Tad Stryker: Faithfulness in the Small Steps

Nebraska football has a few hurdles to clear before playoff talk means anything.

Taylor Martinez hands off to running back Ameer Abdullah against Southern Mississippi Sept. 7, 2013, the day Bo Pelini's home-field win streak reached 10 games at Memorial Stadium. | Bruce Thorson-Imagn Images

Phil Steele appears to have given Nebraska a bit more thought since he predicted the Huskers would finish in the middle of the Big Ten pack this season.

A little over a month later, he now considers the Cornhuskers a playoff contender. And he’s not alone.

Steele’s prediction is worth taking seriously, but let’s take things a step at a time.

I’ve never met Steele, but it’s evident to anyone who’s ever spent more than 15 minutes in one of his painstakingly detailed preseason magazines that he lives and breathes college football. He picked NU to break out in 2019, Scott Frost’s second year at the helm, and when the Big Red burned him on that prediction with a 5-7 season, he shied away for a few years -- with good reason, as it turns out.

Now folks seem to be giving the Huskers another serious look. Head coach Matt Rhule has made important progress in rebuilding the culture and the roster.

It’s high time for the Huskers to take the next few steps. The talent is there. Will they actually do it? If they trust each other, yes.

But the Huskers cannot skip any steps. They haven’t earned the right.

A playoff contender? That’s premature. First, they have to get to the place where every single player has confidence that the guy next to him will do his job. How many times have the Huskers suffered one of those insufferable one-score losses because someone — quite often, an offensive or defensive lineman — panicked, lost focus and made a mental mistake as he tried to do his buddy’s job as well as his own? That’s the first, immediate hurdle to clear, and it’s proven quite daunting lately.

There are players who can do more than just their own job. They’re called superstars, and Nebraska has been fresh out of them the last decade or so. Until that day returns, don’t try to do someone else’s job, because it’s likely you’ll fall down on your own assignment. There’s no reason to take the Huskers too seriously until they pass this mental test. But when they do, watch out, because the consistency that sort of thing fosters will quickly take this program to another level.

Winning at Memorial Stadium needs to be more of a sure thing in order for the Huskers to return to top-tier status. | Nebraska Athletics

One of the surest signs that Nebraska has gone to the next level will be this: playing in Memorial Stadium becomes a big advantage once again. It’s been a long time since that’s been consistently true. Let me quickly add that the fans have been doing their part. The band, and quite often, the student section have been doing their part, although I look forward to the day when they can do more, when a rebuilt and reconfigured South Stadium would place both the student section and the band right near field level, as a high-decibel barrier to any opponent trying to score in that direction.

When Memorial Stadium is once again a hellaciously tough place to play for opponent after opponent, when nobody, not even a top 10-caliber team, pulls away from the Huskers in their house and takes control of a game in Lincoln, that’s a dead giveaway that Nebraska is back to being Nebraska.

Remember home-field win streaks? It hasn’t been all that long. But first, some history:

After Washington’s most recent national championship team, featuring Outland and Lombardi Award winner Steve Emtman, came into Lincoln in 1991 and left with a 36-21 victory, Tom Osborne never lost another home game, clicking off his last 42 in a row. Frank Solich won his first five home games before Texas edged the Huskers 20-16 on Halloween 1998 to end the streak at 47.

Solich came right back to start a new home-field streak and built it to 25 games before another gut-wrenching loss to the Longhorns in 2002 ended it. Yes, the Huskers were really just one untimely red zone fumble by redshirt freshman quarterback Eric Crouch from winning an unbelievable 73 in a row at home under Osborne and Solich.

Nebraska's 2017 victory over Arkansas State capped the Huskers' most recent eight-game home winning streak. | Bruce Thorson-Imagn Images

With a defense and running game like the Huskers built in the 1990s, winning home games seemed almost as easy as taking candy from a baby. Not so much lately, but let’s not forget that Bo Pelini put together a 10-game home win streak from the end of 2011 into 2013, before the Huskers lost to UCLA while wearing black jerseys. They’ve never reached double figures since, although Mike Riley (2016-17) came close, winning eight in a row before quarterback Tanner Lee threw a pair of pick-sixes to Northern Illinois defenders. Frost eventually got six consecutive wins at home after a strong finish in 2018 and taking the first two of the 2019 season, before Ohio State decimated the Big Red a few hours after Lincoln last hosted ESPN’s College GameDay.

It’s time for Rhule to build a streak of his own; he hasn’t surpassed three consecutive home wins yet. To do that, he’ll have to do something else he and the Huskers haven’t done lately — defeat a nationally ranked team. Michigan quite possibly will be in the top 25 when the Wolverines visit Lincoln on Sept. 20. Even reaching eight consecutive home wins would mean beating Michigan, Southern Cal and Iowa in the same season. That’s a pretty high bar for a team that first has a bunch of mental hurdles to clear.

A few All-Big Ten players and maybe an All-American performance this season would make it a lot easier to clear those hurdles. Could Dylan Raiola be one? Sure, but it has to start with coming from behind to win a meaningful game in the final two minutes. This season, the Huskers absolutely have to stack wins in their four October conference games, and while they’re at it, end a nagging losing streak to a troublesome Minnesota program that always seems to outwork and outprepare them. These are prerequisites before you can even start thinking about the playoffs. First, consistency. First, faithfulness in the small things. Then come big dreams.

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