Progression Aggression

Anyone else had it up to here with end-of-season talk about ‘progress’?

Homecoming Dinged: After a couple weeks of October speculation that Penn State might want him as their next coach, Matt Rhule’s return to his alma matter Penn State was anything but welcoming, as Kaytron Allen and the Nittany Lions ran roughshod and rolled to a 37-10 win. – Illustration by Anthony Aleman

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Let's begin with a definition from Noah Webster's first dictionary, published in 1828, titled "An American Dictionary of the English Language""

Progress (noun) 1. Forward, onward movement, as towards a destination. 2. Development, advancement, or improvement, as towards a goal. 3. A ceremonial journey made by a sovereign through his or her realm.

And now, a definition from the "Husker Football Dictionary," which I wrote, edited and published out of thin air five minutes ago:

Noah Webster would be disappointed in how you've butchered the word "progress," Husker fans.

Progress (noun) 1. Something for Nebraska fans to obsess about each November to justify watching a mediocre football team that cannot break through into the national conversation. 2. A word in headlines/articles that mandatorily appears, oh, 5,000 times each November. 3. A ceremonial journey of jargon made by Nebraska’s sovereign – errrr, head coach – in order to secure a healthy contract extension.  

That’s right, kids. The current Huskers football season has reached late November, so you know what that means: It’s time to talk about progress! YAY! Not a game. And certainly not the college playoff. Progress.

Has Matt Rhule made any progress? It’s year three, so we MUST decide NOW whether or not he’s made progress! Progress, progress, progress! 

Talking about “progress” has become the default mode for fans and media in the midst of another “blahzayblah” season, the 2025 edition a cupcake-inflated 7-4 campaign that once again sees the Huskers land squarely in the middle of the Big Ten pack. The two best media members in the state – the Omaha World-Herald’s Sam McKewon and On3’s Steven M. Sipple – are not immune.

But like Pavlov’s Dog, I pull out my phone. Click-click-click, swipe-swipe-swipe. And I’m up to my eyeballs in progress.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re once again asking whether or not Nebraska football has made progress, the answer is no, they haven’t. Progress is neither linear nor quantifiable – you just know it when you see it. And in this case, we’ll know it when we’re not talking about it anymore. For if, not when* the Huskers make this (seemingly elusive) progress, it will cease to be the object of our obsession. We won’t be talking about progress; we’ll be talking about conference championship games and the College Football Playoff. There will be no need to talk about progress, because we will have already made it.     

*There was a time, and not so long ago, that I would have phrased that as “when, not if,” but games like Saturday night’s 37-10 drubbing in Penn State, have led me to believe the contrary. Goddamn it all to hell. 

But we have to talk about something. And thank god guys like McKewon and Sipple do, because I need something to click on. (For all my big talk, I listen to ALL of it.) Can you tell I’m annoyed yet? Getting piss-pounded by 27 points against a 4-6 team will do that to a fella. In fact, I’m annoyed by a lot of things – although maybe not as annoyed as Creighton basketball play-by-play announcer John Bishop (at right) of 1620 the Zone was over a foul in Monday’s New Eras Tournament game wowza – some of them which we’ll dive into in more detail later. But here’s a quick ranking of annoyance heading into Thanksgiving:   

1. The college football coaching “system.” It’s a fear-based system that allows coaches like our sovereign Matt Rhule to leverage a 7-4 season ripe with smoke and mirrors into $71 million in guaranteed money.

2. The ongoing Dylan vs. T.J. “controversy.” People acting like Dylan never completed one single pass on the run.

3. People who call into “Big Red Overreaction” after the game and lecture people for being negative. Or even worse, when hosts are the ones doing the lecturing. Let the people vent, man.

4. Iowa. Just Iowa in general.   

For this level of annoyance, there’s only one cure, and it’s not more cowbell – but rather a regular season-ending win over our loathsome neighbors to the east on Black Friday. Ready, down, hut-hut-hut-hut-hut! On with “Four Downs.” L.F.G.

FOUR DOWNS

1. It was apparent after Penn State’s first drive that Nebraska didn’t stand a damn chance. I feel like an idiot, and you should, too. Many people (like me) predicted a close loss, others an outright win. Well, we turned out to be “Dumb and Dumber.” It’s like we talked all year (because we did) about how much the Huskers were lacking on the offensive and defensive lines, got blinded by Penn State’s disappointing season – exemplified by their 4-6 record – and threw all that talk out the window. Just a terrible job, by all of us. After an encouraging first drive that made it to Penn State’s 2-yard-line but resulted in zero points, the Nittany Lions played the simplest game; they were bigger, faster, stronger – and they knew it.

