Nebraska’s bye week didn’t give the Huskers much peace. While they weren’t on the field, the rest of the weekend did enough damage to make it feel like a rough one anyway.
The odd thing about this particular set of winners and losers is that it has very little to do with Nebraska’s own play. The Huskers didn’t play, so the fallout came from around them - from quarterback chaos across the Big Ten to a few results that probably left plenty of people in Lincoln grinding their teeth.
Anthony Colandrea came out of the weekend looking awfully steady in a conference where that has been hard to find. Big Ten quarterback play has been a mess, with starters benched, backups forced into action because of injuries, and a string of makeshift situations across the league.
Michigan State vs. UCLA and Oregon vs.
Illinois were both battles of the backups. Indiana’s Josh Hoover played and was “not 100% all week.”
Iowa played both quarterbacks.
Colandrea, by contrast, has stayed upright and available. He hasn’t so much as limped off the field in pain this season.
If that continues, it becomes a real point in his favor - proof of toughness and resiliency in a conference where those traits have been rare this year. It also could matter when contract talks heat up around the Transfer Portal.
Scott Shanle also belongs on the plus side of the ledger. When Matt Rhule was first hired, few critics were louder than former Nebraska linebacker Scott Shanle.
He made no secret of how much he disliked the move. After Nebraska’s losses to Oregon and Indiana over the last two weeks, and after seeing how Indiana and Oregon looked this weekend, Shanle has to be feeling pretty good about his stance.
Scott Frost, too, had a weekend that will not be easy for Nebraska fans to ignore. He beat the No. 2 team in the country in a 39-31 double overtime win over BYU, picking up his first win over a Top 25 team since his first stint at UCF. Frost has already started making his case that he never got the right support at Nebraska.
That angle hits harder when you line up the records. In more than four years with the Huskers, he never beat a Top 25 team.
He’s already done it in half that time since returning to Orlando. Meanwhile, current Nebraska coach Matt Rhule led a Top 25 team into the fourth quarter in his fourth year with NU and lost.
The comparison is impossible to miss.
Nebraska football itself gets a spot among the winners, strange as that sounds after a bye week. The rest of the schedule may not be nearly as brutal as it looked before the season, and the weekend offered a few results that could help reshape the picture. Iowa lost to Minnesota, 13-10, in a game that could knock the Hawkeyes out of the Top 25.
Wisconsin also beat No. 16 USC to move to 5-2.
Before the season began, Nebraska fans likely would have preferred facing the Badgers instead of the Illini or Ohio State. With Julian Sayin hurt and Illinois struggling through 2026, even after a big win over Oregon yesterday, it may be better if Wisconsin is not on Nebraska’s schedule this year.
On the other side of the list, Matt Rhule had the worst bye week of anyone in Nebraska. First he had to watch the coach he replaced in Lincoln score a Top 25 win.
Then he saw Michigan push Indiana to overtime before losing 13-6, even with a freshman quarterback who had a rough outing. The weekend ended with Oregon managing only 10 points against an Illinois defense that had been so poor this season it fired its defensive coordinator a few weeks ago.
Rhule surely wanted Indiana and Oregon to roll, if only to quiet some of the second-guessing around him. Instead, most of the weekend broke the wrong way.
Dylan Raiola rounds out the losers. He sat out the first three quarters of his game against Nebraska after struggling badly against UCLA.
He helped Oregon rally in the fourth quarter to beat his former team, then earned a start against Illinois. That didn’t go much better.
He didn’t throw a touchdown, fumbled twice and lost one of them in a 21-10 defeat to the Illini. The weekend made one thing look painfully simple: he wishes he had just stayed put.
In Other News...
Nebraska Fans Are Running Out Of Patience With Matt Rhule
Nebraskas frustration with Matt Rhule has been building for a while, and the latest comparison only adds to it. While the Cornhuskers keep searching for a breakthrough win, Scott Frost is already in his second season at UCF with more victories over ranked teams than Rhule has managed across four years in Lincoln, and Luke Fickell, hired the same year as Rhule, has also stacked up multiple ranked wins with Cincinnati.
The pressure only grows after a close loss to Indiana, a game that again left Nebraska without the kind of signature result fans have been waiting for this season. The Cornhuskers have stayed competitive, but until they finally get over the hump against a ranked opponent, the patience around Rhule is likely to keep wearing thin. [Read more 🡒]
Blackshirts Are Taking Heat For A Much Bigger Nebraska Problem
Nebraskas defense has been easy to point at after the last two losses, especially with the Blackshirts under scrutiny for the way late-game drives slipped away against Indiana and Oregon. But the bigger picture is a little messier than a simple defensive breakdown. The unit has put together strong stretches, held up well statistically and gotten important efforts from key players, even while the games still ended with frustration attached.
The criticism sharpened when Oregon drove for the winner, with Dylan Raiola facing little pressure on the final march, but the problem in those losses did not stop there. Nebraskas offense struggled to do enough, and special teams errors added more weight to the margin for error, leaving the defense to absorb more blame than it probably deserves. If the Cornhuskers are going to turn these narrow losses into something better, the fix will have to be broader than just the Blackshirts. [Read more 🡒]
Nebraska Looks Even More Dangerous After Another Statement Sweep
Nebraska kept rolling with another statement performance, sweeping USC 3-0 and looking as sharp as ever in the process. The Cornhuskers controlled the match from start to finish, swinging at a .400 clip while holding the Trojans to .095, a gap that said plenty about how well Nebraska was playing on both sides of the ball.
Harper Murray led the way with 14 kills and a .426 hitting percentage, while Virginia Adriano added 13 kills and was even more efficient at .500. With production like that from multiple spots, Nebraska is showing the kind of balance that makes it difficult to slow down once the matches get meaningful. [Read more 🡒]