Early signs of progress for NU's offense

And a Nebraska-HCU prediction, not that one's all that needed.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Turns out the computers love it when a team beats an opponent by nearly twice as much as expected, no matter who that opponent is. Following its 68-0 win over Akron, Nebraska jumped 19 spots to 28th in the SP+ ratings, 20 spots in FPI to 12th and a relatively subdued 10 spots to 34th in FEI. Whether you love such ratings, are merely curious or thing they’ve bogus, that’s pretty good work for one Saturday.

Can the Huskers do it again this Saturday?

Based on those same SP+ ratings from Bill Connelly—the only I know that attempts to rank every FBS, FCS, D-II, D-III and NAIA school from 1-to-766—put this week’s opponent, Houston Christian, 49 spots behind Akron (and would make the Zips about an 8.5-point favorite on a neutral field).

Do I think this means the Huskers win 78-0 on Saturday? I do not. It’s hard to be that ruthlessly efficient in point scoring any week, much less in consecutive weeks. But it’s also intended to offer a clue as to why I’m avoiding our (hopefully) classic game preview, because the three keys to a Nebraska win in this one might be 1) Wake up, 2) Show up on time, 3) Don’t turn it over nine times. No disrespect intended towards the Huskies, but everyone knows the lay of the land with this one—barring a catastrophe, style points are basically equivalent with actual points this week.

That’s why we’ll spend our time this Thursday looking at a couple of numbers for Nebraska’s offense that I thought were important in the offseason.

It’s still too early for a real update on the Huskers’ progress on these fronts given an obliteration of Akron is half the sample size, but even with that in mind, I was still sort of blown away by where NU found itself after two weeks.