How long can the Huskers stay under the radar
It's how everyone wants it now, but that changes when the games begin.
We’re in the quietest couple of weeks of the quietest Nebraska football offseason I can remember. That’s by design, I think, based on the official record of what has and hasn’t happened since Matt Rhule turned his hat back around after the Las Vegas Bowl and NU turned the page to 2026.
In the quiet-by-design column: Access to spring football was reduced from what it had been in previous seasons.1 Rhule’s not podcasting right now. I expect Nebraska’s presence at Big Ten Media Days in a couple of weeks to be muted, too. The Huskers are taking center Justin Evans, tight end Luke Lindenmeyer and cornerback Andrew Marshall, all fine choices, but I suspect most of the non-Nebraska attendees won’t know who these players are.2
Even Phil Steele views 2026 NU with a shrug, which is unusual. As I cataloged last summer around this time, Steele’s systems have been kind to the Husker program of the past 20 years. Since 2006, Nebraska has made an appearance on one of Steele’s four predictive lists 29 times and 27 of those appearances projected an upward trend. This year the Huskers don’t appear on any. They’re not a “Surprise Team” nor “Most Improved.” You can’t point to close losses or turnovers as potential clues improvement is imminent.
Right now, this team just sort of exists in the vast middle of power-conference football where it’s hard to pick them out. That seems to be the preference right now of a fan base haunted by past hype, and credit to Rhule for reading the room and taking some steps to keep it this way.
But as the season starts to feel closer, I have started to wonder: How long can the Huskers stay under the radar?
