Nebraska football needs to establish the deep passing game.
It was interesting to listen to Nebraska football coach Scott Frost talk about some of things that this team needed to do better heading into next Saturday’s matchup with Wisconsin. One of the things he talked about is something that I agree with him on. Nebraska football needs to do a better job of getting down the field on passing plays.
It’s not that they don’t have the receivers, I think they do. It’s more about being able to push the ball down the field. We saw it with Ohio State on Saturday. They were able to push the ball down the field with ease. They didn’t always have to, but they certainly had the option to do so.
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To be fair, Nebraska football have a lot of explosive plays on Saturday. However, most of them came from the run game. They didn’t really pass the ball down the field too much. The longest pass play of the day was a 26-yard catch from Austin Allen. It was great to see the tight ends get involved, but it was also concerning that they were one of the only major sources of production.
In his postgame press conference on Saturday, Frost seemed to recognize this. Heading into the game against Wisconsin next Saturday, Nebraska needs to make a more concerted effort on pushing the ball down the field. For his part, Frost seems to be able to think that Nebraska will be able to do that moving forward. This would certainly open up the offense, and the big-play dynamic would certainly be welcome.
"“I thought we had a really good game plan,” Frost said. “Coach Lubick has made us better. We stopped ourselves a lot between penalties and sacks and when we played clean drives, we executed pretty well and moved the ball better. We as a program have to be able to push the ball downfield better. There’s no question about that. When you look at the speed they have at wide receiver and the shots they take and the deep balls they hit. When you hit those, those are big plays and even when you don’t hit them, you’re backing people up and keeping people honest. We have a ways to go to be able to be that kind of threat, but I thought the guys executed the game plan pretty well… We executed the game play well, but we shot ourselves in the foot way too much.”"
To be fair, I’m not suggesting that Nebraska football takes deep shots down the field every single play. Then, that would make them too predictable obviously. I am saying that they need to add the deep ball a bit more in their repertoire. Maybe, Nebraska can establish the deep ball with play action.
One thing they have seemed to have been able to do is run the ball well. Maybe, they could use that to their advantage.
Lulling the defense to sleep with the run game and then trying to move down the field with a deep pass makes a ton of sense. Hopefully, Nebraska can employ something like that next week. It would certainly be advantageous for them to do so.
In any event, Nebraska certainly has enough weapons to establish the passing game. Now, they just need to execute it. It will be interesting to see if it’s something they focus on against Wisconsin.