Their circumstances have changed, but the Nittany Lions were bigger, faster, stronger on Saturday, just like they were all season. Just because you lose a couple games doesn’t mean the talent (they were ranked No. 2 in the preseason for a reason) goes away. They were a hot knife through butter. And when they weren’t that, they were a knife through hot butter. Either way, after a rocky October Penn State has found its stride and pride while rallying under interim head coach Terry Smith. If there’s one thing Nebraska has been consistently good at, it’s helping other teams play their best game of the season. We sure helped Minnesota. We had no chance against the bigger, stronger, faster Nittany Lions. To say they were more physical than Nebraska would be putting it lightly; at this point it goes without saying the Huskers were better in the trenches in both of Rhule’s first two seasons.

You were saying something about … progress?     

And while I appreciated the coaching staff’s never-say-die attitude, we probably should’ve waved the white flag sometime in the third quarter – particularly with the expedited six-day turnaround to the Black Friday game against Iowa. And while superstar Emmett Johnson’s “H21SMAN” campaign is fun (I applaud NU’s marketing department for trying), it is also futile, and the six touches and subsequent hits he absorbed in the fourth quarter were unnecessary.  

2. This is the second time this year you could argue a distraction off the field potentially affected Nebraska on the field. Back in October, the Matt Rhule-to-Penn State rumors – which he did a patently awful job of shutting down; but again, leverage, man, leverage! and we lost that game of chess – seemingly played a role in Nebraska’s no-show (that’s putting it nicely) against Minnesota. Flash forward to the two weeks prior to the actual Penn State game. You saw it and you heard it and you probably participated in it, too. The message boards and podcasts and comments sections of Instagram profiles were chalk full of Dylan vs. Lateef rhetoric.

To be clear, on one hand Penn State kicked our ass fair and square and Patrick Mahomes himself would’ve had a tough time keeping it close. On the other hand, these types of things cannot be stopped from manifesting themselves inside locker rooms and creating a distraction, despite what the players might say in interviews. (In fact, anytime someone says “we don’t listen to the outside noise” you can bet your ass they’re listening to the outside noise. Except for maybe – maybe – some out there Quakers who still reject technology – you might still observe them “driving” in buggies in more quaint and less-annoying parts of Iowa – everybody listens to the outside noise.)

Especially when the outside noise involves someone who’s become as polarizing as Dylan Raiola. He brings some of it on himself. You can’t really blame him for taking the seven-figure NIL deals; speaking of Mahomes, some of the antics … while they don’t bother me … I could see it being a little grating to others. But my point is, and has been since Day 1, that those antics shouldn’t judge how you view Dylan Raiola the football player and whether or not he is the best fit for Nebraska going forward. (What his recent Instagram photo swap and the subsequent social media flirtation with Oregon players and coaches, it appears he might not even want to be here anymore anyway.) For those who have had enough of the antics, all it takes is one T.J. Lateef completion for the confirmation bias to begin.

See! See! Dylan can’t even run, man. THIS is what we need man!  

Objectively speaking, Lateef has been good – better than good and better than I thought he’d be. He deserves no criticism for anything and might be the best fit. But you’ve heard the arguments made by the pro-Lateef/anti-Dylan camp before, the most common one being that he’s more mobile and offset our offensive line problems. I’m just here to point out that if a scrambling quarterback is your idea of a solution to Nebraska’s offensive line problem, you must also believe that band-aids are an effective solution to a compound fracture. No quarterback is going to flourish without being protected.

Anyway. Much like I felt when grandma babysat me in the 1980s, I cannot wait for this soap opera to be over (the transfer portal opens Jan. 2 and we should know something by then). Until that day, we’ll remain “The Dumb and the Restless” while “As the Nebraska Football World Turns” and we fill the “Days of Husker Lives” click-click-clicking waiting for news a few weeks after Dylan was operated on in a “General Hospital.”

Yeah, I took it there. The trauma of Grandmomma’s daytime drama does not fade quietly.

3. The defense was so bad it was hard to even tell what defensive coordinator John Butler’s gameplan even was. I’ve continually praised Butler’s strategy this season, as he’s smartly gotten the most out of his defense using a scheme best described as “bend but don’t break.” Saturday night, they simply got bent over. Gameplans-gone-wrong aside, once again they didn’t tackle well (Penn State’s running back combo of Kaytron Allen (above) and Nick Singleton combined for 126 yards after contact). And the previously stellar secondary didn’t cover well, either (quarterback Ethan Grunkemeyer was 11 of 12 passing). The Nittany Lions also got points on their first six possessions. By the time Nebraska forced a punt the score was already 30-3. It was a bad night in an otherwise respectable season from Butler.  

