Friday Five: A sweep to start league play, a new Big Ten volleyball twist and plenty more
Big Ten play showed up on a Wednesday night and Nebraska volleyball didn’t blink. That leads the way in the latest Friday Five.
Big Ten play showed up on a Wednesday night and Nebraska volleyball didn’t blink.
That wasn’t all that happened this week, of course.
The Big Ten also rolled out a new in-season challenge format, Matt Rhule used the bye week to get blunt about what must change up front, Rifle cut the ribbon on its upgraded home and the men’s golf team stacked hardware and history.
As always, let’s get to it.
No. 1 Nebraska volleyball starts Big Ten play like a No. 1
Nebraska’s first conference swing was all business: 25–22, 25–10, 25–13 over Michigan at the Bob Devaney Sports Center with 8,543 in the building and a box score that read like a clinic. The Huskers hit .380 and held the Wolverines to .108, almost doubling them up in kills (47–24) and beating them in everything from first-ball contact to serve/serve-receive and transition digs (37–24).
Harper Murray set the tone with 11 kills on .391 and added seven digs and two blocks. Virginia Adriano (10 kills, .444, three blocks) and Rebekah Allick (nine kills, two blocks) hammered the middle lanes, while Andi Jackson was nearly perfect (eight kills on .778, three blocks). Bergen Reilly ran the show with ruthless pace: 28 assists, nine digs, five kills and an ace (and in the process passed her head coach, Dani Busboom Kelly, for fifth on NU’s rally-scoring assists list with 2,950). Olivia Mauch anchored the back row with a team-high 11 digs.
Oh, and five different Huskers served aces.
The sets told the story. In the first, Nebraska built a margin with an 8–5 open and a 5–0 burst to 16–9 before withstanding a late Michigan push, 25–22. Set two was a statement with 5–0 out of the gate — .565 hitting for NU and .000 for Michigan — and the whole thing felt over by 12–2. In the third, an 8–8 tie became a 15–8 lead behind Reilly’s 7–0 service run, then the Huskers closed on a sprint, 25–13.
Next up: Nebraska is 11–0 (1–0 Big Ten) and hosts Maryland on Saturday at 3 p.m.
The Big Ten adds an October wrinkle: the Discover In-Season Volleyball Challenge
File this under “new stakes, familiar opponents.” The Big Ten and Big Ten Network are layering a month-long competition—sponsored by Discover—into the regular schedule. Every weekday match from Oct. 1–31 (Wednesday–Friday windows) counts toward a five-match mini-race for each program. Most wins across your five designated challenge matches wins the thing; tie-breaks cascade from head-to-head to common opponents, then set- and point-percentage and finally RPI if it’s still deadlocked.
Nebraska’s five: at Penn State (Oct. 3), vs. Washington (Oct. 10), at Michigan State (Oct. 17), vs. Northwestern (Oct. 24), at Wisconsin (Oct. 31). That closing trip to Madison on Halloween was going to carry some juice regardless, but now it could decide a trophy-adjacent line on a résumé.
Two quick takeaways:
It rewards depth and weeknight professionalism. You don’t survive five October weeknights on vibe alone.
It creates fresh TV inventory with real stakes tucked inside the normal Big Ten schedule.
If you like meaningful volleyball layered into an already-beastly league, you’ll like October.
Rhule’s bye-week audit
Nebraska’s next football game is Saturday, Oct. 4 against Michigan State in Lincoln (3 p.m. CT on FS1). Before the reset, Matt Rhule put the tape on the table and refused to sugarcoat where the standard slipped against Michigan when he spoke to the media on Monday.
On the run defense and explosives:
“You have to be careful what you say as a head coach but I am going to be very direct, I don’t know exactly. If you take out four runs – you can’t take out four runs – you take out three long runs in this game, it's not like they are just going 6 yards then 6 yards because that then starts to scare you because that means you can’t stop anybody. They are averaging 3.7 yards a carry so you are sitting there at the game and you are stopping the run and feeling good about this and then bang, an explosive play. Each one is just a little bit different. We did not play a lot of three-three in the game. We put our big people on the field and we were saying I dare you to throw it. They still found a way to run a couple runs that hurt us so I think that's really what we have to do this week. We need to look at who is on the field and how we are playing. I don't think it's because we don't have good players. Part of that though, is that the players have to hear that we are not overwhelming people. We’re not gap and a halfing, lock down the b-gap and the ball goes inside. I thought, going into the game and I think I said it last week, that 22 was an elite level player. I’m trying to be honest, last week, I said, inside the 10 offense, kickoff game and 10-yard rushes are the things that concerned me. Explosive plays. We had the ball inside the 10, inside the five. We’re being honest about the things that we know we have to fix. I don’t know if it’s a major overhaul. We’re doing sound things, we’re in bear, all those things. I think it’s making sure that the right guys are doing the right things and locking in and settling into who we are moving forward.”
