Defining What A Good Year 3 Looks Like For Matt Rhule, Nebraska Football

By the end of the 2025 season, how will we know if Nebraska is moving in the right direction under Matt Rhule? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about for a while.

In this era of college football, year three is the point in a coach’s tenure where you should see the signs of where things are headed. Just look at the CFB coaches and their third years in 2024:

Dan Lanning had a successful year three, winning the Big Ten Conference in his first year in the league – his first conference title – and made the College Football Playoff at the sport’s number one overall seed. (Don’t ask what happened next.) Marcus Freeman’s third squad at Notre Dame had an early hiccup in the non-conference before ripping off 13 wins in a row to make it to the national championship game, where they’d lose to the same Ohio State team that ended Oregon’s season.
Meanwhile, Brian Kelly’s third LSU group started 0-1, the third time in as many seasons for his Tigers, had a three-game losing streak towards the end of the regular season, and went 9-4. The 2024 Florida Gators, with third-year coach Billy Napier, went 8-5. Both coaches enter the season in put up or shut up territory, trying to survive the grind of the SEC.
And then there are guys like Lincoln Riley at USC and Brent Venables at Oklahoma, two coaches who will be compared to each other for as long as they’re at their current stops. Riley’s third Trojans team was his worst yet, finishing 7-6 in year one in the Big Ten. Venables went 6-7 for the second time in three years. There’s a world where those bad year threes laid the groundwork for some tough decisions to be made as soon as 2025.

Given the recent histories of Oregon, Notre Dame, LSU, Florida*, USC, and Oklahoma, a “good year three” was probably a bit easier to define for those coaches than it seems to be for Rhule. Win lots of games, make the playoff, and contend for a national title. Easy to define, difficult to execute.

Okay, maybe not Florida, though Napier certainly did enough to turn down the heat, if only for now.

But what about Rhule? I continue to be fascinated by the year three of it all.

Given Nebraska’s recent history – losing 6.9 games per season since 2015, appearing in just three bowl games* in ten years, and a 17-45 record in one-score games since the BYU Hail Mary that kicked off the Mike Riley era – it is not a “playoff or bust” season for Rhule and Nebraska. His Cornhuskers are 12-13 through two seasons, including a combined 1-5 against rivals Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. He’s 0-3 against eventual College Football Playoff participants, losing by an average score* of 40.7-10.3. And of course, his teams have gone just 3-10 in one-score matchups.

*One of those three bowl games came in 2015, only because (a) there weren’t enough 6-6 teams to fill the slots and (b) Nebraska’s APR scores were so good. Without that, we’d be talking about two bowl games in the last ten seasons.

**Imagine this stat without the 21-17 loss to Ohio State last year.

Minnesota has haunted Nebraska in recent years. Can Matt Rhule and co. get it done vs. PJ Fleck's group in 2025? | Matt Krohn-Imagn Images

When looking for ways to define a season as “good,” I found four areas Nebraska could succeed in 2025:

Overall regular season record.
Performance vs. rivals.
Beating a team they’re “not supposed to beat.”
Being in the CFP mix late in the season.

If Nebraska checks the box in one of the four categories, I imagine there’d be much debate surrounding whether or not the season was “good” or just “fine.” Check the box in two of the four categories? It’s the most successful regular season in close to a decade, if not longer.

Let’s dive into each.

Overall regular season record: Finish 8-4 or better

Perhaps the easiest way to begin this discussion is to boil the entire thing down to wins and losses.

8-4 vs. 9-3. I debated internally for a while on which record would better represent true progress, and in the end, I settled on eight wins. The biggest reason why? While 9-3 would unequivocally be better, we just haven’t seen anything near 8-4 in recent years.

Since 2017, Nebraska’s finished the regular season 4-8, 4-8, 5-7, 3-5, 3-9, 4-8, 5-7, and 6-6. With that as a backdrop, here’s what an 8-4 season would represent for the program:

The most wins in a regular season since 2016.
A record above .500 in Big Ten play for the first time since 2016.
A two-win increase year-over-year in the regular season, something that’s only happened four times this century; 7-6 to 9-3 from 2002 to 2003, 5-6 to 7-4 from 2004 to 2005, 5-7 to 8-4 from 2007 to 2008, and 5-7 to 9-3 from 2015 to 2016.

Get to 8-4 and it means things are moving in the right direction, full stop.

Performance vs. rivals: Go 2-0 vs. Minnesota and Iowa

Nebraska most certainly took a step forward in a similar category in 2024, getting revenge against hated Big Eight/Big 12 rival Colorado in September and knocking off Wisconsin for the first time in 12 years, locking up a bowl bid in the process. And yet, the 13-10 defeat to Iowa was another in the long line of groin kicks the program has suffered. It represented Iowa’s second-straight win over Nebraska and their ninth in ten tries.

