Year three of the Matt Rhule era is upon us. As was the case in 2024, the Nebraska football team faces what is considered to be a manageable Big Ten schedule. Of course, the Huskers are not in a position to take any team for granted. But the Big Red avoids Ohio State, Oregon, and Indiana–all playoff teams in 2024–and they also get Michigan, USC, and Iowa at home.
The point is, the schedule could be much worse. It sets up nicely for the Huskers to have a chance to take a leap, similar to what Matt Rhule has done at his other stops in college football.
We recently did a Common Fan podcast episode looking at three games that will define the season in 2025. For the episode, each of the Common Fan co-hosts picked our own lists of games; today I’ll try to boil it down to just the top three.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did this exercise in August of last year. The Huskers won one of the three games on my list, but I do believe all three went a long way towards defining the season, for better or worse. I picked Colorado (a thoroughly satisfying W), Illinois (an overtime loss where the boys in red still played pretty well), and Iowa (a maddening, pull-your-hair-out loss where Nebraska completely outplayed the Hawkeyes on the field and won every statistical category, only to hand the game away).
Hopefully this year, we see all three of these games end up as wins.
Let’s get to it. Cincinnati. This one makes me a bit nervous. Nebraska opens up with Cincinnati, Akron, and Houston Christian as their first three games (side note: every time I see “HCU” on the schedule I have to google it to see who they are). The Bearcats will be…