4. What would the narrative be if we had Wisconsin’s schedule? Oh man, I shudder at the thought. The Badgers have had the toughest schedule in the nation; Nebraska’s ranks 54th. Wisconsin currently sits at 4-7 and considering Nebraska has three of the four games they’ve played against good teams this year (and the Cincinnati win looks less impressive by the week) it’s hard to argue the Huskers would’ve fared any better. The Badgers’ road to “no bowl game this year hell” includes losses against College Football Playoff-ranked teams Alabama (No. 10), Michigan (15), Ohio State (1), (6) and Indiana (2). To their credit, after a 2-6 start to the season, Wisconsin has rallied to beat Washington (ranked No. 23 at the time) and Illinois (ranked No. 21 at the time). Nebraska hasn’t beaten a ranked opponent in … well you already know the godforsaken stat. Imagine giving Rhule that contract extension sitting at 4-7 heading into a game against a team (Iowa) that has beaten us ten out of the last 12 times? 

Like I said, this “progress” thing we like to obsess about can’t be boiled down to raw numbers. One team is 7-4; the other is 4-7. I’d argue if Nebraska and Wisconsin played right now, it’s like the Badgers would be favored.

“Deep-ish Thoughts,” by Jack Handoff

-       Don’t Be That Guy: Is there anything worse than watching your team get spanked 37-10 and tuning in to the postmortem radio call-in show for some venting only to hear some jackass get on his high horse and point out positives? I don’t think so. Makes me want to crawl through the radio dial (or in this case, my phone) and go ape. Well Doug in Ainsworth, aren’t you soooooooooo superior? I much prefer sociopathic rants from drunk people. Besides, as I’ve covered, anything a Huskers fan says within 24 hours of a loss and cannot be held against them. Being the naïve douche lecturing people for being disappointed in something they’ve invested valuable time and money into for their entire lives? That’s for eternity, Doug.

-       The fake punt in the fourth quarter was just plain rude: I’m not mad at Penn State’s coach for doing it. They saw a weakness in our punt blocking scheme – a rare loss for special teams coach Mike Ekeler – and exploited it. But still, just kinda rude.

Eye-oh-wa of the Tiger

Can the Huskers tame their rivals – and winners of nine out of 10 in the series – on Black Friday?

Now added to the ever-growing list of Nebraska football “things I never thought I’d see” is the Huskers being a home underdog to a 7-4 team. There’s a lot that goes into it, but the oddsmakers typically think so highly of the Huskers playing at home that in the 2021 game against Iowa – when the Hawkeyes entered the game 9-2 and Nebraska was a paltry 3-8 – Nebraska was still favored by around two to three points.

Not so much this time around. The oddsmakers opened the line with Iowa favored by 4.5 in Lincoln, and the bettors seemed to immediately agree; so much so that as of publication, the spread had jumped to 6.5. My best friend just texted me that one of the loudmouths from Barstool Sports made Iowa winning by 16.5 or more his “bet of the week.” Ouch. That stings, but it’s a rationale that’s tough to argue with after what happened in Happy Valley. They don’t have quite the same caliber of talent, but Iowa plays a similar brand of football (and beat PSU 25-24 in October). The Hawkeyes’ once unfathomable run of victories – 10 out of the last 12 – includes six straight wins in Lincoln, dating back to 2013. That streak is in middle school.

Based on matchups, this year’s Heroes Trophy game has all the makings of a route. Based on history, Iowa will pull a win out of its sphincter with a last-second field goal (Nebraska’s new Thanksgiving tradition!). I thought either of these two scenarios – a route or another grueling 13-10 heartbreaker) were the most plausible as I mulled over ideas for this very column on a windy-ass run (it’s more of a jog these days, possibly even a trot) into the wind and over the Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge Tuesday morning. Iowa is going run it down our throats! Once again, the opponents’ strength is our weakness! And if that fails, surely we will make a blunder on special teams and the clock expiring will coincide with an Iowa field goal splitting the uprights. But then! Ohhhhh … but then. Maybe it was Iowa’s unimpressive win against Michigan State. Maybe it was reaching the armpit of what is the wrong side of the river and turning around towards the skyline of familiar territory. Maybe it was the wind suddenly at my back. Maybe it was the theme song from “Rocky” coming on my playlist.

Getting strong now… gonna fly now…

Or maybe in three days I will look back and conclude that I must have been on something. The runner’s high, after all, is real. Prediction: Nebraska 17, Iowa 14

Volleyball Watch

Funny how there’s no “progress” talk about Nebraska volleyball. The state’s true superstars – the ones who deserve a 2,000-word column but whose play this season can also be summed up in two words: “they’re badass” – finish the regular season with matches this weekend, the first of which is against Penn State at 5:30 p.m. on Black Friday. Should the football team lose to Iowa to start the day, you know where to numb your pain: the game will be televised on Big Ten Network. Saturday, they wrap things up at home against Ohio State.

The NCAA Volleyball tournament kicks off Dec. 4, with the Huskers eyeing the Final Four in Kansas City on Dec. 18.

Enjoy the ride as the ladies head into the thick of it. They’re already at the pinnacle. No talk of progress needed.