Whether Nebraska football has hit bottom is still an open question
Nebraska football losing badly to a Top 25 team on the road isn’t automatically as bad as it can get.
After the loss to Michigan 56-10 on Saturday, Nebraska football head coach Scott Frost tried to assure the fans that it can only get better from here. But is that really the case?
The point of that comment seems to be that the Cornhuskers could not possibly play worse, or be more embarrassed than they were last weekend. I’m not sure that’s accurate.
The fact of the matter is, the Huskers are only 0-3. They’ve only lost seven straight games dating back to last year. Two of those three losses are to Top 25, or Top 25 adjacent teams.
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Now that Nebraska has officially kicked off its Big Ten season, it’s hard to know just where the bottom really might be. Consider this for a moment: Purdue knocked off Top 25 Boston College quite easily last week.
They come to Lincoln with the added incentive of proving Frost wrong when he said it’s a “game we can win.” Yes, the Boilermakers are 1-3. But they’re also coming in as 3.5-point favorites.
Clearly, there are people who think it’s not a given the Cornhuskers will get a win. If they do in fact lost to Purdue they will be 0-4 for the first time in school history. That needs repeating.
"The Huskers will start 0-4 for the first time in school history with a loss to Purdue."
A loss would also be the first time the program has ever lost eight games in a row. Even when covering parts of two seasons. Then they head out to Wisconsin.
0-5 suddenly looks very realistic. How many miles below “bottom” is the team at that point? If you really want to get worried, consider that Illinois, long one of the worst teams in the conference since the Huskers joined, went punch for punch with Penn State last weekend … until the fourth quarter.
None of this is to say that the Huskers are going to automatically keep digging for a new bottom. It’s entirely possible that a win over Purdue hits a kind of reset button on the season. The Cornhuskers looked good against Colorado.
It’s not a coincidence that they came into that game with supreme confidence and played their best football of the season. A win on Saturday could go a long way towards fixing what ails it.
dark. Next. Numbers of note in Nebraska football’s loss to Michigan
The thing Nebraska football fans need to keep in mind is that it’s always darkest before the dawn, and we might not have hit pitch black just yet.