Phil Steele Joins! | Why He Believes Nebraska Will Turn Around One-Score Losses And Breakthrough

uh I'm going to stay close to home there with Nebraska Dylan rayola uh how do you go about your uh prep work in trying to rate and project a quarterback that's obviously not stepped on the field but nobody would question the skill set and the arm Talent yeah I I tell you what it sure look good in a spring game but you don't want to overreact to that you know the spring game's loaded to so he has success but Dylan rol is a guy who was much sought after of course was originally going to go to I believe Georgia then ended up in Nebraska uh he's got the Nebraska Heritage he was my number two rated quarterback coming out of high school uh he's a guy that sees it he's got a great feel for everything he's more mature than your typical true freshman he's got a big arm he's got all the arm talent in the world and uh he sure looked good when the lights came on in the spring game in front of a pretty good crowd and it's got a good Supporting Cast as well if Nebraska can ever get over those close losses that's really struggled with them the last three or four years they could be a dangerous team and I think he helps that because last year the quarterbacks had a negative ratio but they also fumbled the ball a lot I think R if he eliminates those turnovers and last year Nebraska was minus 17 in turnovers all of a sudden with their defense which last year only allowed 304 yards per game this is a team that's going to surprise a lot of folks they are my number two most approved team in the country absolutely and you went a direction that I was going to follow up with uh last four games of the Season looked like classic uh Nebraska over the last six or seven years it looked like Scott Frost was still on the sideline as you know they they blew games right at the end the Iowa one was ridiculous and that they intercept a pass at Midfield near about 10 yards from the game-winning field goal and they throw it right back to Iowa the very next play uh I know it's a statistic in baseball that's proven fairly accurate that if you suffer a ton of one- score one run losses or the beneficiary it tends to swing the other way the next year is there any kind of luck factor of or further evaluation of play Beyond of course the wins and losses and the and the point differential from a previous year where Nebraska would seem to fall into this category yeah I mean Nebraska Falls in all the categories you know the first metric article I wrote for the magazine was the first magazine 1995 and it was turnovers equals turnaround and I had done about four years of research when I wrote that article and it said basically 75% of the time if a team had negative double- digigit turnovers uh they' had better record than next year and vice versa if you benefited from positive double- digigit turnovers yet had a worse record the next year well guess what it's held true to form each and every year for 30 years so I started developing more and more metrics like you touched on close wins close losses and I say these things have a success rate of 75 80% that does mean that there's going to be 20% or 10% of the teams that don't do it Nebraska's killing at my close wins close losses category because they're the one team that keeps having these close losses and doesn't improve the next year I think that all stops this year with Matt ru's second season but uh yeah that close wins close losses article has always done great the magazine since I put it in and it actually has about a 76% uh success rate except for that dog on Nebraska team which is ruining the metric but you mentioned the key factor there second season Matt rule Temple Baylor we all know the deal so maybe he pulls it off at Nebraska this year and they improve decidedly I've got a statistic for you Phil I started to notice about seven or eight years ago that with a lot of the preseason Publications uh that they were extremely conservative in their projections meaning that they were selecting basically the same record or maybe just a one game difference from the previous season and so I thought well how often does a team have a significant increase or decrease in losses so I said three is the bar as being the difference between you know a significant change six and six becomes a nine and3 team or a three and N team the next year for example and I've tracked this now for seven or eight years 26 teams last year out of the 70 power five teams 26 had a plus or minus difference in wins the previous season of at least three and that's pretty consistent uh it's usually in the 18 to 22 range so I think it's a larger portion of college football teams that undergo change from year to year than we think about the sport being kind of static but it's really only static at the elite level yeah I would agree with that there is often drastic change and uh you know we've seen teams go from first place to last place uh and last place to first place and that's the thing about college football there's even a bigger difference Mark if you ever get the time to look at it in the FCS the FCS actually has an even higher percentage which figures because you know you've got more turnover on the roster but uh yeah I I would agree there's that's a pretty significant number and I appreciate you sharing that with me