At some point this spring, billions of cicadas will emerge from the ground across the eastern half of the United States. Some will have been underground for 13 years, while others will have been waiting for 17 years. Regardless of the time each cicada spent in the cold, damp Earth, awaiting the moment to finally see the sun and be eaten by a bird, they will all ask the same question.
“What the hell happened to Nebraska football while I was down there?”
The last time Nebraska had to deal with cicadas was in 2007. The Cornhuskers went 5-7 and fired Bill Callahan for the audacity of missing a bowl game. It was the second time one of Callahan’s Nebraska teams had done so after the Cornhuskers went bowling every season from 1969 to 2003, with multiple national titles in between. In the 17 years since, Nebraska has been to nine bowl games, the last of which was in 2016.
It’s a program that’s been wandering aimlessly since leaving the Big 12 to join the Big Ten in 2011. Nebraska has time and again embarked on a new season with hopes of resolving its issues, only to be met with disappointment.
The biggest problem in solving Nebraska’s problems is knowing what the problem is. All sorts of things have gone wrong, whether on the field or off it. The Scott Frost tenure was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, but one stat from Frost’s tenure has been cited repeatedly.
In Frost’s five seasons at Nebraska, the Cornhuskers struggled, going 7-25 in one-score games. The blame was squarely placed on the coaching staff. The reason Nebraska failed to win close games, or blew leads late, was a failure of leadership. The hope was that a new staff would rectify this. Enter Matt Rhule, who was seen as a promising program builder based on his previous work at Temple and Baylor, but had a disastrous run in the NFL with the Carolina Panthers.
The Huskers went 1-5 in one-score games under in 2023, Rhule’s first season, dropping their record to 8-30 in one-score games since 2018.
Of course, it’s important to note that a consistently poor performance over five years under Frost was a trend. The 1-5 record in one season under Rhule could prove an outlier. The question is, how does Nebraska go about fixing it? The answer isn’t simply to cross your fingers and hope more breaks go your way.
You make your own breaks, and if there’s anything Nebraska football has done consistently in recent…
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