Frost Focus: Greek Tragedy

I think I’ll skip the preamble this week and get down to the brass tacks of Nebraska’s 24-19 loss to the Troy Trojans, where we learned just how much a dual-threat quarterback mitigates the weaknesses of an offensive line and counteracts aggressive defenses. A big part of the offensive line’s performance against Colorado was due to the run threat of Martinez, forcing the Buffs to play with a bit of apprehension. Without this run threat, the Husker offense was essentially plunged backward into the Mike Riley milquetoast pro-style/spread amalgamation and while the offensive line is improved over the 2017 unit, we aren’t quite dynamic enough up front to successfully run out of the spread without the added dimension of a dual-threat quarterback. In this week’s Frost Focus we’ll look at how Troy defended the Husker run game and how Frost adjusted his playcalling in response.

It’s no secret that dual-threat quarterbacks can mask an offensive line’s deficiencies in execution in addition to distorting defender reads and displacing them from their gap assignments. With Andrew Bunch stepping in for the injured Martinez, Frost and Troy Walters put the offensive gameplan on the shoulders of the offensive line and the tailback run game, basically putting the chains on the tires and looking to churn up some yardage against an under-sized, but very athletic Trojan front 7.

What the Troy front 7 lacked in size, they made up for with an aggressive game plan out of their base Tite front (4i-0-4i) in which they looked to take away the holy grail of a spread-to-run offense: the open B gap. Troy also varied their alignments based on Husker formations, with a 4i sometimes condensing down into a 3 technique (outside shoulder of guard) and the 0 technique, Trevon Sanders, moving around to a shade technique (either shoulder of the center) or a 2i technique (inside shoulder of the guard).

Now before you accuse me of declaring the 2018 Troy defense the 85 Bears, I’ll say that despite Troy’s aggressive game plan, the Husker offensive line did themselves no favors in having too many instances of pre-snap miscommunication that resulted in post-snap missed assignments. With the Trojan 4i’s physically keying the Husker tackles and visually keying the Husker guards, Nebraska was unable to consistently and cleanly pull guards to create extra gaps leaving, the Husker offense to predominantly lean on the Inside Zone run game. Some success was found by pulling Matt Farniok on Dart and Fold concepts to the tailback, but the predominance of the running game was Inside Zone.