Nebraska 49, Ohio 21 — and the offense is a long way ahead of the defense
Welcome to the first statistical breakdown of the 2026 Nebraska football season. I said back in the summer that I’d track a set of numbers all year to see how this team is actually doing, and this is the first one.
These are simple statistics. I’m not doing anything advanced. Advanced stats are fine — I’m not against them — but most people don’t want to sit through them, and you were promised no math. I’ve got about fifteen numbers
I’m tracking, and I’ll probably add a few special teams stats before this is done. I’d like to say I’ll be perfectly consistent about it, but if you know anything about me, you know better.
Here’s what I’m measuring against, week to week:
- Points per game — 32.0
- Yards per play — 6.1
- Yards per pass attempt — 8.0
- Explosive plays per game — 5.0
- Third down conversion rate — 44%
- Red zone touchdown rate — 67%
- Sacks allowed per game — 1.6
- Points allowed per game — 20.0
- Yards per carry allowed — 3.7
- Opponent red zone trips per game — 3.2
- Opponent red zone touchdown rate — 55%
- Sacks per game — 2.5
- Turnover margin per game — +0.5
- Takeaways per game — 1.75
An explosive play, for our purposes, is a run of 10 or more yards or a pass of 20 or more.
Nebraska 49, Ohio 21. It was a good game, and a genuinely shocking one early for anybody who’d waited months for football to come back only to watch Ohio go 75 yards in three plays on the opening possession. Seven points, just like that. Yay.
Let’s get to the numbers.
Offense
Against the targets:
- Points: 49, against a target of 32.0
- Yards per play: 7.1 — 523 yards on 74 plays — against a target of 6.1
- Yards per pass attempt: 8.6, against a target of 8.0
- Third down: 9 of 15, or 60%, against a target of 44%
- Red zone touchdown rate: 4 for 4, all touchdowns, against a target of 67%
- Sacks allowed: 2, against a target of 1.6
Six of seven offensive numbers cleared the bar. The only miss was sacks allowed, and two is not a number to lose sleep over.
Explosive plays
This is the one I want to spend time on, because Nebraska had a whole gob of them. Fifteen, by the definition above — ten runs of 10-plus and five passes of 20-plus:
- Isaiah Mozee, 24-yard run
- Anthony Colandrea to Jacory Barney Jr., 27-yard pass
- Colandrea to Kwazi Gilmer, 21-yard pass
- Colandrea to Jamal Rule, 23-yard pass
- Colandrea to Jamal Rule, 24-yard touchdown pass
- Anthony Colandrea, 11-yard run
- Jamal Rule, 15-yard run
- Jamal Rule, 13-yard run on 4th and 1
- Anthony Colandrea, 13-yard touchdown run
- Jamal Rule, 13-yard run
- Mekhi Nelson, 29-yard touchdown run
- Colandrea to Mekhi Nelson, 51-yard touchdown pass
- Jamal Rule, 39-yard run
- Anthony Colandrea, 11-yard run
- Jamal Rule, 11-yard touchdown run
Two came in the first quarter. Nine came after halftime.
Everybody has spent the last few days talking about Jamal Rule, and you can see why — six of the fifteen were his. People have been reaching for a former Nebraska back to compare him to, and for whatever reason my brain went to Dan Alexander. Alexander just seemed like a very strong guy, a guy who would run over people, and he had decent speed on top of it. That’s the late 1990s, which tells you more about my age than about Rule. You younger folks can come up with something more current.
I like explosive plays for two reasons. They force a defense to keep people back, and they stop a defense from crowding the line of scrimmage. That’s it. That’s the whole argument, and it’s enough.
The part that isn’t a statistic
523 yards of total offense. 275 passing, 248 rushing. 42 runs, 32 passes.
That is a very well-rounded offense, and I suspect it’s close to what Dana Holgorsen wants his offense to look like. I saw the usual take in the Corn Nation game thread and on Twitter — “he went away from the run game when it was working.”
I don’t understand the “we have to run all the time” position, and I understand it less after the last couple of days, when everybody got thrilled about the power-I look on fourth down where Rule broke off 13 yards.
It was a cool formation. I liked it too. And I saw more than one person ask why we can’t just stick with that.
Because we have to have a number of ways to beat people if we’re going to beat the ranked teams on this schedule. That’s why.
What the alternative looks like
If you want to see what happens when an offense can only grind, watch what Western Michigan did to Michigan.
Western Michigan started a drive at its own 8 with 9:05 left in the third quarter and ended it with Dieter Kelly’s 39-yard field goal at 10:25 of the fourth. Twenty plays. Seventy-one yards. Thirteen minutes and forty seconds of game clock — almost an entire quarter of football on one possession.
And they didn’t do it out of one formation. They mixed it up. Here’s what it looked like:
- 13 runs for 46 yards, 3.5 per carry
- 6 of 6 passing for 30 yards
- 6 first downs
- 4 of 5 on third down — and every conversion except one came on 3rd and 4 or shorter, the exception being a 16-yard throw on 3rd and 14
- Longest play of the drive: 16 yards
- Longest run of the drive: 8 yards
- Explosive plays: zero
Twenty plays, thirteen minutes and forty seconds, three points. Western Michigan won time of possession 40:08 to 19:52 and lost the game 13-12.
