Nebraska is undefeated in NCAAF. Why are they not top-25?

I'm a lifelong fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. I worked in the stadium when I was so young that I can't believe it was legal and I barely remember any of it. I have followed very few college football teams in my life for all of it, but I have followed Nebraska. I am a true fan and always will be.

They were a dominant team in the 80's and started to slip a bit after Tom Osborne left the team after a ton of seasons at the helm. Shortly thereafter the team has been rather average, with a few trips to some slightly meaningful bowls but never any real contention for a national title. It just shows how important a good head coach actually is for a football program at any level.

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Nebraska normally has a pretty easy pre-season and early season and their first conference test was against a struggling Michigan State and Nebraska easily won and made almost everyone happy because of that by easily winning the game 31-13.

I had hoped this victory would turn some heads and maybe get Nebraska a nod for the top-25, but they weren't really even considered. The win was a good one, or so it would appear, but there is more to a team than just their W/L ratio, and the experts know that. This is why they are not top-25 and are unlikely to be this season unless they can pull off an upset victory against Indiana next weekend.

Here's why:

Nebraska handily defeated Mich State and that is a good thing because of name recognition. But the downside of this is that Mich State's name is a lot bigger than their football program is. Michigan State has gotten basically wrecked by any team they have played that has a name that football fans even recognize. It's not really that big of a deal when you defeat Toledo and Eastern Michigan for your only 2 wins of the season.

They sort of held their own against Notre Dame but still lost the game pretty badly (although Notre Dame beat them by LESS than Nebraska did and ND is ranked number 3 at the moment.)

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We need to dig into the numbers to understand why Nebraska isn't ranked in the top 25 and here are some stats to consider.

In the game vs. Michigan State, Nebraska failed to accomplish as much as would be required on offense to really turn some heads. Sure, they scored 4 touchdowns in the game and allowed only 1 but these TD's took ages and as is usual for Nebraska, their passing game isn't really as fantastic as we want to see. They averaged less than 8 yards per pass (on completed passes only) and while this slow burn down the field is very typical of Nebraska football, it isn't the sort of thing that really gets you noticed. It seems as though Nebraska rarely goes for long passing plays and instead opts for an explosive and relentless crawl down the field. Is this effective? Well it is to a degree, but they haven't really been tested by a "good" defense yet this year.

Their only victories that the press even paid attention to was vs. Michigan State and Maryland and if we were to say that neither of those teams are very good, we would be correct. There is no reason to focus on either one of them this year.

Nebraska failed on almost every offense benchmark vs Michigan State including third down conversion, yards per play, and red-zone conversion rate. That's all fine and dandy when you are up by 14 points at halftime, but against a good team when it really counts, that is not enough and relies too much on the team you are playing against to be bad rather than you being good.

The Nebraska defense looked really good in the game vs. the Spartans, but again, this could be due to how "bad" MS is rather than how incredible the Nebraska defense is.

The 3rd quarter of this game was embarrassing. They barely moved the ball down the field at all and while they held Michigan State to just 3 points in that quarter, they didn't look like the better team at all for 1/4 of the game. This can't happen if you want to be top-25.

Things could go terribly wrong for the Cornhuskers in the rest of the season as their true tests are coming up. Next week they have Indiana, then Oregon, then they get a couple of games that should be gimmeys, then they face Ohio State and Iowa and I fear that they are going to lose all of these, perhaps badly.

If it goes the way that I fear it is going to, Nebraska will get relegated to some barely noticeable bowl game again this year and everyone will go back to thinking "well, get em next year!"

We've been saying that for 20 years.

Nebraska, as much as I love them, doesn't deserve to be in the top-25 and I seriously doubt that we will see them there at any point in this season.

No matter what happens though, defeating Michigan State is always a good thing in my book.