Phase 2 begins now at Nebraska

Nebraska may have turned a corner against Maryland. Be a shame if something like the Penn State job came along to complicate that.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

The play of the game from Nebraska’s come-from-behind, 34-31 win over Maryland was definitely Emmett Johnson’s 50-yard dance through the defense in the fourth quarter. Offering his best Johnny Rodgers’ impression, Johnson’s jolt made victory seem possible again after the Huskers had twice let 10-point leads slip and trailed the Terps 31-24 early in the fourth quarter.

Or maybe it was Nyziah Hunter’s 64-yard sprint following a screen pass to open scoring in the first quarter. Maybe it was Kenneth Williams’ 85-yard kickoff return to seize momentum after NU fell behind 14-10. It earned Williams a scholarship and allowed Nebraska to regain the lead two plays later on a brilliant Dylan Raiola pass and even better catch from Luke Lindenmeyer near the corner of the end zone.

Maybe the play of the game was Raiola linking up with Lindenmeyer again on another broken play for 23-yards to jump start what would be the game-winning drive, or maybe it was Raiola nearly being tackled by ghosts only to heave it to Hunter for 33 yards two plays later.

You could make a decent case for Heinrich Haarberg’s 13-yard, one-handed grab on the sideline that put Nebraska at the Terrapin 3, or maybe you preferred Dane Key’s one-hander to close out the remaining distance and send the now-top-25 Huskers home 5-1.

Point is not to pick one,¹ but more…holy crap look at all of these winning plays. Nebraska needed all of them thanks to three interceptions thrown, one a pick-six, and Maryland’s best day on offense this season.²

Pay attention also to the players making those plays that had to be made. Johnson and Lindenmeyer were always good players, but it was largely Dana Holgorsen who turned over those respective rocks when he arrived last November, setting up what we see today. Key and Hunter were key transfer additions for 2025. Until Saturday, Williams was a freaky-fast walk-on from Lincoln High. Haarberg started games at quarterback for this staff in its first season, and now he’s an uber-athletic tight end.

That’s a lot of buttons pushed and decisions made to beat Maryland in far-from-perfect fashion, and that’s why this win felt like the end of Phase 1 under Matt Rhule and the beginning of Phase 2.

“The narrative of we lose close games is over,” Rhule said during his postgame TV interview.

The narrative might be with the Huskers moving to 2-1 this season in one-score games after a tortured history with the topic since 2018. The close games, however, are likely to continue. That’s just where Nebraska’s at entering Phase 2.

But it couldn’t get to Phase 2 without slaying at least a couple of dragons.

Nebraska won a game while being -3 in turnover margin for the first time since a 28-21 win over Rutgers a week before Christmas 2020, a game with absolutely zero stakes. The time before that was the 42-38 win over Illinois in 2019, which earned the Huskers the right to host College Gameday the following Saturday. That was fun until Gameday gave way to game, which Ohio State won 48-7.³

Nebraska won Saturday with zero takeaways, the first time that’s happened since a 37-27 win over Purdue in…deep breath…2020.⁴ Prior to that it was 25-24 over Purdue in 2017. The last time NU beat a team not named Purdue with zero takeaways was (dramatic pause) Maryland in 2016.

Not to go unmentioned, after allowing 12 sacks through two Big Ten games, the Huskers allowed just one to the conference’s leader in sacks coming into the game.

Lot of buttons pushed and decisions made.

Of course, all coaching staffs do that, and the Huskers have had a lot of them in the recent past.

For the first time since probably 2008–09, it feels like they’re working.

Normally in my career I’ve been the guy writing about how a loss wasn’t that bad or a win wasn’t that good. I don’t choose to be that way, just am.

But I didn’t have many “well, actually,” thoughts with how Nebraska beat Maryland. These Huskers have earned the opportunities ahead, which are undeniably there but, in keeping with the theme, far from sure things.

Circa Sports opened the Nebraska-Minnesota game at NU -4⁵ but it was up to -6.5 late Sunday night. After that, the Huskers return home to face Northwestern, which just knocked off Penn State. Despite that, NU is still likely to be a double-digit favorite over the Wildcats in Lincoln, barring a Gopher blowout.

