Is Nebraska a good bet in 2026?
Metaphorically speaking, of course. This story isn't brought to you by a sports book.
Over the last five years, 60% of power conference teams have finished within 1.5 wins of the preseason win total set by oddsmakers.1 You could consider that the “breaks of the game” allowance. If a team is projected to win 6.5 regular season games, anything between 8 wins and 5 might be randomness; having or avoiding key injuries, terrible turnovers luck, bad in-game decisions, difficult travel, etc. It’s only when a team’s actual total is more than 1.5 wins off the expected total that I start to wonder, “Did something great/horrible happen here?”
And I guess that’s the good news for Nebraska fans entering the 2026 football season: None of Matt Rhule’s three seasons in Lincoln have fallen into the “something horrible” category. The Huskers were -1.5 wins off the projected total in both 2023 and 2024, and -0.5 last season. The 2021 and 2022 teams, Scott Frost’s last two, were both -2.5 wins against expectation
And maybe that’s the bad news here. Of the 68 power conference teams, including Notre Dame, only three have failed to hit the projected win total in each of the last five seasons: Nebraska, Wisconsin and Auburn. No team has gone over on the total in all five seasons.
This is what I’m wrestling with as the time for a season prediction draws near. Is betting2 on Nebraska to be different the sucker’s bet or is betting on it to be the same the wrong play? I don’t know—and probably won’t until someone puts me on the spot—but here’s what I can share from having looked at the last 340 individual seasons, over five years, of power conference football.
Over that span, Nebraska is 8.5 wins below expectation. That’s tied for worst among the power teams with Wisconsin. Virginia Tech isn’t far behind at -8, and Clemson and Boston College are at -7.5. The five teams to exceed expectations the most are BYU (+11), Duke (+9), Illinois and Mississippi (+7.5) and Vanderbilt (+7).
That should highlight a few important things about win totals, which I still find incredibly useful for trying to make sense of things that haven’t happened yet. One, this is a projection that is then shaped by an open market. Public perception and attention are part of the recipe here given almost anyone can make almost any bet they want. The average college football fan is more likely to have opinions on Nebraska or Clemson than Duke or Vanderbilt.
Two, we’re dealing with ceilings and floors at the extreme ends of the scale. Oregan can go undefeated in the regular season and only exceed its win total by 1.5 while UMass could win one game and only fall short by the same amount.
The first factor applies to NU to some degree, the second doesn’t right now. Nebraska will be back when we’re all thinking, “Well, they can only be so much better than expected because the expectation is so high,” but that’s not now.
Nebraska’s win total has held steady at 6.5 after being hammered up from an opening number of 5.5. That’s what we’re talking about, a middle-of-the-pack team where anything between 5 and 8 wins could be considered normal.3
But we’re also trying to talk about something different, something better, and I had a few takeaways from the data compiled:
Nebraska is one of three power conference teams to have gone under in each of the last five seasons, but really that streak extends to 2016, a common endpoint in Lincoln for current ignominious streaks. But my data for all power teams only goes back five years, so I decided to explore the teams that were as “disappointing” as Nebraska over the four years entering 2025. The Huskers were 8 wins below expectation entering last season, and there were 10 teams that were -5 or worse. Five of those teams went over in 2025, including Playoff qualifiers Oklahoma, Texas A&M and Miami as well as two teams that beat NU, USC and Utah. Five of that group were under their preseason projection: Nebraska, Wisconsin, UCF, Clemson and Virginia Tech.
What are the chances for a special season in Lincoln? At 9-3, NU would be +2.5 over its expectation. That would likely require either Nebraska winning every game it “should” and every tossup, including wins over Washington and Iowa, or it would require at least one win over Indiana, Oregon or Ohio State. Choose your own adventure on the latter. A team being +2.5 or better over projection has happened 17.3% of the time over the last five seasons.
The chances of bottoming out—being 2.5 wins or more below expectation—would be about the same at 17.6% based on the last five years. If Nebraska goes 4-8 in 2026, there’s real reason to panic and that’s not based on any local context, just how the sport has worked since 2021.
We should return to Oklahoma and Texas A&M from 2025. Both represent the best-case scenario for Nebraska’s season in 2026. The ’25 Sooners were coming off a 6-7 season, had a host of staff changes, a transfer quarterback and a defense that needed to improve from pretty good to darn good, which is where it had been early in Brent Venables tenure. Texas A&M, entering its second season under Mike Elko, didn’t go with a transfer quarterback, didn’t drastically improve on a good defense from the year before, saw its turnover margin go from +5 to -9 and somehow still tied for third for the biggest wins over expectation value of +3.5. Sometimes a special season is traceable to decisions made (OU). Sometimes it’s more random (A&M).
None of which might give you a better idea of what’s about to happen in 2026. It didn’t make me more confident about whatever record prediction I give whenever I get asked.
But that wasn’t really the point anyway. If this story is useful eventually, may it be so in how you consider whatever happens in 2026. We have a baseline for the average power conference team over the last five years.
Nebraska will probably land there, which is true for 60% of teams playing at this level, but this is hopefully context for wherever the Huskers might be going.
For this story, I used the win totals recorded by The Action Network.
Metaphorical here. I’m using the betting lingo throughout because it just reads better, but I don’t care if you’d never place a sports bet or have already made plenty. No judgment either way. This isn’t meant to be advice, just an interpretation of data I find to be interesting in hope of offering something you won’t read 15 other places.
Or at least normal from a power conference view. That’s another challenge here. Context is always hyper-local and prone to be volatile. Right now, I find it hard to picture a Husker fan disappointed with 8-4 this season. Should NU get there, I know the discussion would be dominated by the missed opportunities that prevented winning 9 or 10 games. Just how it goes everywhere.