Does Lujan get any grace for it being his first season? Sometimes, it takes time for the team to adjust to a new offensive scheme. I notice that ex-UCLA coach who went to Ohio State this year as a supposed offense guru, Chip Kelly, seemed to have a just above average offense during the regular season and it's not till the college football playoffs that they seem to have gone high octane. I recall it took a year for Kevin Wilson with Randy Walker, from so-so 1999 to the breakout year in 2000 with the Wildcat spread offense.
Slight correction, Ohiovalleycat, if you don't mind. It didn't take a year for Kevin Wilson's spread offense to catch on. It happened immediately. That spread offense was brand new for NU in 2000.
In '99, his first year at NU, Walker ran his stone age power running game (I say that with full love and respect as an old OL coach who believed in a VERY boring between the tackles running game when I called plays in youth football a few centuries back), and it was an absolute garbage offense. That was with Nick Kreinbrink & Zak Kustok sharing QB, and an injury plagued OL. Not only was it awful and unable to score points or get first downs, it was SOOOOOO freakin boring and miserable to watch. Can I get an Amen from Coral, Hungry Jack and Corbi?
I would love to get the back story on this, because I have no idea how it happened..... but somehow during the winter offseason of 2000, Walk was persuaded to make the radical (for him) decision to switch from his beloved Big Ten power football offense to a spread passing game. Truth be told, even though we lined up four wide receivers the majority of the time, and threw the ball more than usual, it was still a run first offense. The purpose was to spread out the defense by forcing wider gaps between the DLinemen and linebackers, and get all the DBs (and sometimes LBs) out of the box, and create bigger run lanes for Damien Anderson. It worked fabulously. That 2000 team RAN for 3000 yards.
Hello? THREE THOUSAND rushing yards by an NU offense. Per game, it was 255 rushing yards, and 220 passing. Yes, I looked it up. What a fun year that was to watch offense at NU.
And the point is, that happened in the first year of that offense at NU. Walker and Kevin Wilson traveled to Clemson that winter to hang out with their coaches and basically copy/steal their spread offense. I sure would love to hear from some old players on this board more about how that process happened that winter and during spring ball, because it was such a radical transformation, and so shocking (to me) that Randy Walker agreed to it.
