There are plenty of reasons the Nebraska football team hasn't shown the same kind of speedy success that head coach Matt Rhule has seen over his career, but one of the biggest is a lack of offensive identity.
Since Rhule has been in Lincoln, the Huskers have tried to roll out a dual-threat approach, then went to a pocket-passer pro-style attack, then a kind of hybrid pro-style, air-raid offense, and finally, whatever the 2026 Dana Holgorsen offense will bring. So far, it's three years and three different offensive approaches, zero identities.
Could this fall be the difference? Could new quarterback Anthony Colandrea, teamed with Holgorsen, finally give Nebraska a real offensive identity? That is at least the goal. The coaches made it clear this spring that they feel the UNLV transfer can run the offense Holgorsen wants a bit more completely than Dylan Raiola could.
Nebraska Cornhuskers On SI writer Mike Delaware believes the Huskers could finally show they know who they are on offense. If that's the case, it would certainly mean that they could find more consistency. More consistency leads to more success.
Anthony Colandrea could finally give Nebraska football a true offensive identity
The identity in question would be a run-first attack that features many quarterback runs. Colandrea certainly looks like he'd be able to handle that particular attack better than what Raiola did. Even when the more mobile TJ Lateef took over last year late in the season, the Huskers still couldn't roll that attack entirely because of Lateef's lack of experience.
With Colandrea, it looks like it's time to return to a running quarterback complementing a powerful rushing attack, the way Nebraska was hoping Jeff Sims would in Rhule's first year with the program.
"The first real attempt at that vision came in year one with Jeff Sims, and it’s fair to say that experience reshaped the conversation entirely. The athleticism was there. The upside was obvious. But the turnovers were crippling," Delaware wrote. "It wasn't just a failure, it killed trust in the system."
"That forced Nebraska into a midseason pivot, throwing Heinrich Haarberg into action. With Haarberg, the offense leaned more heavily into physicality and the run game. It wasn’t perfect, but it was at least coherent. There was a direction. Then everything shifted again."
Everything shifted again because it was clear that while Haarberg was a gifted runner, he simply wasn't an FBS-level passer. He eventually even lost the starting quarterback job late in the season as his mistakes piled up, leading to yet another Huskers campaign without a bowl game.
Rhule and offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield decided d to turn things over to a pocket passer and let the running backs do all the work on the ground. Then Satterfield was fired late in the 2024 season, and Holgorsen was brought in. He tried to shape his offense around Raiol, but after a bowl win over Boston College, it was obvious that in 2025 things weren't meshing as they hoped.
Anthony Colandrea is a return to the Jeff Sims approach. Right down to having a quarterback that, on occasion, turns the ball over too much. However, with a quarterback coming off a Mountain West MVP season, Nebraska believes the fourth time is the charm. With the entire program on the same page (perhaps for the first time in four years), the Huskers' identity crisis could finally come to an end. The sky's the limit if that's the case.
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