The Nebraska football team almost knocked off the Ohio State Buckeyes on Saturday. And despite the fact that there was plenty to be happy about, even in a loss, one thing people weren’t all that thrilled about was the offensive playcalling for most of the game.
Quite a bit of the frustration when the smoke cleared on the 21-17 loss for the Huskers were what felt like an inordinate number of short passing schemes that had NU throwing an awful like a passes near the line of scrimmage. The frustration was especially heightened because the NU coaches have previously talked about their players’ struggles when it comes to perimeter blocking.
The perimeter blocking problems continued. That meant quite a few of those short passes by the Nebraska football team were stopped in their tracks. On Monday, head coach Matt Rhule stepped to the mic and tried to take some of the growing heat off offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield.
Matt Rhule takes the heat for Nebraska football screen game
“I completely understand why people are frustrated, right? Completely,” Rhule told the media. “At the same time, what I would say is: You go block that front without throwing a couple screens and tell me, okay? I mean, they' re dominant. Absolutely dominant.”
“There's some kids that feel really bad on our team because they see the heat that, like, you know, Sat's taking, or I’m taking or whoever, and they know that they had a missed assignment,” he continued. “If they had blocked the man-to-man defender, the ball would have gone for about 50. Yeah, it wasn't good enough. The screen game wasn't good enough.”
While Rhule mostly defended the play-calling, he seemed a bit frustrated with Satterfield’s decisions in at least one area.
“You know, to have two on the final drive. You know, I can understand why people would be frustrated about that.
However, in the long run, Rhule was seemingly on board with the offensive gameplan. He even went to far as to say he definitely signed off on it.
“But, yeah, I mean, the screen game hasn’t been terrible for us, but it was not very good for us in that game. And, you know, it's just one of those things that come out of the game as coaches, and you're like, hey, we really thought going into that game we were going to need to be able to screen them because of their pass rush.”
All of that makes sense, but most Nebraska football fans would be a little annoyed at how long it took Satterfield to recognize it wasn’t working. That’s the bigger issuen for most on the outside looking in.