The Equation: How the Huskers win 9

In the final installment (probably) of this offseason series, let's see how far Nebraska has to go.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

If you’ve been following along this offseason with The Equation series you already know two things (and if you haven’t, don’t worry, I’m about to catch you up right now):

1. I think a 9-3 regular season is the threshold for an undeniably good year for Nebraska in 2025, and it probably needs to outscore opponents by about 10 points per game to get there.

2. Nine wins is a number that carries some weight at NU given its history, but I like it as the number this year because Nebraska is seemingly in range¹ of it and over recent seasons a 9-3 mark has been the spot where expectation most closely mirrors reality.

Today we zoom in a little more to examine what it takes to actually get to nine wins in the regular season. What sort of point differential does a team need? How about turnovers? Field position? You could do this for every statistical category, but I tried to keep it big picture and focus only on differential numbers because average offenses with great defenses should have as good a shot to win nine games as great offenses paired with average defenses (with special teams as part of the recipe, too).

Rather than just look at all of the teams to win nine or more games over a certain span, I decided to look at the teams that scored like nine-win teams. That number, on average between 2021–24,² was a points-per-game difference of 9.4 points, but in the interest of grabbing as many teams that could’ve won nine games as possible, I pulled every FBS team to outscore opponents by an average of 8 to 11 points per game. That left me with 47 teams, 26 of which won at least nine games. Of the 21 teams to actually win fewer than nine, 15 won eight, five won seven and one³ won six.

With parameters in place, how did those teams engineer a scoring differential that should be good for 9-3 slightly more than half the time? And, more importantly, how far does Nebraska have to go to get there in 2025?