On pass protection and assignment football:
“They edged us early and then we started trying to absorb contact instead of taking the fight to them. They bring a lot of blitz and pressure. There were times we turned a guy loose that did not need to be turned loose because we were overthinking it. They present a lot of challenges, so credit to them. There are also a lot of other things like a chip in the back that doesn't chip properly. He tries but it's just not a great chip. One sack we were supposed to have a come back but the guy runs the wrong route. It's all 11 guys. I think versus that rush, they were lining up wide and doing everything we knew they would do, like going speed to power and trying to collapse the pocket and make Dylan (Raiola) uncomfortable. We did not widen the pocket enough so just from the football perspective you want to have the width and depth of the pocket and have the tackles set the width and the inside guys set the depth. For the most part, the depth was okay but we had the edge guys beat our tackles too much. That takes all 11 guys and guys have to get open fast and the quarterbacks have to get the ball out. We did not get that done well enough.”
On what wins in this league and not overreacting to one week:
“I mean you want to run the ball more. I always want to be able to run the football more than we did. I think you need to be 100-150 yards rushing to win. That being said, we had every chance to win that game. I don’t want to start panicking about if we are doing too much of this or too much of that. When Dylan (Raiola) had time, everyone was open. We scored 27 points and we would have killed for 27 points at times last year versus a pretty good defense. I think we are always searching for balance and I think the one balance we believe in too is the ball getting into many peoples’ hands. I do think we are spreading the ball around and attacking people. I think this is a good week for us to go back and look at all that. We can say to ourselves, ‘What are we doing well and can we do better.’”
Rifle is (finally) home with a renovated range, ranked roster and an 8 a.m. start
If you’ve been waiting to see Nebraska Rifle without leaving town, Saturday’s your day. The Huskers open the 2025–26 season against Ohio State at 8 a.m. CT at the Nebraska Rifle Range, which is back at Pershing after a year away for renovations. Admission is free and results will be posted online.
Head coach Richard Clark didn’t undersell the facelift.
“This weekend's match will be extra special being the first home match we’ve had in our range since February 2024,” he said.
New sound-deadening walls and ceiling, an upgraded command center, 12 megalink targets and improved lighting were built to raise the practice-to-competition transfer and impress recruits.
Nebraska opens at No. 11 in the CRCA preseason poll, fresh off a No. 10 finish last season but short of NCAA team qualification. The schedule features nine regular-season matches (seven this fall, two in spring) ahead of PRC Championships, NCAA Qualifiers and NCAAs.
The roster is built to push: senior captain Emma Rhode returns as a first-team CRCA All-American (aggregate and smallbore) and 2025 NCAA individual qualifier; captain Camilla Johannessen brings every-match experience and top-end highs (585 SB/595 AR/1180 Agg); sophomores Grace Corbett, Maddy Moyer (2025 NCAA qualifier in both guns, HM All-American in smallbore), and Alivia Perkins (tied the freshman AR single-match mark with a 597) all flashed ceilings as freshmen; Charlie Mick re-joins after a year away with a past 597 AR on her ledger. Add freshmen Hannah Gallagher (Junior Olympic mainstay; 2023 Olympic Trials), Carley Seabrooke (multiple Alabama state titles; a 200/20x national record at the 2024 Southeastern Regional) and Katlyn Sullivan (back-to-back GHSA champ; 2025 State JO champ in both guns), and you see why Clark called this “a strong returning group and some very talented newcomers that is “poised to do some really special things.”
Also worth noting: Nebraska holds a 22–9 all-time edge over Ohio State, including a 4,692–4,688 win at the 2025 NCAA Qualifier. UAB visits Lincoln on Saturday, Oct. 11.
Rudy Sautron’s hot hand
When a program hasn’t won a team event since 2012 and then posts a school-record 823 (-29) for 54 holes, you circle it in red ink. Nebraska did exactly that at the Git-R-Done Invitational at Firethorn (Sept. 22–23), and junior Rudy Sautron was the engine. He shot 200 (-13) for the week, tying for medalist honors and smashing the individual tournament mark.
The close was the exclamation: a final-round 64 (-7), matching the best by a Husker junior since Brady Schnell (2005–06) and just one shy of Sautron’s own school-record 63 (-9) from last fall’s Steelwood Collegiate. The Big Ten took note, naming him Golfer of the Week for the second time in his Nebraska career (the first came Sept. 12, 2024 after he won the Gopher Invitational… in his program debut).
Team-wise, that 823 didn’t just clear the record. It obliterated it by 13 shots.
Momentum now idles for a couple weeks before the Purdue Fall Invitational (Oct. 13–14) but talk about a start to the season.
Even in a bye week for Nebraska football, things don’t quiet down in Lincoln. It was a good mix too for late September: a sweep, a challenge, a mirror, a homecoming and a scorecard to hang your hat on.
Not bad.