Johnson’s offense performed well, looking at yards, in the bowl game against LSU. His running and passing numbers were similar to LSU’s. It was obvious that Johnson was forced to pass more than he desired and LSU’s tactic, even if questionable, worked out very well in that game at keeping Tech out of the endzone.
Man this is great stuff for the real hardcore college fan and or historian. One note I would like to add is that the reason Osborne went to option/power running game was his team’s difficulties in defensing Oklahoma’s version of the wishbone through the 70’s and 80’s (A hint at maybe your next off season research project)