If Nebraska has turned a corner, begun a new phase, the path is certainly there to 7-1 and increased attention.

Would be a shame if something came along to complicate this new narrative…

The specter of Penn State

Following its home loss to Northwestern Saturday—the second straight as a 20-plus-point favorite and third in a row to start Big Ten play—Penn State fired James Franklin. You had to know that was on the table a week ago, and the loss to the Wildcats certainly accelerated things, but I was still surprised it happened now, though that seems to be the current playbook in college football—get on the market as soon as you know you want to be on the market.

Rhule, as you know, went to high school in State College. He walked on at Penn State. The Nittany Lions’ athletic director, Pat Kraft, was Rhule’s AD at Temple. If these were dots to be connected, you wouldn’t be able to read the 1 because it mostly overlapped the 2.

There’s going to be a local/national divide on Rhule-to-Penn State. Like many of my colleagues—or at least that seems to be the early consensus—I’ll be surprised if Rhule jumps at the job. He seems to genuinely like Lincoln and is pretty deeply embedded there after just 2.5 seasons. Also, the Huskers are still ascendant, for now, which is completely different than stepping into a Penn State scenario where Franklin’s fatal flaw was getting the program 95% of the way up the hill, but never the final 5%.

That said, Rhule left Temple after four years and Baylor after three. We don’t know how strong the tug of “home”⁶ actually is. I don’t know if many people know how strong it is until they’re finally forced to choose, and the strength of that tug is constantly in flux.

There are few national reporters I look to more for real coaching carousel news than Bruce Feldman of The Athletic. He wrote Sunday that there are “two obvious front-runners for this vacancy”—Indiana’s Curt Cignetti and Rhule. Any blue-blood program would be insane not to at least make the call to Cignetti, a Pittsburgh native (as it relates to Penn State), after his 17-2⁷ start over two seasons with the Hoosiers.

If Feldman puts Rhule No. 2 on the list, I buy it, but most of the other national guessing you might read in the next few days might just be people connecting the dots that are so close together it’s boring. A lot of coaching carousel chatter is just that. This was always the job, even before we knew how Rhule might “work” at Nebraska, that it was fair to wonder about and now it’s available.

But the conflict that could be interesting to watch over the weeks ahead is this: The more Nebraska wins, the stronger Rhule’s résumé gets for Penn State but—based on my guessing, at least—the less likely it gets for Rhule to make the move. Is Year 1 Penn State a better situation in 2026 than Year 4 Nebraska?

Nobody knows Rhule’s answer to that—though he’ll be asked about it in a gentler way later today—but the next few weeks will be telling. If Nebraska is announcing a big extension for Rhule, which would come with more money for Rhule to drop the new deal to go somewhere else, we’ll know where things stand.

Getting to 6-1 against Minnesota would be a great time to announce such a deal. Even finishing October 6-2 probably still works. The USC game looks pretty big at the moment, that would be a heckuva time to do it.

Get into November with no new deal, and then I’ll start to wonder.

1. Based on the change in win probability, courtesy of Game on Paper, the plays above ranked as follows based on how much they changed the expected outcome: Haarberg’s catch (24.9%), Raiola’s falling-down fling to Hunter (18.9%), Key’s catch (14.4%), Williams’ return (12.1%), Johnson’s run (11.1%), Lindenmeyer’s touchdown (4.7%) and then his fourth-quarter reception (3.2%).

2. Though not Nebraska’s worst day defensively. That’s still Michigan, but Maryland made it a closer call than I would’ve expected.

3. Nebraska was -3 in turnovers that day and (foreshadowing alert if you read these footnotes contemporaneously) didn’t have a takeaway.

4. The evidence just never stops mounting that the Covid year was truly bizarro-world football and should be stricken from the record. Ball everything up and throw it in the trash. Except Alabama’s national title because the Tide would just claim it anyway.

5. Lower than what I expected, for what that’s worth.

6. For a guy who just talked last week about how he grew up in Kansas City, New York and then State College, often feeling like a person without a place.

7. Including delivering Oregon its first (regular-season) loss in the Big Ten, and on the Ducks’ home field.