What if NU's schedule isn't as bad as we think?
The key to Nebraska's season might be going 2-1 in these three games.
Nebraska’s 2026 football schedule is tough. You already know that, but just in case you need a reminder: The Huskers will face all three playoff qualifiers from the Big Ten in 2025 and six of the nine conference teams ranked ahead of them in the recently released SP+ ratings. Facts like that, and some of the early numbers, point to 6-6.
But if you zoom out a bit to view the schedule as a whole rather than focus on the most difficult1 stretches, you can more easily see the Huskers caught at least one break with this year’s slate.
Last year, as a way to get some distance from win totals and projected point spreads, I did the simplest thing possible—divide the 18-team Big Ten into three tiers. I used conference title odds to do the sorting last season, but here I’m using the SP+ ratings as the odds aren’t out yet.2
Does somewhat arbitrarily3 dividing the league into three produce some gray area? Absolutely. The difference in rating between the top of Tier 1 and the bottom is 15 points in SP+. The difference between the middle of Tier 1 and the top of Tier 2 is 2 points.
Even with that caveat, the tiers mostly held last year. Over the Big Ten’s 81 conference games, 43 were tier-to-tier matchups and 38 were games between teams of different tiers. Of the latter 38, there were only six instances (16%) of a lower-tiered team beating a team viewed to be superior in the preseason.
