Put Me In, Coach: How Will Five-in-Five Impact Nebraska Football?

Dave Feit uses participation data to dispel a commonly held assumption about the new eligibility rules.

Tight end Danny King (49) has played in two games during his first two seasons at Nebraska. Dave Feit isn't buying the notion that five-for-five will mean significantly greater opportunities for younger players lower on the depth chart. | Kenny Larabee, KLIN

Over the summer, the NCAA passed "five-in-five" legislation that gives student-athletes five years to complete five years of eligibility. This change gets rid of the traditional redshirt, medical redshirts, and many other exceptions. 

In college football, five-in-five eliminates the previous rule where a player could participate in up to four regular season games and still maintain their redshirt status.*

*It also eliminated the weekly Redshirt Tracker reports I compiled for the last two seasons.

Under the new rules, a student-athlete's five-year clock starts 1) when a student starts classes at any college or university, OR 2) at the beginning of the academic year after a student-athlete's 19th birthday. Players can no longer take the Chris Weinke or Monte Harrison path of playing four seasons of college football after a lengthy minor league baseball career. The only exceptions remaining are the so-called "Three M's": Military service, religious missions, and maternity. 

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One of the biggest unknowns is how five-in-five will impact play on the field*.

*Off the field, the rule has been creating a bazillion billable hours for lawyers trying to get an extra year of eligibility for 2025 seniors who didn't redshirt… or were cut from an NFL roster… or have a medical exception… or a note from their mom… or…

I've seen a lot of speculation that five-in-five will lead to more underclassmen getting on the field sooner. The belief is that a talented recruit who isn't playing will now be more likely head for the transfer portal at their earliest opportunity than they would have been a year ago.  As the theory goes, the lack of redshirts should lead to more opportunities for true freshmen and sophomores to get in games than ever before.

From a big-picture perspective, I don't buy this theory. At all.

Ever since freshmen were granted eligibility in 1972, talented freshmen have almost always found their way to the field… unless there was somebody better ahead of them.

Regardless of who is eligible to play, a football coach can only (legally) put 11 guys on the field at any given time. Sure, a coach could theoretically shuttle waves of players in and out every few downs like a hockey line shift, but that sounds chaotic, impractical, and downright unrealistic. 

The 1974 Sugar Bowl capped the freshman season of I-back Monte Anthony, an impact player for Nebraska in the early years of freshman eligibility. | Nebraska Football Media Guide

College football is a bottom-line business. Coaches who cannot win enough games will eventually be fired. Therefore, it is always in a coach's best interest to do whatever he can to win. The players who can help a coach win (regardless of their class) will play. They guys who cannot help the coach win (because they don't know the playbook, need more time in the weight room, or any other reason) spend their Saturdays standing on the sidelines. The notion that coaches are going to start playing most or all of their 105-man roster every game to keep younger guys from jumping in the portal* is absurd.

*Speaking of the portal, five-in-five increases the pool of available players with remaining eligibility at any given time. And roster limits (105 for college football) have placed a cap of the number of players a team can carry going forward.  This creates a numbers game that is stacked against players in the portal.

Let's say Johnny Threestar hops in the portal this winter because he didn't get enough playing time. In this day and age, that's his right. But guess what: when the portal window opens, teams will likely have more players to choose from than ever before to fill their spots, because more players have more eligibility. And since many P4 programs prioritize filling open spots with starters or established college players, jumping into the portal with only your high school film seems like a great way to end up at a lower tier school.

Admittedly, all of this is hypothetical and could be impacted by other factors (such as revenue sharing and NIL) once things heat up. It's hard to accurately predict the future without some past numbers.

So, let's shift gears and look at some real-world (yet close-to-home) data.

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As I mentioned above, for the last two seasons I put together a weekly Nebraska Redshirt Tracker. In that time, I have become very familiar with the participation reports in the official stats, and have compiled a ton of data on how many players actually got on the field. For our purposes today, I went back and added the participation numbers from 2023, Matt Rhule's first season at Nebraska. In addition to another data point, I hoped it might reveal some interesting trends - which it did (more on that later).

Before we get into the data, let's talk about the outliers. I considered removing Nebraska's non-conference games against teams outside of the Power Four conferences from the dataset, as the 108 players used against Akron in 2025 or the 107 who played against UTEP in 2024 will impact the totals. However, the overall bump was fairly minor so I left them in.

