Nebraska is a college football riddle: What do you do when nine wins a season isn't good enough? Most places, after all, would love to have that problem.
But Nebraska isn't like most places in college football, so that's the question first-year head coach Mike Riley has to answer.
The Huskers have a history of national championships and Heisman winners. The program is still a game-day destination with world-class facilities and outstanding institutional/fan support—all the things that make up a blue-blood program.
Yet Nebraska hasn't won at an elite level since the early 2000s. The likes of Bill Callahan and Bo Pelini could never replicate the success the program experienced under legendary coach Tom Osborne.
Can Riley reverse that trend? Yes and no.
Understand this about the promised land for Nebraska: It's not a replica of the Osborne era. That's just not the Huskers' place in college football anymore.
If Riley can lead Nebraska to a Big Ten championship at least once and multiple Big Ten West division titles, he'll have done his job. More specifically, if he can get Nebraska to play with consistency, those goals are more obtainable.
Consistency—that's something Pelini's teams rarely had. If anything, they were consistently inconsistent. That was perhaps the biggest reason Nebraska never flourished under him. How many times were the Huskers in a position to take home a divisional or conference crown only to fall (sometimes astoundingly) short?
There were losses of every variety, with blowouts and heartbreakers alike. The 70-31 loss to Wisconsin in the 2012 Big Ten title game was an embarrassment. The loss to UCLA at home in 2013 was brutal. Up 21-3 with one minute remaining in the second quarter, Nebraska gave up a Paul Perkins touchdown. Then it gave up 28 straight points in the third quarter as part of a 41-21 defeat.
In order to get back to the level it wants, Nebraska has to be more consistent. That starts with winning the games it's supposed to win in a division that's—to put it one way—winnable.
That goes without saying, right? Yes, but Brandon Vogel of Hail Varsity provides an in-depth answer as to why it's so important:
Over the past seven seasons, Nebraska — according to Phil Steele’s data — was favored in 75.5 percent of its games. The Huskers won 71.1 percent of those games outright over that span. During Mike Riley’s tenure at Oregon State, the Beavers were favored 51.4 percent of the time and won outright 53.7 percent of the time. ...
Now, 2 percent above expectations might not seem like a huge deal, but it’s really hard for a coach, particularly one at a powerhouse program, to be better than the spread. That’s Riley challenge (sic) now. Assuming Nebraska is of relatively the same strength over the next five years (and 13 games per year), if the Huskers were favored 75 percent of the time and Riley was two percentage points better than that, he’s averaging 10.1 wins a season. Even if he’s just at that 75 percent number, that’s 9.8 wins per year, a half-game improvement per year over the average for the previous seven seasons.
That half-game could be a halftime adjustment. It could be finishing what the team starts in a game. It could be the difference between a second-place Big Ten West finish and a divisional title, or between another Holiday Bowl trip and a Rose Bowl berth.
It could also mean the difference between whether Riley has a job with Nebraska in five or six years or not.
At Oregon State, Riley developed a reputation for taking a team of mostly under-the-radar players and getting every last bit of potential out of them. Though Nebraska is at a whole other level as a program, the same need applies. Riley has to get the most out of the talent available and the talent which is not yet on the roster.
The benefit Riley has now is that he has resources available to recruit more than just under-the-radar players. Pulling out recruiting gems will still be part of the game plan, but so will landing bigger-name prospects. Nebraska may not have a natural recruiting territory, but it can still attract some blue-chip players Riley never would have had access to at Oregon State.
As JC Schurburtt of 247Sports opines, Riley is as resourceful as any coach in the country. He'll make the most of his recruiting efforts in Lincoln:
At Nebraska, you have a bigger, better brand to sell, but you still have to be resourceful and scour the country for talent (along with having a developed walk-on program for the in-state prospects). There’s no more proven head coach in the country at doing just that than Riley. The talent level at Nebraska will ultimately prove to be superior to what he had at Oregon State (and likely already is), but it’s his resourcefulness and ability to build a high-level roster on an annual basis that will pay dividends for this program.
That doesn't mean Nebraska will land top-10 classes regularly anytime soon, but Riley should be able to pull in top-25 classes with a mix of 4-star and higher 3-star targets from Oklahoma, Texas and elsewhere. One recent commit, dual-threat quarterback Terry Wilson, is from the Sooner state.
He's also committed to keeping in-state and regional kids coming to Nebraska.
“The one thing that we want to know for sure is that we’re going to keep all the best football players from right here,” Riley said, via Jon Nyatawa of the Omaha World-Herald.
Riley is known as one of the nicest, most respected coaches in the business—but he's also known as a builder and developer. Nebraska may have been winning nine and 10 games under Pelini, but the program is not above the need to build and develop.
Riley is establishing a new culture at Nebraska, one that's more fan-friendly and less abrasive. Pelini's attitude (he only cared about his players) never meshed well with the administration or the fanbase.
Nine-win seasons may not be the end of the world for this program, but the attitude around the program has to change. Additionally, the blowout losses have to stop, and the ceiling has to be higher.
Even if that ceiling is reached once every few years.
Ben Kercheval is a lead writer for college football. All quotes cited unless obtained firsthand. All recruiting information courtesy of 247Sports.
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