The equation for Nebraska football in 2026
The Importance of 30/20 or: Could NU be 2025 Alabama, Louisville or Penn State? Two of those would work.
This should be Matt Rhule’s best team at Nebraska. It’s his most experienced team. While returning production doesn’t mean quite as much as it once did, it’s not meaningless. It’s still better to have it than not and the Huskers have more of it than at any point since Rhule arrived.
That’s great and probably undervalued here in our Offseason of Indifference, but the conditions that created this 2026 skepticism are real, too. Nebraska didn’t make unimpeachable progress in Rhule’s third season—exactly when his Temple and Baylor teams had—and it went 1-4 after the calendar flipped to November. Even if you’re willing to start fresh for 2026, Nebraska hasn’t beaten a ranked team in nearly a decade and Rhule is 0-20 against top-25 teams as a power conference coach.1 The Huskers are almost certain to face three top-10 teams in 2026 and maybe another two or three ranked from 11th to 25th.2
All that being (likely) the case, how does Nebraska get to a record that sends everyone home happy at the end of the regular season? That’s the starting point for The Equation. Last year, it was easy to land on 9-3. Given a schedule that could include five or more ranked teams, I think it’s 8-4 this year. It would only be one more win than the past two seasons, but I think it would be hard to hold that against NU given the context. Go 8-4 against this schedule—and don’t collapse in November—and that’s the type of 8-4 that lands in the top 25.
Just don’t tell quarterback Anthony Colandrea that. “When I first got here, it felt like the bar was eight or nine wins, and I was like, no — we want to win 11, 12 games,” he told On3 this week.
Fair enough. He and I have different motivations and stakes at work here, so I still think eight wins is a pretty good bar. Here is, in a realistic sense, how the Huskers could get there.
