Nebraska’s quarterback buzz has officially gone off the rails, and Anthony Colandrea is right in the middle of it.
Two weeks into fall camp, the chatter around the newest Husker has grown so loud that one On3 analyst went all the way there: Jake Crain said he’d rather have Colandrea - even with an eye-patch - than a fully healthy Dylan Raiola. That’s the kind of line that doesn’t just raise eyebrows; it detonates them.
“I think Colandrea's a witch,” Crain said on a recent podcast episode that featured former Husker Will Compton. “I would take Colandrea with an eye-patch on over Raiola, full health.”
And what made the moment even more striking was the reaction around the table. Nobody pushed back.
Instead, the group made it clear they believed Raiola out and Colandrea in was the best thing to happen to Nebraska in a long time.
That is a massive endorsement for Colandrea, whose track record outside the Mountain West has been, at best, ordinary. Still, a lot of this conversation also comes from the growing belief that Raiola may never quite match the hype that followed him.
Maybe Nebraska didn’t get the best version of the former 5-star recruit. Or maybe he’s been so focused on avoiding mistakes that he’s taken the edge out of his own game.
That caution has been part of the criticism. Raiola, at times, looked reluctant to trust what he could do, and that showed up on throws he should have been able to make, including a fade into the corner of the end zone.
The issue wasn’t arm strength or touch. It was hesitation - the sense that he was thinking about the turnover before he trusted the throw.
Colandrea, by contrast, doesn’t play like a quarterback trying to keep the lights from going out. A Mountain West Conference Offensive Player of the Year season will do that.
He trusts his arm, trusts his instincts, and lives with the consequences. That means the ball can end up in the wrong team’s hands at a decent clip, but it also means that when he’s on, he’s really on.
That’s the tradeoff Nebraska fans are being told to accept: the bad comes with the good, and the good can be very, very good.
Even with that, the idea that Colandrea is already being framed by some On3 voices as a better quarterback than Raiola - who is entering his third season and has two years as a starter behind him - is still a bold one. It’s especially bold when measured against what Colandrea showed at Virginia, where he was mediocre at best.
But bold is where the Nebraska quarterback conversation lives now. And for Husker fans, the hope is simple: maybe the people making these wild comparisons are onto something, and Anthony Colandrea really is the upgrade they’ve been waiting for.
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