Is this the room I'll live my life forever?

After a brutal loss to UCLA, Nebraska is running out of outs to make 2024 look like progress.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Picture L.A. The smog is smothering but you have to admit it makes for glowing pink-orange sunsets that perfectly backlight all those problematic palms. That smoky light reaches your eyes through the smoked lenses of some cool sunglasses. You’re listening to something cool while driving something cool. Or, at least, sitting in something cool. Good set design, L.A. It is somehow gnarly and glamorous simultaneously.¹

At least that’s what the movies have led me to believe. I’ve never actually been there, and I can’t make it for the Huskers’ trip in two weeks. This bothers me for multiple reasons, but the top one is that I’ll miss seeing that clichéd L.A. backdrop used for a football game between two teams desperately trying to salvage something in the last three weeks of the 2024 season. It feels a bit like staging a middle-school play on a grandiose Hollywood set.

Nebraska earned its co-starring role in this production thanks to a shockingly flat performance against UCLA (the only team on the schedule with Los Angeles in the name, incidentally). The Bruins were mostly momentum-less² and without much star³ power. The matchup appeared to favor Nebraska—heavily, I thought—but it didn’t play out that way.

The Illinois loss was frustrating but as the first of the season, and in overtime, somewhat tolerable. The Indiana loss signaled, emphatically, that maybe NU wasn’t quite “good” yet, as its record would’ve previously suggested. The Ohio State loss gained at least some of that lost ground back. The UCLA loss, however, represented a hard fork in the road.

Unless the Huskers improbably win out over the final three games, we’re headed for a season that will be popularly perceived as momentum-less. Yes, even if they make a bowl game, and I think Nebraska will get the one win it needs.

But the hard fork the Huskers took Saturday was down the path towards “the same.” That’s better than “worse,” but only barely during a rebuild.

For those of the “never tell me the odds” persuasion, skip ahead a couple of paragraphs, but I think this is important to the overall sameness contention. Here’s the line the FPI ratings would have on each of Nebraska’s remaining games, along with the outright winning percentage of teams with that line since 2003:

• USC: NU +12.5, 26.1%

• Wisconsin: NU +1, 42.5%

• Iowa: NU +11, 26.1%

Disagree with the numbers if you will—I do with the USC and Wisconsin numbers—but taken at face value, Nebraska’s chances of winning all three games is about 3%. No surprise there, of course, but this is what the program lost against UCLA. Finishing 3-0 is about the only way I could call the 2024 season an unqualified success at this point. It would only be a half-game above Nebraska’s preseason win total, but it would be progress at the end of the season. Steering out of a three-game losing streak probably becomes the dominant offseason narrative.

That doesn’t mean the 2024 season is already an unqualified failure either. Nebraska’s chance of losing all three games is about 31%, 10x its chances of winning out, but that still means the Huskers go bowling with at least one more win about 70% of the time.

Maybe I’m underrating the value simply making a bowl would have. It would make conversations easier during the holiday season. It might even be enough to help the Huskers during the December transfer window, a “season” NU won a year ago and one that could get dicey depending on how this year shakes out. If a bowl game helped the Huskers keep the current roster together, that’s a bigger win than snapping the streak or getting a trip through the gifting suite.

I’m just not sure that would mean the Huskers were meaningfully better in year two under Matt Rhule and staff. From the outside at least, I’m not sure there’s much of a case to be made over the final three games, and it’s a case I was still making after each of the previous two losses.

Right now the Huskers’ scoring differential per game (+4.4) is about a field goal better than the same number (+1.1) after nine games last season. It’s literally better, but it might be mostly a reflection of turnovers.⁴ Nebraska was -12 after nine games last season. It’s even so far this year.

Also, nothing changes the fact that Nebraska lost twice, at home, as a 7- to 9-point favorite this season. Relative to the spread—which I’m using here as a reliable marker of “expectation”—these are the two⁵ worst results of Rhule era as a favorite. By the same measure, the Indiana loss as a 6.5-point underdog was twice as bad (-42.5 to the spread) as the loss to Michigan (-20.5) in 2023.⁶

Want to be considered good, to have an air-tight case for progress? Win those games. At least one of them.

On the inside of the program, maybe the case is easier to make. That’s not satisfying for anyone on the outside, but you at least have to account for the possibility. And pin a lot of hope on that being true once the page turns to 2025.

Rhule’s trajectories at Temple and Baylor may have always been an outlier because they were so utterly traditional. Bad, better, good. That’s how they both went, and that’s still I think the baseline expectation for a rebuild, how the average person thinks it will go. There’s even a coaching-world cliché for it: First you lose big, then you lose close, then you win close, then you win big. Rhule did that twice.

But I’m having a hard time thinking of other contemporary examples of such a station-to-station rebuild at similar programs to Nebraska’s. Nick Saban went 7-6 then 12-2 with a conference title while reviving Alabama. Kirby Smart, inheriting a solidly second-tier Georgia from Mark Richt, went 8-5 then 13-2. Jim Harbaugh went 10-3, 10-3, 8-5, 10-3, 9-4 and [redacted because 2020 was nonsense] before turning Michigan into the class of the Big Ten for three seasons. Maybe Steve Sarkisian’s revamp of Texas is the closest we’ve seen lately to the Rhule method: 5-7 to 8-5⁷ to 12-2 (and 7-1 so far this season). Lincoln Riley at least produced an 11-3 season out of the gates, the Trojans’ first with double-digit wins in five years and probably the source of a false sense of hope given a bonkers turnover margin, but he’s 12-10 since.

That’s how USC earned its role in next week’s drama. It’ll be a program and fan base with full-on existential dread hosting a program and fan base that’s closer to it than anyone would’ve imagined a month ago. Maybe even a week ago.

The UCLA loss was bad, but nothing real has actually been lost as it pertains to the present and future of Nebraska football. It’s just hard right now to argue for what’s been gained. That’s better than losing something, but only barely.

What’s Next?!

Angst through an off week that will cover every big-picture concern possible. Nebraska put a lot of its recruiting eggs in this basket, so we’ll see what the produces. The Huskers aren’t exactly in a position to sell high here on a three-game losing streak. Both basketball teams open their seasons today, however.

1. “Los Angeles may be the most photographed city in the world, but it’s not photogenic,” as Thom Andersen put it in his video essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself. If you like movies, you should watch this very long, not all that exciting film. It’s excellent. L.A. is very good at making paeans to itself. It’s almost like the film industry is based there or something. An impromptu, in-no-order top-five list of movies that make me love L.A. despite never having been: Los Angeles Plays Itself, Chinatown, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Body Double and To Live and Die in L.A., which supplies today’s headline inspiration.

2. If we have to compare, which is a more meaningful result for momentum-building going into last Saturday: Beating Rutgers on the road by 3 as a 4-point underdog two weeks ago, or playing Ohio State within 4 as a 25-point underdog one week ago?

3. I’m on record as liking Ethan Garbers as an underappreciated quarterback. Outside him, however, did anyone in powder keg blue—yes, that’s UCLA’s official name for it—jump out?

4. Based on the exchange of field position, turnovers end up being worth about five points on average. With the Huskers at -1.3 per game at this point last year, their scoring differential might’ve been about 6 points per game worse than it would’ve been with an even margin.

5. Based on the exchange of field position, turnovers end up being worth about five points on average. With the Huskers at -1.3 per game at this point last year, their scoring differential might’ve been about 6 points per game worse than it would’ve been with an even margin.

6. The 4-point loss at Ohio State was Nebraska’s best performance relative to the spread under Rhule, which only make things more confounding.

7. And this season was with a freshman starting quarterback, Quinn Ewers.