How soon is now?

"Is this going to work? Is this going to work? Is this going to work?" A kickoff column for 2024 Nebraska football.

Image courtesy Nebraska Athletics. (Inspiration courtesy the Smiths.)

Matt Rhule won eight games over his first two seasons at Temple. His third team, the 2015 Owls, won its first seven to start the season, setting up what then-AD Pat Kraft called the “biggest game in program history.”

Notre Dame, in Philly.

Technically it was a Temple home game, though it would be played at the Eagles’ Lincoln Financial Field on Halloween night. The Irish going “on the road” in the AAC would’ve been noteworthy even if the Owls were 0-7, but Temple wasn’t. It had already beaten Penn State by 17 to start the season and was ranked 21st. Notre Dame was 9th and 6-1, its lone loss by two on the road at Clemson.¹ It was probably the closest to equal these two programs had ever been viewed.

But Notre Dame and Temple are never really viewed as equal for narrative purposes. There’s too much history there, and too little. In the 80 years of Associated Press polls prior to this game, the Irish had spent 761 weeks ranked. The Owls had 11 total appearances.

Temple could be favored by 20² and it wouldn’t matter. Put these two helmets next to each other—as ESPN did on its College GameDay set, which visited Temple for the first time—and it will always read as royalty versus a challenger to the throne.

But 60 minutes on turf is a much smaller sample size than 80 years. I watched Notre Dame-Temple at some point this summer when football felt far away. The Owls took a 20-17 lead with 4:45 left. The Irish answered with a 2-minute touchdown drive that provided the final 24-20 margin.

It wasn’t a fluky game. Kraft told reporters before kickoff that Temple would be “the most physical team” Notre Dame played that season. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t,³ but the Owls looked like they believed Kraft’s claim. They didn’t just think they would punch the Irish right in the mouth, they played like they had the right to.

Here at the end of the offseason, having processed all the projections and power rankings, having talked through the schedule a thousand times, finding this mindset is the biggest win Nebraska can have in 2024.

But it may not be easy.

When you say it’s gonna happen now, when exactly do you mean?

There’s a lot to like to about the Huskers and a lot of national pundits do. It was clear last winter that Nebraska should benefit from some favorable conditions, and those conditions have mostly held up. The Huskers are an experienced team. They fought off suitors for their star defensive coordinator. They’ve experienced some injuries, but nothing so far that approaches a catastrophe.

Nebraska should be improved, but conditions don’t win football games. Only teams do.

The party line under the previous Husker regime was preparing each week for a “nameless, faceless opponent.” I think the actual challenge facing this program right now is to play like a nameless, faceless team.

There’s a freedom that comes with being an unlikely usurper, a Temple giving everything against a Notre Dame. It’s a freedom that’s incredibly hard to find in Lincoln. No matter how lost this football program got over the past decade—a 10-year stretch that includes as many fired coaches as bowl games—it was always still Nebraska. The fans cared. The stadium was full. When Nebraska and Ohio State play, it’s still pitched as NEBRASKA-OHIO STATE, even when the Huskers are 24-point underdogs (2017) on their home field in primetime.⁴

However you feel now about Trev Alberts’ about-face for Texas A&M, at some point this summer when football felt far away, I watched his press conference from the day Scott Frost was fired. It remains prescient two years later.

“We’ll stop talking about championships,” a bleary-eyed Alberts said, running on little-to-no sleep after the previous night’s loss to Georgia Southern. “We’ll stop talking about things we used to do. We’ll just get really process-oriented, detail-oriented, and ultimately when you start doing those fundamental, championship habits, those types of wins and things follow. But we need to stop focusing on [the wins] and start focusing on the small fundamental things.”

Alberts went on to say he was looking for coach with a “servant leadership mentality.” He knew that for Nebraska to be Nebraska again, it had to stop being Nebraska for a bit. It’s a challenge to fight with the determination of someone who’s starving when there’s a full buffet available every day.⁵ Alberts was looking for a coach who could build a team anywhere.

“It’s hard to have a great team when you have entitlement,” Rhule said late last week. “When you have great players who have always gotten things, sometimes they expect things.”

He mentioned that while noting how unentitled he’s seen this 2024 team be.

Still, Rhule might be one of the few in the program who we’ve seen be free of Nebraska’s storied past. He coaches this like it’s Temple.

