Act I: A Nebraska-focused, post-spring look at UTEP, CU, UNI and Illinois

A quick look at what we learned from the spring about the Huskers' first four opponents.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

The portal is “closed”—unless you’re a graduate transfer or your name is already in the portal—and spring practices are done. May marks a transition from pre-preseason to just preseason on the college football calendar. At least it does on my college football calendar.

Now we’ve got nothing but time to think about the season ahead, to consider the schedule and the teams on it. I’ve done this long enough to know not everyone is here for lengthy breakdowns of teams they don’t follow, no matter how willing I am to write lengthy breakdowns of teams they don’t follow. This is my effort to keep things shorter.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going through Nebraska’s schedule in three acts—the first four games, the middle and the furious finish. The hope here is that if someone asks you, “What’s your read on UTEP in the opener?” you’ll feel equipped for a quick conversation. Nobody will probably ask you this, but there’s a satisfaction in just being prepared.¹

For the FBS teams on the schedule I’ve included Action Network’s post-spring Transfer Activity & Returning Production (TARP) measure, a weighted calculation of how much a team returns plus what it added and lost via the portal. This is expressed by the projected change to a team’s power ranking on a scale of 12 to -12. I’m also including the initial SP+ rating, which can be read as “Team X is projected to be Y points better/worse than the average FBS team.” Finally, I’ve included a projected Nebraska point spread using those SP+ ratings.

On to Nebraska’s first four: UTEP (Aug. 31), Colorado (Sept. 7), Northern Iowa (Sept. 14) and Illinois (Sept. 21), all at home.