On the other extreme was Nebraska's 2023 game at Michigan State. The Huskers used just 43 players in the game. That is 10 players fewer than the next closest games (2024 at Ohio State and the 2024 Pinstripe Bowl vs Boston College). These games were also left in.

Running back Isaiah Mozee and 107 other Huskers got into last season's game against Akron. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

In the Matt Rhule era to date, an average of 63.3 players get into each game. There are some slight differences between home (68.0), away (57.1), and neutral-site games (60.0), and that is mostly where those empty-the-benches nonconference blowouts show up.

In games decided by 24 points or more - win or lose - the number of players used jumps up to 74.0. But pretty much any other way you slice the data*, the number of players who see the field in a Nebraska game coached by Matt Rhule is in the high fifties to low sixties.

*For all of my data sickos out there, here are some of the other numbers:

• One-score games: 57.1 players used
• Conference games (all): 58.7
• Conference games (home): 60.2
• Conference games (away): 57.0
• All games against P4 teams: 59.9
• Wins against P4 teams: 60.5
• Losses against P4 teams: 57.8
• Bowl games: 59.0
• Games versus non-P4 FBS or FCS teams: 87.2

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But wait, you say, those numbers ARE from a world with redshirts and the free-four-games rule. How might have things played out differently if five-in-five was around in the first three years of Rhule's tenure? Would NU have used more players if sitting them on the bench cost would them a year of eligibility?

To answer that, let's pull up the final update from the 2025 Redshirt Tracker. Nebraska only had two players who utilized all four of their free games (Pierce Mooberry and Willis McGahee IV). Would those players have seen more action if there was no redshirt on the line? I believe so. From the 2024 Redshirt Tracker, I really only see one name that would have played in more than four games: Riley Van Poppel.

But I have a harder time believing that the other 11 players who used at least one of their free games in 2025 would have been regular contributors. Some (like Malcolm Hartzog Jr. and Jeremiah Jones) battled injuries and would have been unavailable. Others (such as Houston Ka'aha'aina-Torres, Shawn Hammerbeck, and Jackson Carpenter) only played in the two nonconference blowouts. 

To show that this isn't a Rhule thing, I ran the participation numbers from a random game in the Frost, Riley, and Pelini eras:

• Frost era (2021 Purdue): 57 players used
• Riley era (2016 Purdue): 60 players used
• Pelini era (2014 Purdue): 54 players used. This was a 21-point win, so if anything, I'm a surprised more guys didn't play.

Unless something dramatic and unexpected happens in 2026, I am convinced Nebraska will continue using around 60 players per game.

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With all that said, there is an interesting trend worth mentioning. Over Rhule's three seasons, the number of players he has played per game has increased every year. For this, we will limit the data to P4 opponents only:

• 2023: 56.5 players used per game
• 2024: 58.9 players used per game
• 2025: 61.0 players used per game

I cannot definitively account for why this number is trending up. I know Rhule redshirted a ton of players in his first two seasons. Maybe he did not have a ton of trust with some of the players on the 2023 and 2024 rosters. Maybe the increasing numbers are a signal of his development starting to pay dividends with added depth. 

Last fall, Rhule talked about five-in-five coming, so maybe they not push as many redshirts as they might have in previous years. Eighteen players redshirted in 2025. Six of them transferred out. Only one - Malcom Hartzog Jr. - played in more than three games in his Nebraska career. It is possible that one of the guys who left (presumably because he couldn't get on the field) will turn into an all-conference player or NFL draft pick. 

But as a fan, I want the best players to play, and the guys who aren't quite ready yet to sit.

Even if it costs them one of the five years of eligibility.

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So where does all of this leave us regarding five-in-five's impact on Nebraska in 2026 and beyond? The Huskers' roster has already been updated with the revised roster years, as redshirt freshmen no longer exist. A handful of players who are fourth-year seniors will have the opportunity to play an extra year.

Otherwise, I don't think it will have much - if any - impact on the number of players to see action. Coaches will still play the guys that they believe can help the team win games. Players are aren’t quite there yet will sit and wait their turn (or look for greener pastures in the portal).

But there is one other space in of college football that could see some changes: the record book.

As HuskerMax's Joe Hudson wrote recently, a player who plays five full seasons (at 12 or more games per year) could do some serious rewriting on Husker career records that have stood for decades. 

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