Huskers' Bronx tale offers better optics for offseason ahead
Some closing thoughts on Nebraska's 2024 football season and a few stock tips for 2025.
It wasn’t hard to see coming, but I still got a bit of a jolt seeing Nebraska’s 2024 football season bottom-lined on ESPN’s BottomLine a few hours after the Pinstripe Bowl win over Boston College. Alongside the score, 20-15, were two additional pieces of information: NU first bowl win since 2016, NU first winning season since 2015.
For those that didn’t live each of Nebraska’s 1600-some plays this season, that’s how it will go down in the books, the logline for the eight months ahead. “First winning season since…” isn’t a bad way to go into the offseason, and, zoomed out, the result feels pretty true. The Huskers mostly dominated their final game. They didn’t look drastically different than the team we saw all season, an unevenly sharpened blade with some hard to hone dull edges (i.e., special teams). But sharper than BC on the day, and more wins is more wins.
Those that did live each (or at least most) of Nebraska’s 1600-some plays don’t get a zoom lens. Theirs is fixed, maybe even a macro only capable of extreme focus. That view of 2024 is different, but the season should still look decent enough. Maybe it’s a good enough photo for a like on Instagram, if not a comment. More wins is more wins.
“We haven’t ended many seasons on a win in a while,” said Matt Rhule after the game, decked out in his black Pinstripe Bowl Champs hat and black jacket with green confetti spilling out of the hood. “We want to go to the College Football Playoff. We want to win national championships. But playing that last game, coming back out on a Tuesday [after the regular season ended], coming to New York City—nobody was late to anything, nobody missed anything—all those things are how you win in my mind going forward.”
Forward. That’s the direction we’re moving, and Nebraska earned a tiny tailwind in the Bronx.
Did this team reach or surpass its ceiling? On my own bottom line, that’s largely how I judge seasons and my feeling is the Huskers didn’t reach their ceiling, but they were probably close.
One of my annual “turning the page” rituals is to calculate the Pythagorean expectation number for every college football team. Nebraska’s point differential looked like that of an eight-win team through 13 games. The Huskers won seven, which is problematic evidence for the “ceiling” legal team looking to score a decisive verdict.
But, because this is a yearly exercise in nerdery for me, I see that -1 number1 and know it falls on the fat part of the Bell Curve. As of Sunday—some teams still have games to play, of course—84 of 134 FBS teams (63%) were plus/minus one win of their projected total. Being a game long or short of the actual win total is probably just the randomness inherent to the game.
For what it’s worth, Nebraska was about a game2 short of expectation last year, too. That was a five-win team that probably should’ve won six. This year was a seven-win team, over 13 games, that probably should’ve won eight. If the Huskers had simply done that both years, we’d be flying high into the offseason, zoom lens or macro lens, doesn’t matter.
That they didn’t means there’s plenty to try to understand. A team that is consistently a win below expectation isn’t getting Nebraska where everyone hopes it could go. That’s just reality and the essential question for what’s to come. We won’t have an answer for a while.
Won’t stop any of us from formulating theories, however. Isn’t football great in that way?
Stock buys for 2025
Now that there’s no more for 2024, let’s look ahead and share the Huskers we’re buying stock in for next season:
LB Vincent Shavers Jr.: This isn’t exactly an off-the-radar pick given the staff has been talking about Shavers since the summer. He was indeed good enough to forego a redshirt as a true freshman, seeing second-team snaps, but when inserted into the starting lineup for the Pinstripe Bowl, Shavers exceeded what felt like pretty high expectations. He made six tackles including two for a loss (one sack) and forced a fumble. More than just talented, Shavers looks like a playmaker, and I’ll leave it there lest I write that he reminds me of another Husker linebacker who came from Miami.
OC Dana Holgorsen: Rhule made a bold in-season move here and I’m even more bullish on it for next season. The Husker offense wasn’t night-and-day different3 in four games with Holgorsen at the helm, but everything just looked a little easier. In seven games against power-conference opponents pre-Holgorsen NU’s offense averaged 16.4 yards per point. That’s not a good number. For the season, it would’ve ranked 109th. In four games with Holgorsen, that number came down to 15.7. Still not good enough for Nebraska to be a playoff contender,4 but any improvement given the circumstances is worthy of noting. Give Holgorsen more time and the chance to bring a few of his own tools, and I be surprised if trajectory wasn’t upward, particularly in the passing game. The Huskers completed 71.6% of their passes in four games with Holgorsen against four above-average defenses.
TE Luke Lindenmeyer: He’s got five career catches—all this season—and four of them came since Holgorsen entered. Despite the loss of Nate Boerkircher to Texas A&M, Nebraska’s not in a bad spot at tight end with Heinrich Haarberg moving there, Carter Nelson’s ability to shift inside and the presumed availability of Mac Markway, a late transfer addition from LSU this season who was injured early in fall camp. For now, however, Lindenmeyer probably belongs at the top of the list at this position, and that’s good news.
DL Riley Van Poppel: He took a strategic redshirt in 2024 and it might end up being one of the best decisions Nebraska made this season. The Huskers blew up a lot of plays and made things difficult on opponents in various ways thanks to the earth-moving capabilities of Ty Robinson and Nash Hutmacher this season. Van Poppel can only try to replace one of them, but he’s already shown himself to be a load to handle in spot duty. NU needs him to be a revelation in 2025, and I wouldn’t bet against him.
DB Donovan Jones: There’s not going to be much meat on the bone for Jones stock after he came out of nowhere to man one corner spot for most of the game against BC’s legit passing attack. He spent most of this season, a redshirt year, at safety, but looked very much like he belonged on the outside against the Eagles, making three tackles with one for loss. If anything, the risk here is putting too much on that one, remarkable performance when it comes to considering personnel for 2025, but it was remarkable and deserves mention.
What’s Next?!
Men’s basketball gets its traditional New Year’s week home tune up, hosting Southern tonight at 8 p.m. (BTN). No such light lifting for the women who travel to Los Angeles to face No. 4 USC Jan 1. at 2 p.m. (also BTN). On the football front, the portal is closed for new entries until April but that doesn’t mean teams won’t continue to add from what’s already in there. Later this week I’ll have a full Big Ten transfer portal recap, assessing not just what teams added but what they lost.
It’s -0.9 if you’d prefer to be exact.
It’s -0.9 if you’d prefer to be exact.
As they say in the offseason.
The lowest mark for a playoff team this season was 13.3 (Clemson).
Two of the one score losses could have been avoided with even decent special teams. Ill and Iowa. But Rhule has to take some of the blame in Iowa. He rolled the dice that DR could make some magic happen with 35 seconds left. That defensive effort was wasted. To hold a bowl bound team to 5 first downs and lose is heart wrenching. But the biggest question to analyze is what really happened at Indiana. Absolutely catastrophic.
I was just thinking that only about half of the teams win their last game, so we got that going for us.