Is it now or never for Nebraska football?

The hiring of Matt Rhule and the school's robust NIL infrastructure have the Cornhuskers positioned to win in a way they haven't in 20 years. But is it enough?

After crossing off many items on the proverbial checklist of an introductory press conference – thanking the president and athletic director for the opportunity, emphasizing his attention to detail and embrace of the grind that awaits, and relaying a charming anecdote about his wife – Matt Rhule got to the whole reason he was standing at the dais that day at Nebraska last November.

“If I have one message for you, it is that we can absolutely do it,” Rhule said. “We can absolutely get the University of Nebraska and University of Nebraska football exactly where it is supposed to be. It will be hard. It may take time but it will be done.”

It’s not the first time that Cornhuskers fans have heard a coach repeat some version of that line with that kind of confidence and certainty. For two decades, it has been happening in Lincoln, a new savior arriving with a familiar message. This program was once great, they’ll say, and under me, it will be again.

Still, the wait continues. For 40 years, Nebraska was the best and most consistent program in college football. From 1962-2001, it won 398 games, 44 more than the next-closest FBS team (Penn State), and five national championships. With a palatial stadium, a passionate fan base and a blueprint for success that had stood for decades and across multiple coaching tenures, the Cornhuskers were both a power and an inevitability. This was a place that had not only won, but was built to do so forever.

That is, until it wasn’t. Over the past 20 years, Nebraska has seen its place in the college football hierarchy gradually slip. What was once a perennial national title contender became something less feared and more middling, winning eight or nine games instead of 11 or 12. It has gotten even worse over the past six years, with a 23-45 record and no bowl appearances.

It’s why Rhule was hired, to try to fix something that is so clearly broken. In recent years, “Is [insert prestigious program here] back?” has become a trope when applied to the likes of Texas, Florida State or Miami. There’s an underlying assumption with those programs that they will one day return to prominence. It’s just a matter of when. With Nebraska, though, the question is fundamentally different. It’s not whether the Cornhuskers are back, but whether they ever can return to the heights they once enjoyed.

Unlike previous attempts to do so, it just might actually work this time with Rhule at the helm.

How’d it get here?

Before we venture into why this time is different for Nebraska’s storied football program, it’s important to illustrate the contrast between what the Cornhuskers were and what they have become.

That story is told in the coldest, most starkest way through numbers.

• Nebraska was ranked in the final Associated Press poll in every season but two between 1963 and 2001. In the 21 years since, it has happened just six times. 

• From 1963 to 2001, it had 27 top-10 finishes. Since 2001, it has had none.

• Between 1962 and 2003, it had no losing seasons. It has nine sub-.500 seasons in the past 19 years.

• Between 1963 and 2003, it had 23 seasons with at least 10 wins. Since then, it has had just three.

• It hasn’t had a season with fewer than four losses since 2003. In the 40 years between 1963 and 2003, it had fewer than four losses 38 times.

• It has six straight losing seasons, equaling as many as it had between 1959 and 2015. Since 2017, the only Power Five programs with a lower win percentage than Nebraska are Arizona, Vanderbilt, Rutgers and Kansas.

There isn’t a single, convenient excuse for why the Cornhuskers have fallen to previously unimaginable depths. A number of factors have brought them to this point.

Part of it is self-inflicted, especially when it comes to coaching hires. Since legendary coach Tom Osborne retired after the 1997 season, only one of his five successors have finished their tenure in Lincoln having won at least 72% of their games – and that coach, Frank Solich, was unceremoniously fired after going 9-3 in 2003, fewer than two full years after leading the program to a national championship game appearance.

But the Cornhuskers have also seen college football change around them, a series of shifting tectonic plates that erased fundamental advantages for the program. 

In 1969, then-coach Bob Devaney hired what was believed to be the first strength and conditioning coach in college football history, which gave Nebraska a crucial leg up with strong, beefy and well-conditioned teams that were able to physically manhandle opponents. Eventually, every other program in the sport created a similar position and leveled the playing field. For years, the Cornhuskers benefited from the Big Eight Conference’s lax rules around players that were partial or non-qualifiers academically, meaning they had one or none of the required academic benchmarks needed to play under NCAA rules – a high enough ACT score, SAT score or GPA. Because of that, Nebraska was able to bring in talented players it otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, developed them and rode them to great on-field accomplishments. On its 1995 national championship team, four of its starters in the bowl game were partial or non-qualifiers. But when four Texas schools from the Southwest Conference joined the Big Eight to form the Big 12 in 1996, a compromise was reached that mandated there be no more no-qualifiers and only one partial qualifier per team per year in the new league.

With both of those advantages gone, the lack of a robust in-state recruiting pool, something they were previously able to skirt, became that much more detrimental. And it’s why the program is where it finds itself today.

They may have finally gotten a football coaching hire right

Each of Nebraska’s previous post-Solich hires was supposed to fix this. 

Bill Callahan was hired to bring in a passing-oriented offense that would modernize the program. Bo Pelini was supposed to instill a toughness and defensive mindset the program lacked under Callahan. Mike Riley was a universally liked and respected coach with NFL experience who had done more with less at Oregon State. Scott Frost was the prodigal son who grew up in Lincoln, starred at the school, understood its intricacies and had just engineered a quick and impressive turnaround in his previous head-coaching job at Central Florida.

For various reasons, though, they all failed. Callahan had little college experience and the transition from the option to a West Coast offense was too much for any one coach to oversee, much less one with such limited college coaching experience. Pelini’s teams had a clearly defined ceiling and, more importantly, his abrasive, hot-headed personality created a toxic environment around the program (or, put more bluntly, he was an asshole very few people could stand to be around). Riley didn’t have the wherewithal to pilot a resource-rich program with high expectations. Frost, whose hire was universally praised, is more of a mystery, if only because he was fired only 11 months ago, but his head-coaching resume was relatively thin and took place at a Group of Five school with sizable advantages over its conference peers.

So why should Rhule be any different? Why should he succeed where others have fallen woefully short?