If you watched it, you know Western Michigan was completely outclassed athletically. And I think this is the key thing: consuming drives, consuming yardage, consuming clock is one way an outmatched team stays in a game. If Nebraska is ever going to beat an Ohio State, that may well be part of how it happens.
But it can’t be the only thing you can do. Nebraska went 70 yards in five plays and 75 yards in six against Ohio. Same field, same distance, a fifth of the clock, twice the points. You want both.
Why I’m fine with the passing
It’s the first game of the season. You want to get out there and find out what you have. You want your guys on the field against a defense they haven’t been looking at all fall camp, so you can see who’s stepping the right direction on the offensive line, who’s not pulling properly, whether the receivers are running their routes.
There was a fourth-down play where Nebraska ran an out to the tight end and Colandrea slipped, and somebody in the game thread said we got cute. Well — you’re going to have to get cute against an odd front you can’t block straight up, and there’s one of those on the schedule in November. You have to know what works and what doesn’t before you get there.
Colandrea was fun to watch. Dynamic, decisive, and throwing across the middle in a way we haven’t seen here in a couple of years.
Defense
Now the other side, and it’s a harder read — partly because your numbers get wrecked when the first play from scrimmage goes 68 yards.
- Points allowed: 21, against a target of 20.0
- Yards per carry allowed: 4.2, against a target of 3.7
- Opponent red zone trips: 2, against a target of 3.2
- Opponent red zone touchdown rate: 100% — two trips, two touchdowns — against a target of 55%
- Sacks: 2, against a target of 2.5
- Turnover margin: +1, against a target of +0.5
- Takeaways: 1, against a target of 1.75
Ohio had six explosive plays. The 68-yarder to Riley Neer on the opening snap was one, and most of the rest were Nick Poulos on the ground — a couple of designed runs and a couple of scrambles.
I know what’s coming: Nebraska always has trouble with mobile quarterbacks. Everybody has trouble with mobile quarterbacks. That’s why everybody wants one.
I should probably throw out that 68-yard play when I look at this, because Ohio’s average yards per completion for the game was 11.7, and that number tells you more about what the defense actually did. I’ll adjust how I handle outliers as the season goes.
What I saw: Nebraska ran stunts where they’d shift one way and loop a defensive tackle all the way around, and those took a long time to develop. A long time for anything to happen. I’ll be blunt, and I’ll admit up front that defense is not my strong side of the ball — if that’s what we’re doing, can this defensive line hold up against the running games in this conference?
Michigan State is the first real test, and Pat Fitzgerald is now their head coach. Fitzgerald is a rock fighter. He always has been. He will grind you down and beat you by two, and I wouldn’t dismiss that team just because they’ve been down.
The problem is that the next two weeks probably won’t tell us much. Bowling Green lost at home to Tarleton State last week — and before anybody piles on, Tarleton is the No. 5 team in the FCS and has now beaten an FBS team in back-to-back seasons, so that’s less damning than it sounds. Then it’s North Dakota. I’m not sure we learn what we need to learn about this defensive line before Michigan State. The coaches will know more than we will.
The offense is well ahead of the defense right now. That’s the honest read.
Special teams
I need to add these to the tracker and I’m still working out which ones. This game says a few things:
- Ohio missed a 44-yard field goal at 10:11 of the third quarter that would have given them the lead. That’s the one special teams play that changed the scoreboard math.
- Opponent drives starting inside their own 25: Nebraska failed this badly. Ohio started 12 drives and only two began inside the 25. In a game we should have been punishing them, that’s not good enough.
- Archie Wilson averaged 40.0 on three punts. Maybe there’s more leg available in a game like this one.
- Return yardage was a non-factor. Nebraska gave up zero punt return yards on zero returns, and 23 on the only kickoff return.
- Two offside penalties on kickoffs, which is bizarre. I don’t remember the last time I saw that. Both gave Ohio the ball at the 30 instead of the 25, and both of those drives ended in points.
Name this thing
I’ve got two candidates.
MRUCS — Matt Rhule Is A Used Car Salesman.
Because that’s what this season is about: is he a good used car salesman or not?
And I still don’t understand what you people have against used car salesmen. I buy used cars. Buying a new car is a horrible financial decision. I buy toaster cars — go out, pay for it, drive it, and if it gets totaled I throw it away and get another one. The nice thing about a toaster car is you don’t worry about it. You can just drive at people when you’re merging onto the freeway and they get out of the way.
In Your Dreams — which came from somebody leaving a nasty comment when I proposed this series. And you know what, that’s not the worst description. If we hit all of these targets, if this team accomplishes what it wants on both sides of the ball, that would pretty much be in my dreams.
Of course, dreams also covers nightmares. I’ve got the brain injury, and I’ve had to take a lot of different drugs for it over the years. Some of them gave me horrible nightmares the whole time I was on them. One of which would be Nebraska football over the last — God knows how many years.
So there it is. In your dreams. If we do well, we’re going to be a good team. If we don’t, we’re a nightmare.
Let me know which one you’d rather have this thing called.
The plan is to spend these first three weeks figuring out the format, then run it consistently the rest of the way through the Big Ten season. Tell me what you’d change.
Take care of yourselves. Go Big Red.
