McKewon: O-line is key, but it’s not Donovan Raiola’s job to fix Nebraska’s offense | Football

Those little data trackers embedded into compression jerseys don’t fib, and the truths they tell about Nebraska’s offensive line are ones Scott Frost wants to hear. Truths he sought on the hiring trail that led him to one Donovan Raiola.

He’s the mystery man in a sense of Frost’s four new assistants on offense. Too much is being put on the shoulders of Raiola, a guy doing this for the first time. And Frost, in subtle ways, has tried to redistribute some of the weight. We’ll get back to that in a moment.

“The guys wear monitors that track overall output and 100 other statistics,” Frost said of NU’s offensive linemen. “And they’re more than doubling, in a lot of cases, the amount of effort that they put out the last couple years in practice.”

The Pipeline is pumping their legs — and twice the oil. How?

Frost points to a tough “Indy” — a rigorous set of individual drills — where Raiola has each lineman firing off the ball and pushing one of his linemates 10 yards downfield. Men who weigh 315 pounds give resistance standing still so imagine how you’d feel pushing that boulder 10 yards. Imagine doing that several times.

The goal, left tackle Teddy Prochazka said, is to create “consistency” and “trust” for six, eight, 10 play drives.

“Sometimes I get a little frustrated during team (period) because the linemen are dog tired by the time they get to our team drills,” Frost said Saturday. “We’ll probably have to curtail that as we get into the season a little bit, but the work that they’ve gotten done is extraordinary in camp.”

This is all by Frost’s design.

If the coach ceded some of the play-calling and planning authority to offensive coordinator Mark Whipple, he has leaned more into offensive line play. Frost wants a downhill, physical run game with backs who go 100 miles per hour into a hole and big men whose blocking doesn’t make a back guess.

Frost had worked six years with Greg Austin, who developed three Husker linemen — Brendan Jaimes, Matt Farniok and Cam Jurgens — into NFL draft picks, but the subtle friction between the two seemed to grow whenever Frost talked about wanting more “crease runs.” Frost was right, too.

After 2018 — when NU had 31 rushes of 20 yards or more — the creases got smaller and smaller.

Just 21 rushes of 20 yards or more in 2019, 13 in COVID-19 shortened 2020 and in 2021, 18 such runs, 1.5 per game. A number of those totes were either Adrian Martinez scrambles or triple-option pitches that popped for big plays.

And it affects a lot when you can’t control a defense with a standard ground game. Nebraska seemed to run everything this side of the wishbone last season to account for its absence.

Against Iowa, Frost’s play-calling basically turned Logan Smothers into a Tim Tebow-style wing-T QB with more rushes (24) than passes (22). Fifteen years after Florida’s No. 15, defenses have adjusted. You’ve got to throw to win — and mix in a downhill run game as needed.

Ohio State made that switch four years ago when J.T. Barrett finally graduated. Last season, two Big Ten quarterbacks — Martinez and Rutgers’ Noah Vedral — had more than 100 carries. This season, I expect that number to be zero.

If NU’s plan works, the run responsibility transfers from the legs of Casey Thompson, Chubba Purdy and Smothers to that of six scholarship running backs Frost seems to like and an offensive line that has a lot of age, a lot of size and a lot of pressure.

It’s the one question I get via text, email, Twitter DM, you name it. What about the line?

Raiola is paid less than every other offensive assistant to coach a group we understand the least about and tend to critique the most. Raiola’s not a run game coordinator, like Austin, or much of a quote. When Frost decided to limit position coaches to preseason interviews, my immediate thought drifted to how that’d please Raiola. We’ve heard twice already from receivers coach Mickey Joseph. No Raiola yet.

And in a sense, that’s OK. Raiola is vocal and forceful with the linemen, as reporters have noted in two open periods in training camp.

“He’s going to make sure he’s not babying you,” Prochazka said. “He’s not going to just comfort you, he’s going to make sure and give you tough love, say ‘This is what you need to do,’ over communicate it so you can fully understand it.”

Raiola has graduate assistant Aaron Coeling, who coached Charleston Southern’s offensive line for three seasons. Frost liked Coeling enough to mention him by name Saturday. Not all GAs get such treatment.

Coeling isn’t here by accident. Like Raiola, he worked as a GA at Notre Dame under Harry Hiestand. He and Raiola know and teach the same stuff.

“More movement, more coming off the ball, more effort,” Frost said, describing the style that Raiola and players hint at but don’t explain. That reticence — an unnecessity that hints at something more exotic than it really is — only heightens the interest around the offensive line coach who, at Nebraska, gets an unusual amount of attention.

