How Nebraska always seems to never be getting there
It's a chart party as we try to make sense of Nebraska following its loss at Minnesota.
Just when you thought it might be safe to believe Nebraska is “just good” again, PJ Fleck and Minnesota showed up for an audit of that idea. The Gophers found multiple inaccuracies and didn’t let the Huskers go on any of them.
This is pretty much the history of Nebraska-Minnesota since Fleck arrived in 2017, but 2025 was supposed to be different. Bettors jumped on an opening line under a touchdown, puffing it all the way up to Huskers -9.5 before it settled back down to -7 around kickoff. Nebraska had won tough game. They weren’t pretty wins against Michigan State and Maryland, they were wins, pushing NU into the top-25 last week.
Everyone’s had since Friday to be stew in the 24-6 loss, so there’s little need to recount many of the details three days later, but Minnesota was masterful at exploiting the weaknesses Nebraska had put on tape. If the pass-protection alarm first sounded against Michigan, I though it reached peak volume against Michigan State, a team with no pass rush. I was wrong as the Gophers recorded 9 sacks, a program record.
Minnesota made Nebraska prove it could stop the run, even though the Gophers hadn’t had much of a ground game this season. The Huskers could not, allowing their second 70-plus-yard rush of the season (both touchdowns). NU is one of five teams1 this season to have allowed two such runs. That second-quarter touchdown gave Minnesota the only lead it would need on the night, as Nebraska was held without a touchdown for the first time in the Matt Rhule era.
The idea that I couldn’t shake for most of the weekend was “how2 is it Nebraska always seems to never be making progress?” I thought it was a week ago, but the Minnesota loss was so emphatic that I tried to think through it in a way that was more than just gut reaction.
It’s mostly a matter of consistency, I think. You can deal with a loss, particularly in conference play, if the team looks somewhat like what you thought it was. Nebraska may have, according to Rhule, ended its annoying close-game narrative, but a butt-kicking in Minneapolis showed it still has a way to go to achieve the steadiness that sets good teams apart from mediocre ones.
It’s easier if I just show you.
To try to measure “consistency” (and because I’m obsessed with performance versus expectation) I opted for the following: Starting in 2024, I grabbed the moneyline odds for every FBS game providing an implied pregame win probability. I then compared that to collegefootballdata.com’s postgame win probability, which basically randomizes the play order to determine how often a given team would’ve won the game.
Our most recent example, Nebraska was about -260 on the moneyline at Minnesota, implying a .721-win probability to start, and its postgame win probability was .019. It’s a stunning drop from solid favorite to being dominated, and we’ve seen it before over the past 20 games at Nebraska.
There are a couple of things you’d hope to see from that chart. More green, less red to start, as green shading indicates when the Huskers played better than the pregame expectation. You’d also like the green line and red line to be pretty close together, indicating a team that is basically “as good as we thought they were,” and that works for teams thought to be “not very” or “pretty” good—we’re only measuring it against itself.
Nebraska’s chart since 2024 shows pretty big gaps almost everywhere you look, which is inconsistency visualized. The Huskers’ plunges have come at some big moments, too. Sitting at 3-0 and ranked in 2024, NU lost as about a 9-point favorite to Illinois. Falling to 4-3 after that, it lost as a home touchdown favorite to UCLA, sparking changes to the coaching staff. Minnesota this year represented the third time in the past 20 games the Huskers have lost as a touchdown favorite or more and two of those games came with a near-zero postgame win probability. Nebraska didn’t just lose it lost.
Of course, you didn’t need a chart to know NU has struggled with consistency the past season-and-a-half. It’s only useful if you start comparing it to other charts. Makes sense to start with the guy who got us here:
Fleck’s chart is spiky, which you can expect for a mid-tier Big Ten team that’s not going to have great pregame odds against the Ohio States of the world. It also shows the Gophers aren’t immune to clunkers against teams like UCLA, Rutgers and Purdue. But Minnesota’s clunkerdom has usually been short-lived and it’s put up some good results against good teams like Penn State and USC.
How about the recently fired James Franklin? That one should be fun.
The “can’t win the ones that matter” book on Franklin was all but written entering 2025, but his chart shows just how close the Nittany Lions were, minus last year’s Ohio State game. A slight deficit last year against Notre Dame in the CFP, basically even with Oregon this year before the bottom fell out after the loss to the Ducks.3 Penn State was at a high enough level that there were few opportunities to exceed expectations, which is the ultimate good news-bad news situation in college football.
Lastly, we’ll look at what probably has to be the best chart since the start of the 2024 season.
Lotta green, man. And a postgame win probability line that stays consistently near the top of the chart. Cignetti’s Indiana has won decisively and emphatically a lot. The two valleys here came against Ohio State and Notre Dame in 2024, the two teams that played for the national title. Whether Indiana or anywhere else, it’s about as perfect through a season-and-a-half as you can reasonably expect. It’s why Cignetti will be mentioned alongside every major job that comes open in this already crazy coaching cycle. Knowing what you’re going to get is as good as it gets.
Nebraska’s not there yet, but you knew that late Friday night.
There was one more thing that stood out to me about Rhule’s chart, however. If you take the first half of 2024, it uncomfortably matches what we’ve seen in 2025. A strong start, buoyed by as-expected wins over teams that didn’t pose a huge threat, followed by a cratering loss to a team Nebraska was a solid favorite against.
It took the Huskers a couple of weeks to steer out of that one last year, which won’t be an acceptable timeframe this year.
Nebraska opened as a 7-point favorite over Northwestern (5-2, 3-1). The moneyline odds (-325) give Nebraska about a 76% chance of winning, but good luck convincing anyone in Huskerland of that.
I do think the risk of long runs is basically a function of how Nebraska chooses to play defense. On both of the 70-plus-yarders (and most of the other long runs this season, too), one guy had a chance to make a tackle and didn’t. You might choose to live with that in exchange for lockdown pass defense, which, prior to Friday, the Huskers definitely had. This group also includes Indiana.
Note: The question is not “why” here because if anyone had that figured out and it was a simple fix, they should’ve contact whoever was in the AD’s chair years ago.
As high-profile and impactful as those losses were, the Nittany Lions still “earned” more in terms of postgame win probability than Nebraska did against Minnesota.