What can Nebraska's offers teach us about the long-term plan?

Every program can choose the type of players it pursues. Here's a tally of the positions the Huskers are pursuing most often.

True freshman WR Jacorey Barney Jr. returns a kick during Nebraska’s 2024 spring game. | Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Nebraska’s staff continues to show everyone it’s not messing around when it comes to camps. The coaches have been upfront about wanting them to be a place where a prospect can show up, perform well and land on the Huskers’ radar, maybe even walk away with an offer.

Elkhorn (Neb.) North linebacker Jase Reynolds was the latest example, walking away with a Nebraska offer after participating in last week’s Friday Night Lights camp. The 2026 prospect made 57 tackles, five tackles for loss and two interceptions a year ago while also playing receiver. Reynolds has also already clocked a 4.5 40.

He was, per 247Sports’ running tally, the 155th offer NU has made for 2026 and the 12th to a linebacker. Nebraska needed 352 offers to corral last year’s class of 31 and has already made more than 250 offers for 2025. The totals so far for the next two classes are about on pace for around 350 each by the time they sign.

That’s a lot of evaluation and contact time to land on the next 25 or so scholarship recruits every year.

How do the Huskers “spend” those recruiting resources? I was curious how it broke out by position and if it could tell us anything. It taught me a few things.

Here’s the position breakdown of total offers for Matt Rhule and staff’s first full class (2024), and the two upcoming classes.

Admittedly, that’s not the most intuitive or easy-to-read chart I’ve ever created,¹ so let’s talk through some of what it shows.

• You can see the impact of need, I think, in the 2024 list. Due to a rash of injuries, the lack of wide receiver depth became apparent last fall, but the bulk of the recruiting was already done by the time NU started losing pass-catchers. Maybe only a portion of the boatload of receiver offers last cycle can be attributed to what was unfolding on the field. The bulk of it might be more about…well, more on that in a minute. Linemen were the most heavily targeted group on defense, and that makes some sense. Nebraska’s staff wouldn’t have known it would have Ty Robinson and Nash Hutmacher back for 2024, and even if it had those two starters are gone for 2025.

• With the commitment of TJ Lateef for 2025, the Huskers should be done with offers at quarterback for the cycle. That effectively caps things at the 10 offers that went out (4% of the total so far). But for the 2026 class, when either (though hopefully not both) of Nebraska’s true freshmen quarterbacks could be entering his junior season, NU has already extended 18 offers (12%) at QB.

• On offense for 2025, the Huskers are again heaviest at wide receiver (14%), but tackle (13%) isn’t far behind. The same is true for 2026 so far with receiver and tackle leading the way at 12% each. On defense, Nebraska has made the most offers at cornerback to this point for 2025 (11%) and 2026 (10%).

• Buzzword alert: positionless football. Rhule talks about it a lot and you can at least say this, the Huskers have made a lot of offers so far in the “athlete” category. I’m not sure how much more you can say about that group because we don’t really know in every case where NU might slate those guys.

I do think there’s an overarching theme to all of these offers, and it has to do with Ian Boyd’s “space force theory.” It posits that there are “certain positions where high level athletes can impact a game more than others.” Boyd highlights four positions² where players have to win one-on-one battles routinely—wide receiver, offensive tackle, edge rusher and cornerback.

Are those the four position groups Nebraska has offered the most in the past three cycles?

Not quite, but we’re close. Wide receiver leads at 13% followed by offensive tackle (12%), cornerback (10%) and defensive lineman (10%). Edge rusher only makes up 7% of the total offers so far, but figure some of the interior defensive linemen might be options on the edge, and maybe that’s even more true at linebacker (9%), which also tops edge in offers so far.

Then there’s the athletes. If you count them as a group of their own it actually leads any individual defensive group with 12% of offers, but I like to keep the athletes separate and (eventually) deal with them on an individual basis. As a group, however, it seems reasonable to say the unclassifiable athletes are more likely to be future space force cadets than guards or defensive tackles.

I generally buy the space force theory, and, having pulled the offer numbers, I see echoes of it in who Nebraska is trying to land (even if it is wholly unaware of the theory itself, which is probably the case). That’s good because I don’t think many honest Husker fans expect Nebraska to recruit like Georgia, Ohio State, Texas, et al. I think there’s scant evidence Nebraska ever did for sustained periods even during its greatest run as one of the elites.

In Lincoln, consistent winning will always require doing a lot more with a little less than most of the other top-10 all-time winners have. If there are indeed positions that “will have an outsized impact on a game, more so than having high quality athletes or size at other positions,” to quote Boyd again, then Nebraska probably needs to be a program actively trying to work such an advantage.

So far, so good, at least based on where the Huskers are putting their offers.

Odds & Ends

• Nebraska volleyball landed its first commit for 2026 in outside hitter Gabby DiVita from Michigan. You’re not going to believe this, but she’s one of the top-10 recruits in her class.

• Back to football, the Huskers landed a commit from 2025 defensive lineman Malcolm Simpson, an official visitor this past weekend. The 4-star Texan is tied for the highest-rated recruit in the class by 247Sports alongside QB TJ Lateef and RB Jamarion Parker.

• Picked up my copy of Athlon Sports over the weekend, and it might be more bullish on Nebraska than most in 2024. Normally I wouldn’t take something from a magazine someone’s trying to sell and put it out there, but since Athlon already did that—it has NU ranked 33rd nationally and seventh in the Big Ten. Both are among the highest I’ve seen thus far.

• A few months back the gentlemen of the Common Fan Podcast pitched me an idea and asked me to be part of a special project that debuts today. It’s called The Reckoning, and it’s a look back at Nebraska’s coaching changes since Tom Osborne retired. If that doesn’t sound like particularly sweet Kool-Aid, well, no sugar-coating that, but it’s still worth trying to understand what happened with each of those massive changes and how it got us to today. This series gets into that. You can get a preview of the series here (or wherever you get your pods), and the first episode on the firing of Frank Solich is out today. I joined the guys for each episode, but we also brought on a media member who covered those coaches at the time. First up is my friend and former colleague Mike Babcock.

1. But it is interactive for the first time! You can hover of individual slices or position groups and whatnot, so you win some, you lose some.

2. Close readers of the chart above may have wondered why I highlighted those four positions. This is why.