Putting a number on year one and other thoughts from a hard-weather week

As Nebraska begins its spring semester next week, here are some persistent ideas from the start of 2024.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

As the University of Nebraska begins its spring semester next week, let’s clear the decks a bit, shall we? Here are a few things I’ve been thinking about during a hard-weather week in Huskerland (or almost anywhere, it seems).

Putting a number on Rhule’s first season

Apologies for the painful reminder right off the top, but Nebraska has won either three, four or five games in every season since 2016. While wins and losses are how coaches are hired and fired, they can flatten things for programs that aren’t well established at the top or bottom of the sport.

Yes, we know the Huskers have averaged four wins per season for the better part of a decade now (seven years). But we also know they’re trying to be something other than that, in which case, if you’re not an absolutist, record might leave too much on the cutting room floor.

It’s why I often put more stock in power ratings for non-playoff teams, and I pay the closest attention to the SP+ ratings from Bill Connelly of SP+. They’re “nothing magical,” as Bo Pelini used to say about other things, but I understand SP+ the best. I find it valuable enough to have weekly rankings for Nebraska going back to 2018. Is it crazy? Maybe, but I find it easier than trying to find that rating for, say, week seven in 2021 on the internet.

I have kept, and will keep, this weekly task going for the Matt Rhule era. The final SP+ ratings for 2023 were released recently, and they tell a story that, frankly, wasn’t quite as rosy on Nebraska as I was after this most recent season.

The Huskers began the year with a 3.7 rating by SP+ (59th), and finished it at 0.3 (66th). That’s not unusual. Nebraska has finished the season worse than projected, via the ratings, in each season since 2018. Scott Frost’s first Husker team started the year with a 2.0 rating (60th) and ended 2018 with a 5.4 (49th).

Remember the optimism entering 2019? The SP+ model was more moderate than public perception, starting Nebraska at 6.6 (45th) and it would finish with a 2.6 (55th). The next two years were defined by that were probably better than their record showed. The 2020 Huskers, playing a conference-only schedule, had a 7.9 rating (34th), and the cursed 2021 team—3-9 despite a positive scoring margin—had a 10.3 rating (37th) at the end of the year.

Of course a coach can’t continually put out teams that are “better than their record shows” for long when the record is all that matters. In 2022, Frost was relieved of his duties after three games and Nebraska finished with its lowest SP+ rating (-1.2, 71st) since at least 1970, per collegefootballdata.com.

That’s what Rhule stepped into from an SP+ perspective. The Huskers’ weekly ratings in 2023 ranged from a high of 5.1 (55th), following the loss at Minnesota, to a low of -1.7 (72nd) after losing at Colorado. From there Nebraska bounced around in the 50-to-69 range for the rest of the year, finishing at 66th.

All models can have their flaws, but I like ratings like this because they aspire to objectivity and are comprehensive. SP+ is but one measure—and I wouldn’t recommend being an absolutist here in the same way I wouldn’t with record—but the story they tell of 2023 would be a) Nebraska wasn’t quite as good as expected, and b) it still represented progress from 2022.

I had a more generous view of this past season, but part of the reason I always check the rankings is as a check on myself. Do with that what you will.

The first SP+ ratings for 2024 should arrive in February. I’m not sure any model has completely figured out how to account for the transfer portal yet, but I expect the Huskers to start somewhere in the 50s.

Familiarity is the key

Erin covered Nebraska football’s newest addition to its staff yesterday, co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Glenn Thomas, and there’s plenty that’s intriguing here on first glance. To start, he went straight from a Division II job (Midwestern State) to the NFL (Atlanta Falcons). That’s gotta be rare. Minus his first few years as a student and graduate assistant, Thomas has exclusively worked with quarterbacks. This more trivia than something important, but he replaced one-time Nebraska OC Danny Langsdorf at UNLV in 2020, being hired by the Rebels just before a pandemic-driven hiring freeze in Nevada took effect.

Also, I have yet to find any record of Thomas playing football at Texas Tech. That’s far from a non-starter—in fact it only boosts the intrigue—but it’s also rare for a coach at his level.

Anyway, it’ll be good to talk to Thomas when we get the chance to learn a little more than research can offer.

For now, this hire is about not just coaching ability but familiarity, and when Rhule, Thomas and Marcus Satterfield have teamed up, things have been pretty good.

Thomas joined the Temple staff in 2015, Rhule’s third season there, and shared OC duties with Satterfield. That Owls team jumped from 123rd in offensive SP+ (23.1 PPG) in 2014 to 82nd (29.8) with Thomas. Satterfield left to coach his alma mater, Tennessee Tech, ahead of the 2016 season, and Temple improved again under the direction of Thomas, rising to 52nd in offensive SP+ (32.4 PPG).

He followed Rhule to Baylor to be the offensive coordinator in Waco, and the Bears improved from 78th in SP+ in Year 1 to 39th to 27th in 2019. Satterfield was back on the team as the tight ends coach for that final season.

Maybe the rise you can correlate with Thomas teaming up with Rhule had as much to do with the program getting better as whole as Rhule got deeper into his Temple and Baylor tenures. Even so, isn’t that exactly what they’re trying to do here?

There’s a lot still to learn about the newest assistant, but you can already say this—it has worked in the past.

About Nebrasketball

The shine came off Nebraska’s upset of No. 1 Purdue rather quickly, didn’t it? For the second time this season the Huskers let a double-digit, second-half lead slip on the road in Big Ten play, falling to Rutgers 87-82 in overtime Wednesday. That followed a 94-76 loss at Iowa, and Nebraska is now 0-4 on the road in conference play.

I wrote about how I was a bit skeptical (by nature) of the Purdue win, but how I still thought there were encouraging signs with this team that existed outside of knocking off the top-ranked team in the country. Those signs didn’t totally evaporate after back-to-back losses—if the season ended today, I think Nebraska would be in the NCAA Tournament—but we might be in for a bumpier ride the rest of the way.

Definitively good teams win on the road, and they definitely don’t let big leads disappear in the second half. Occasionally, poor teams can be tough to beat at home, which Nebraska definitely is. But I wouldn’t put the Huskers in either category just yet. It’s murkier than that.

The Huskers’ résumé remains strong, but they’ve got six road games among the 13 remaining. Two of those are against teams (Illinois, Ohio State) currently ranked ahead of the Huskers (55th) in the latest KenPom rankings. The Maryland and Northwestern road games look like virtual toss-ups, while winning at Indiana or Michigan isn’t an easy task in any season.

It's going to be tense from here on out. How tense, unfortunately, might shift significantly once we know the status of Juwan Gary. He left Wednesday’s game after a non-contact injury.