Three Reasons Nebraska Football Needs to Overperform in 2026

In case you hadn’t heard, the Nebraska football team begins fall camp this week. More than seven months after Matt Rhule’s team ended the 2025 season with a whimper in Las Vegas, a new season is finally here. Thank God.

For fans of the Big Red, this season brings promise, intrigue, questions, hope, anxiety, and more. Can the Huskers make a third straight bowl game? Can they get beyond seven wins? Can a Nebraska football team finally look stronger in November than it did in September?

There will be plenty of time for all the questions. For now, as I read all the coverage from Big Ten media days, and obsess over the position battles and storylines and quotes that will be emerging from fall camp, there’s one big-picture, overriding thought I can’t get out of my head: the Nebraska football team needs to overperform in 2026.

What does overperform mean? I’m not talking playoff or conference championship here (those things would, of course, be lovely). But I am talking better than seven wins. Beating somebody (or somebodies) you’re not supposed to. In the words of Royal Tenenbaum, I’m talking about putting a brick through the other guy’s windshield.

I don’t want to be content to exhale with relief when we beat Maryland and Rutgers. I want to be elated about beating Indiana or Oregon. I want to take the fight to Illinois and Iowa, and be the one left standing at the end. Husker fans know what better looks like, and it needs to be better this year.

Here are three reasons why.

The fan base desperately needs it.

Need it? Hell, we deserve it.

Even with Matt Rhule's back-to-back bowl games, the last decade-plus has been a historically bad stretch for the Big Red. Nebraska hasn't won a conference championship since 1999. It hasn't finished in the AP Top 25 since 2012. It hasn't beaten a ranked team since 2016. We’re getting dangerously close to a slump turning into an era.

What’s more, this offseason has been...different. For the first time since I can remember, people seem disinterested. I only say “seem,” because I don't believe Nebraska fans are capable of not caring. Memorial Stadium will still sell out. Saturdays will still revolve around Husker football. Husker fans will still watch, and hope that this time will be different.

But hope is not the same thing as belief. We have believed so many times, been certain we were over the hump so many times, we’ve been to that well SO MANY TIMES, only to be let down. I think it would be accurate to say Husker Nation has entered its “Doubting Thomas” phase. We need to see again before we will believe.

And frankly, it’s only fair. Most other fan bases would have been long checked out by now. We’re still here. But my read of the fan base is, we could really use a shot in the arm right now.

An unexpectedly good season wouldn't simply change Nebraska's record. It would restore confidence to a fan base that has spent the better part of fifteen years believing a breakthrough was coming, only to suffer heartbreak again and again.

Nebraska can’t lose recruiting momentum.

Nebraska currently holds one of the nation's top-ranked 2027 recruiting classes. That includes 5 star quarterback Trae Taylor, who is so dialed in on Nebraska he moved to the state to play his senior season at Millard South.

That kind of commitment from that kind of impact player doesn’t happen very often. Taylor appears to be all-in on what Matt Rhule is building, and he has been an aggressive peer recruiter for his class, which includes four of the nation’s top 100 players according to Rivals.

Would Taylor or some of his fellow recruits bolt if the bottom fell out on Nebraska's season?

I don't know. But I don't want to find out.

As we’ve seen in the past, recruiting momentum is difficult to build and easy to lose. Right now Nebraska has something special brewing with the 2027 class. The best way to keep it together isn't another sales pitch from the coaching staff. It's winning football games.

The Big Red Rebuild needs a Big Red winner.

The Memorial Stadium remodel – the Big Red Rebuild as it’s being called by the powers that be – begins in December, and will supposedly be done in time for the 2028 season.

Am I an expert on the Big Red Rebuild? I am not. Do I think it's going to raise prices on everything from mandatory donations to individual ticket prices to the newly-allowed, already-overpriced beer you can now buy inside the stadium? I sure do.

I don't have a problem with the effort to upgrade and modernize the stadium. The Memorial Stadium we grew up attending is much different than the one our fathers knew. So it will be with our children. That's fine. The beat goes on. Time marches on. The concession lines go on.

But what if Nebraska underperforms over the next couple of seasons, right before Dear Old NU starts asking fans for more money than ever before?

Athletic Director Troy Dannen has said the stadium renovation is expected to generate tens of millions of dollars in additional annual revenue. I hope he's right.

Winning feels like the best way to make sure that happens.

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