While headlines covering the decision to transfer by Derrion Grim have focused on his lack of trust in Riley, a deeper look reveals a player who simply wasn’t going to get the ball enough for his liking.
I’m never one to throw shade at a player, current or former, but after reading a few stories like the Omaha World Herald’s with headlines like, “Derrion Grim cites lack of trust in Mike Riley’s offensive vision as reason for transfer,” I felt like it was time to clear something up.
Derrion Grim isn’t actually calling Mike Riley an incompetent coach, or a bad coach, or a bad offensive coach as headlines like that hint at. In fact, if we look deeper at the reason the freshman wide receiver is leaving, Husker fans should take some solace in the hope that Riley might have learned his lesson from last year.
This transfer really boils down to two things, Grim was obviously homesick, considering he’s already back in California. The second factor in this decision is that Grim wasn’t willing to wait and see what Riley’s offense is going to look like when he has someone under center he recruited specifically to run it.
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In an interview with the Stockton Report, Grim talked about not feeling at home in Nebraska and a major part of that was that he couldn’t trust Riley anymore. The reason he couldn’t trust the head coach anymore you might ask? Because the Huskers weren’t going to be running as many four wide receiver sets as Grim had been led to believe they would.
“They told me they’d be passing more, that they’d go four-wide,” Grim told his hometown paper. Considering that the coaches have talked about how they’d like to focus more on the run this year, clearly they aren’t going to go four-wide more than they did a year ago.
Rededicating the team to having a more balanced approach, especially when you have three running backs (four if you count Tre Bryant) who are battling for playing time is what many of us wanted
Is that a bad thing? I’m in the camp that Tommy Armstrong can certainly improve on his numbers a year ago, especially when it comes to throwing to the other team. Having said that, bad things happened to this offense when we threw more than 35 times a game.
Rededicating the team to having a more balanced approach, especially when you have three running backs (four if you count Tre Bryant) who are battling for playing time is what many of us wanted. This year, with Tommy Armstrong and Ryker Fyfe as the quarterbacks and Patrick O’Brien and Tanner Lee not yet ready to step on the field is going to be another transition year of sorts.
That doesn’t mean we should all be okay with anything close to 6-7 again. It does mean we aren’t going to see the offense Mike Riley really wants to run just yet. This year will likely be more of a hybrid offense of what Riley and offensive coordinator Danny Langsdorf have in store.
I have no doubt Riley tried to convince Derrion Grim that if he waited one more year he might see those four wide-receiver sets he had heard so much about. Keep in mind, Grim is a freshman this year, it’s not like he was running out of time.
I don’t begrudge Grim his desire to go play somewhere else if he doesn’t feel comfortable. That’s his right. But lets not buy into the narrative that some are starting to peddle that Riley “chased him off” or he “doesn’t know what he is doing.”
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The transfer hurts our depth and it’s never fun to lose a player, but if Grim wasn’t willing to wait an entire year to see how the offense was going to pan out, then it’s likely better that he left now.