Nebraska and Offensive Efficiency - Part III

Today we’ll look briefly at the historical data concerning Nebraska’s Scoreability Index over time. You can see the entire spreadsheet here. Have fun.

Here are the Top 10 seasons since the Osborne era began in terms of offensive efficiency.

1. 1988 - 9.68
2. 1996 - 9.90
3. 1980 - 10.00
4. 1983 - 10.51
5. 1986 - 10.66
6. 1997 - 10.91
7. 2000 - 11.09
8. 1993 - 11.10
9. 1992 - 11.29
10. 1999 - 11.45

Interestingly only one of our National Championship teams makes the list. This is due in part (I think), to the ways in which certain Nebraska teams dominated their competition. If we consider the 1995 team, which blew out pretty much everyone, you get to a point where that team was just racking up yards with its scrubs, but then taking knee and refusing to put up points. That would certainly hurt its efficiency as calculated by this method. That’s at least my best guess to explain this.

Now we have the worst ten seasons since the Osborne era began in terms of offensive efficiency.

1. 1973 - 17.70
2. 1977 - 15.67
3. 1995 - 14.53
4. 2004 - 14.53
5. 1979 - 14.05
6. 2003 - 13.93
7. 1981 - 13.79
8. 2002 - 13.64
9. 1994 - 13.62
10. 2006 - 13.56

First thing that jumps out at me is that we see both 1973 and 2004 on the list. What do these two seasons have in common? Breaking in a new head coach. We also see that the last two seasons of the Solich era also make this list. This should surprise absolutely no one who was actually paying attention.

Is anybody surprised to see that 2006 made the Top 10 in least efficient offensive performances? In some ways it is unexpected but our performances against teams like KSU, and ISU involved pretty big chunks of yardage and not a lot of point production. That adds up pretty quickly when we use this methodology.