Minnesota, meanwhile, has put up a stealthy 6-1 record vs. Nebraska since 2017, including the 13-10 win in Rhule’s first-ever game as Nebraska’s head coach. The only win Nebraska has in the series in this timeframe was in 2018.

To make matters worse, Iowa’s last six wins in the series have come by an average of 4.2 points, while Minnesota’s last four have all been decided by a touchdown or field goal.

Plainly, if the Huskers are going to put up a good season, they cannot go 1-1 against these two schools in 2025. 1-1 would certainly feel good like 2-1 felt good last year – no one’s trading away last year’s win over Wisconsin for a win over UCLA, for example – but is the program really moving in the right direction if they’re unable to pick up two wins against their biggest tormentors?

Pull off an upset: Go 1-1 vs. Michigan and Penn State

The sibling to this category is “win a game vs. a ranked team,” but that’s well-tread territory at this point, so instead let’s focus on the two big dogs on the schedule.

Putting aside the West Coast schools for a moment, old school Blue Bloods in the Big Ten Conference, for most* observers, would be defined as Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, and Nebraska. Since Nebraska joined the Big Ten, they’ve played Ohio State nine times, Michigan seven times, and Penn State five times. They’re 6-14, with eight losses in a row vs. the Buckeyes and four in a row against the Wolverines. They’re 4-1 against Penn State, with the lone loss coming in Mike Riley’s penultimate game as head coach in 2017.

*Now is not the time or place to debate whether or not you think this is true. Accept this and let’s move on together!

Nebraska's 2021 loss to Michigan is one of the few close games the series has seen since the Cornhuskers joined the Big Ten. Can 2025 be different? | Dylan Widger-Imagn Images

Nebraska’s success in this category is especially tricky, even without Ohio State on the schedule. According to Bill Connelly’s SP+ numbers from the end of May, the Nittany Lions would be about a 19-point favorite on a neutral field, while the Wolverines would come in favored by about 12.5 points. Even building in a home field advantage that favors Nebraska in the matchup with Michigan, you’re still looking at two games where the Cornhuskers will be double-digit underdogs.

On one hand, you’re looking at a full-fledged national championship contender in Penn State, and a Michigan program that took a step back throughout much of 2024, only to finish on the upswing with a close loss to Indiana, before wins over Ohio State and Alabama.

On the other hand, Nebraska will catch Michigan early in the season and without their head coach.

Is it even realistic to expect Nebraska to go 1-1? Probably not. Possible? Absolutely. We’re talking about college football, after all.

Enter November in the playoff mix

Another way to put this? Have a good enough record through eight games where you can talk yourself into Nebraska making the CFP if things break their way in the final four games. Not counting the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, here were Nebraska’s records after their first eight games going back to 2017:

2017: 4-4
2018: 2-6
2019: 4-4
2021: 3-5
2022: 3-5
2023: 5-3
2024: 5-3

Going a step further, it took Nebraska eight games to pick up five wins in 2023 and just six games to get to five in 2024. The only other time they reached five wins in that timeframe, 2019, it took them 11 games to do so.

In a way, this one seems the most doable on the entire list, as Nebraska’s very much improved as a program in September and October under Rhule. And, stop me if you’ve heard this before, the 2025 schedule allows for a nice start, at least on paper. Going back to Bill Connelly’s SP+ numbers, Nebraska is an underdog just one time in the first eight games; at home to the aforementioned Michigan Wolverines. On top of that, in the seven other games where Nebraska is a favorite, only one of them – the Friday night game at Minnesota – puts the spread within a single score.

Nebraska's schedule according to Bill Connelly's SP+ projections. | Bill Connelly SP+/Josh Peterson illustration

While it’s easy at this moment to say the season will swing in November games against USC and Iowa, I’m looking at those early-season matchups against schools like Cincinnati, Michigan State, and Maryland; the types of games where Nebraska has too often been the favorite in recent years, only to find ourselves wondering, “how on earth did they lose that one?”

If Nebraska is finally able to avoid one of those early-season clunkers and play to their full potential, for the first time in a long time, they’ll enter November with a path – however unlikely it may be – to college football’s ultimate prize.

It’s time to find out if Nebraska can deliver their first truly good season in a while.

Let’s see if they can pull it off.

Agree or disagree with what Josh had to say? Shoot him an email; he'd love to hear from you. joshpeterson.huskermax@gmail.com.

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