The late Milt Tenopir, a godfather of line tutelage, started that trend.

If Dennis Wagner escaped some of the criticism because his boss Bill Callahan was another offensive line godfather, Wagner’s predecessor and successor, Barney Cotton, did not. Cotton’s lines were far better than we judged them at the time. And the media was tougher on the man than readers may appreciate. Once we backed him up into a water fountain that started to gurgle because Cotton had to lean on it.

“If they ever want to give me a holler, put their name on it, they can give me a holler in my office,” Cotton later said of his critics before the 2013 Capital One Bowl. “I’ll sit down and talk to them, no problem. Nobody’s ever called me up.”

Years later, Mike Cavanaugh’s preference for not rotating linemen during a game went through the press wringer. An initially colorful quote grew increasingly terse over three years.

Austin, a former Husker lineman himself, faced his share of scrutiny. Especially in 2021, when Pro Football Focus’ college division routinely judged NU’s line to be awful.

Other statistics disagreed — Football Outsiders ranked NU 67th in average line yards, way ahead of Iowa — but Nebraska gave up too many sacks, and had too many false-start penalties. And Frost clearly preferred, well, a completely different practice approach.

Why didn’t he make a switch sooner?

“I have too much respect for people who were here before that are great coaches,” Frost said. “This just fits what I believe in better.”

My read: Big Ten defenses — mostly coordinated by millionaires — did just what Frost once predicted they’d do. Adjust.

So Frost made his own chess move by picking Raiola, who doesn’t require a big salary and additional coaching title — or the authority that goes along with it. Frost could have hired a more experienced line coach to pair with Whipple. An analytics firm used by Nebraska provided those options. Frost instead gave Raiola his big break.

“When I went out interviewing people, I wanted to find somebody that felt the same way I did about the mentality and technique,” Frost said. “Donny knows it better than I do, but I love what he taught, and it’s coming to fruition now.”

If Nebraska’s O-line of Prochazka, Turner Corcoran, Trent Hixson, Broc Bando and Bryce Benhart stays healthy and effective, Raiola will get a raise and credit. (And so will Frost.)

If not? Hard to fault a new guy. It’ll happen anyway, but it’s Frost who gave Raiola the chance, and the coach likes what he sees so far.

So do the GPS trackers. On with the Rewind.

31.03%: Of Nebraska’s rushing yards came from the quarterback last season. That’s a lot — and it’s also way down from 2020 (54.9%) and 2019 (36.8%). I’ll offer a sneaky reason: The triple option.

Seems counterintuitive, but that play accounted for some big runs last season — including an 83-yarder by Zavier Betts — without having to use the quarterback’s legs. NU has kept the play in its offense — reporters saw a glimpse of it Wednesday — so it’s available.

29: Passing plays of 30 or more yards last season, second in the Big Ten.

Frost said Saturday that Nebraska is throwing the ball downfield more often, which may “back off” defenses that need to account for the deep pass. The Huskers had an excellent deep game in 2021 — Samori Touré averaged 19.52 yards per catch — so it’ll be intriguing to see how much more they can do. (NU conversely struggled with some of the short-to-intermediate routes.)

111.5: Average Husker special teams ranking the past four seasons, according to Phil Steele’s metrics. Only Purdue (102.5) comes close to this average in the Big Ten — Iowa’s four-year average is 9.25 — and it speaks to the gap between Nebraska and its league peers.

I trace struggles back to 2019, when Frost’s coordinator Jovan Dewitt parted ways with NU for a job at North Carolina. That was the moment to hire a standalone coordinator. It didn’t happen, and Nebraska paid the price.

1: Win in August or September over a Power Five team since Frost took over. That’d be the 42-38 win at Illinois in 2019.

Otherwise, Nebraska lost to Colorado, Michigan and Purdue (2018), Colorado and Ohio State (2019), and Illinois, Oklahoma and Michigan State (2021). NU is 1-8 against P5 teams in August and September since 2018, with the COVID-shortened 2020 season starting in October. Now I’ll impart to you something extraordinary.

1: Win in August or September over a Power Five team for Northwestern since 2018. That’d be a 31-27 win over Purdue … four years ago.

Since then, the Wildcats have lost to Duke and Michigan (2018), Stanford, Michigan State and Wisconsin (2019), and Michigan State and Duke (2021). The Huskers and Wildcats are joined in this early season futility by Illinois and Rutgers, which also have one P5 August/September win since 2018. Illinois beat Nebraska last year. Rutgers beat Syracuse last year.

No matter how you slice it: These teams have stunk early in the season.