If college football parity is in for 2024, where do the Huskers fit?

Michigan-Washington was a stylistic clash and, maybe, the start of a new era for college football. Which team is Nebraska trying to be?

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Monday night’s College Football Playoff championship game provided the perfect conditions for a dominant trend to emerge. First, there was novelty: The title game featured two first-time participants for the first time since 2015. There were a lot of ways to make this fact stand out if it didn’t already stand on its own.

The championship game was the first without an SEC team since 2014. It didn’t include Alabama, Clemson or Georgia, at least one of which appeared in every title game from 2015 to 2022. All told nine different teams got to play for a national championship over the 10 games of the four-team era, but that marked a 50% increase in just the last two years. Prior to TCU’s surprise run last season, just six teams had appeared in the first eight games.

It all naturally leads to an appealing hypothesis: Maybe college football is entering an era of increased parity.

The arrival of the 12-team playoff will certainly include more teams in the national conversation. If you applied next year’s criteria to past CFP rankings the long list of “playoff teams” would include names like Arizona, Colorado, Houston, Indiana, Iowa State, Liberty, Memphis, Mississippi State, Tulane and Western Michigan. All of those programs would’ve made a 12-team playoff and had a shot to win their way to the national title over the past decade with the postseason format that began when last night’s game ended.

But let’s be honest, the top four teams will have a huge advantage in a 12-team field with a first-round bye and the top four teams will probably still most often be drawn from the handful of top recruiters. Still, a hypothesis only needs partial explanation to exist. If you want to propose a leveling of the field in college football, the potential explanation is easy to reach. It’s the portal! It’s NIL! It’s both!

We saw plenty of that theorizing in the days leading up to the last game of the season, and your job as a writer who only covers one team is to sometimes take the national and make it local. It seems somewhat obvious that increased parity, if it’s here or forthcoming, would be good for Nebraska football. The Huskers will have to be usurpers before they can be usual suspects on the national stage as they once were. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about while watching the Wolverines grind down the Huskies.

I was thinking about the clash of styles between Washington and Michigan. Nebraska’s offseason is barely a month old, but it already feels like an early crossroads. One that might sit at the intersection of what happened in Houston.

Or maybe I’m just crazy.