Would you rather Nebraska be an offense oriented program or a defense oriented program?

[Quint]

Meh, recreating history...

1990 class
15 offensive guys signed, 1 moved to defense (Wilhite).

1991 class
7 offensive guys signed, 1 moved to defense & it was Tony Veland. His first couple years was at QB in Lincoln, he was co-2 with Berringer back in 1993 (his 3rd year in the program). Brook solidified the 2 spot after Veland was injured, which allowed Osborne to move Veland to defense after this & remember, Tony was coming off an injury. Had nothing to do with Tony not being good enough for offense.

1992 class
11 offensive guys signed, 3 were recruited as 2-way; Minter, Terwilliger & Washington. Minter was recruited as a RB/DB, and in this class was also Damon Benning, Clinton Childs & Marvin Sims.

Was Minter "not good enough", or did we have Calvin Jones as the starting IB (2,000 career rushing yards) with Lawrence Phillips behind him followed by Benning & Childs?! We were stacked at IB, which allowed TO to move Mike to DB during his redshirt year. Twigs converted to defense his redshirt freshmen year & Washington remained with the offense.

It goes on & on for the next 3-4 classes to end his HC career....

One could easily say, and have more validity, that McBride making the move with some DB's to LB'er and some LB'ers to DE's was the most important move that allowed the 90's defenses to actually become what they did. In the late 80's, and early 90's, we were big & fucking slow on defense till moving some guys up 1 level happened. Then, we had great speed all over the place, straight up thugs in some cases & the rest is history. (Rampant drug use noted)

Mike was a helluva safety, and I honestly didn’t remember him being in the RB room.

 

[PonyBoy]

Mike was a helluva safety, and I honestly didn’t remember him being in the RB room.

Ya, he was a beast. I just wish he was healthier before his senior season.

He never was in the RB room, that's my point. Once he got to campus he was with the DB's (recruited as a 2-way).

 

[Kaladin]

TO and his staff seemed to be able to find and recruit straight badass mother fuckers too. Legit question have we had anyone on defense since the Suh/David years that scared anyone on opposing offenses?

Prop 48 probably had something to do with that

 

[doublewing]

Defensive oriented. It keeps you in games and more often than not, you'll have an overall tougher team mentality.

Since TO years are being discussed in this thread - look at the change of the program in the early 90's that let to national titles. Defensively they weren't bad before that, but not athletic enough to match up with the FL passing teams. NU brought in better athletes and it seemed like the overall confidence of the team changed with it.

Offensively they didn't change much beyond a few tweaks. Frazier was a huge recruit but NU had decent QB's prior to that, like Turner Gill, but there wasn't a defense to match the success of the offense. The mantra at the time was "Nebraska will never win a title running the option/run-oriented attack." TO stuck with his offense but McBride evolved the defense.