Nebraska football and the hilarious problem with national prognosticators

Nebraska football kicks off its season against Northwestern on Saturday.

That the Huskers are facing off against the Wildcats appears to be something that is not in dispute. The same can’t be said of some of the other games on the schedule … apparently.

Hilariously national sports writer and prognosticator Stewart Mandel underlined what happens when guys who clearly know their business might be stretched too thin. His recent comments also underlined why Nebraska fans would be wise to take what these national prognosticators have to say with a grain of salt.

Whether those comments are positive or negative.

The hilarity ensued on Twitter on Wednesday morning when Stewart Mandel answered a question about his preseason predictions for the records of both the Cornhuskers and the Oklahoma Sooners.

The poster pointed out that Mandel had both NU and OU with just one non-conference loss. Since they can’t lose to each other, the user pointed out that Mandel seemed to think that one of the teams was going to lose to an FCS opponent. When he asked Mandel flat out, the writer’s response demonstrated more than just a tweet he didn’t put much thought into, rather it seemed to indicate that his preseason predictions were off kilter.

Mandel responded that Nebraska football’s matchup with “a very good” FCS team just six days after their tilt against Northwestern was a “trap game.” While it’s of course possible that it could be a trap game no matter what the opponent was, the problem with Mandel’s tweet is that unless he knows something the rest of the college football world does not know, the Huskers are not, in fact, playing a “very good” FCS team.

Who the Cornhuskers are playing is a North Dakota Fighting Hawks squad that finished last season with a 5-6 record. No offense to the Hawks, but it’s extremely generous to frame them as “very good” even if they’re supposed to be better than the 2021 version.

Where this episode takes a turn from just wrong to rather funny is that it doesn’t appear Mandel has some inside information that the Fighting Hawks have reshaped themselves as an FCS juggernaut.

It seems extremely likely that the national college football expert confused North Dakota for North Dakota State.

NDSU is indeed a very good FCS program. In fact, they just went 14-1 in 2021 and won another FCS National Championship. They could indeed be a handful for a tired and possibly jet-lagged Nebraska football squad. But they don’t play them.

This isn’t to call out Mandel only or specifically. But at the same time, it appears that when he was going over his teams and coming up with their 2022 schedule predictions, he looked at North Dakota and saw North Dakota State several times.

Once again, Bison very good; Fighting Hawks much less so.

And that’s the problem with taking anything national media says as gospel. These men and women simply don’t have the time to do the kind of homework they often behave as though they’ve done.

There are 130+ FBS college football programs out there right now, and that number grows every year. No one should be expected to know every little thing about every single team out there. That’s a herculean task, and people like Mandel have other commitments.

That doesn’t make it any less hilarious when someone predicts that Nebraska football is going to be toppled by a team they aren’t even facing off against. Just keep that in mind as the college football season moves forward this fall.