He might be the first Nebraska coach since Bob Devaney arrived in 1962 to not have to coach with the pressure inherent to upholding something. He coaches this like it’s scandal-decimated Baylor, even though it’s not.

As we saw in 2023, however, the head coach being free isn’t a guarantee his team will play that way. He’s spoken of the challenge at multiple points. He may coach like no one’s watching, but can his team play that way?

Based on an offseason of comments, Rhule knows a lot of signs point up for the Huskers. He’s not, however, asking how soon is now?

“As a fan base, we’re all so nervous. Is this going to work? Is this going to work? Is this going to work? Is this going to work?”

“It’s not a matter of if, it’s just when.”

That’s freedom.

See, I’ve already waited too long, and all my hope is gone

Nebraska fans can’t be totally free of everything they’ve seen since [insert year when you really became concerned about the future of this program]. All those one-score losses? All those turnovers? The times when you thought things might be turning a corner only to realize they’d turned 180 degrees instead and you already know every broken window and burned-out light on this street you can’t seem to leave?

Those things accumulate. Nobody wants to be a mark. Post-2019, it has almost been verboten to completely buy in during the offseason, when it can only be talk.

That makes sense when the football feels far away, but it’s here now. Across the country, fans of any program can feel like anything is possible this week until their team takes the field. Enjoy at least a week of this freedom if you can.

Nebraska practices outside Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, in 2022. Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

On Saturday, I watched Georgia Tech beat No. 10 Florida State, 24-21, in Dublin, Ireland. I was in the same stadium two years ago for the beginning of the end of the Frost era. This year’s game reminded me not of 2021 Northwestern-Nebraska, but 2015 Notre Dame-Temple.

The Yellow Jackets punched Florida State in the mouth. They ran the ball on almost 70% of their snaps, gaining 190 yards. They were about 11-point underdogs to a Seminole team with real playoff hopes. They played like they didn’t give a damn about any of that in the first game of head coach Brent Key’s second season.⁶

Georgia Tech isn’t a Temple. Over the first 100 seasons of the sport, the Yellow Jackets’ win percentage (.638) ranked 21st,⁷ two spots ahead of Nebraska. If not royalty, they were members of the court.

Since 1969, Georgia Tech’s win percentage (.524) ranks 54th. When’s the last time you had a blue-blood discussion about the Yellow Jackets? Things rarely change for long at the top of college football, but they did for Georgia Tech.

That said, the Yellow Jackets’ last national title⁸ is only seven years earlier than Nebraska’s.

None of that matters over the short sample size of 60 minutes on a Saturday. At least not if a team can play like they’re the only 60 minutes that have ever or will ever be played.

It’s time to find out if Nebraska can reach that state in 2024.⁹

1. Clemson would come up four points short of a national title, losing 45-41 to Alabama in the onside kick game. Tricky, Nick Saban.

2. Notre Dame was favored by 11.

3. Notre Dame went 10-3 in 2015, its three losses coming by two to No. 2 Clemson, two to No. 3 Stanford and 16 to No.4 Ohio State.

4. Another good example, College GameDay came to Lincoln in 2019 with the Huskers a 17-point home dog to the Buckeyes. Why? Nebraska is still a college football destination that reads like one on camera.

5. That isn’t a commentary on modern athletes, coddling, comforting or anything like that. It’s just an observation on human nature.

6. Georgia Tech went 7-6 in Key’s first season. Key was viewed nationally as a ho-hum hire, given he was promoted from interim when all of the internet scuttlebutt was, “imagine what Deion Sanders would do back in Atlanta.”

7. Fifteenth if you take out the Ivy League schools and Army.

8. Georgia Tech won (a share of) that title by smoking Nebraska in the 1991 Citrus Bowl, but the Huskers were wearing all-white, so it barely counts.

9. If you made it this far and are wondering what’s with the title, parenthetical in the hero image caption and section headings, I didn’t provide the musical accompaniment for this column. If you recognized them immediately then, hey, wasn’t that fun? In my first real writing year on the NU beat, 2012, I gave every postgame column a headline from a song. Is this fun? Is it dumb? I don’t know, but I think I’m going to do it again for this Monday column, which will be the regular spot each week through football season to dissect what we saw the previous Saturday. Hopefully you look forward to the column, but also your favorite band might be next!