The Buckeyes are hungry to shuck off their bye-week blues against the Cornhuskers this Saturday.
Nebraska
Cornhuskers
After a week to recover and review what went wrong in a 32-31 loss at then-No. 3 Oregon, Ohio State welcomes Nebraska into the Shoe for what should be a get-right game against a decent opponent that doesn't threaten OSU atop the Big Ten.
The Cornhuskers are fresh off of a 56-7 shelling at the hands of undefeated No. 13 (W)Indiana, but overall possess a respectable 5-2 record in 2024. They have a head coach and quarterback that the program hopes are building blocks of future success.
Nebraska is one of the most storied programs in college football, though, even if the Cornhuskers haven't sniffed the summit of the sport in the last 20 years. They hold the ninth-most wins in college football history and five national championships, and with that tradition comes a unique nickname lore and one of the sport's most iconic stadiums, Memorial Stadium.
Rhule of man
Nebraska's been trying to recapture the glory of legendary head coach and three-time national champion Tom Osborne since his retirement following an undefeated national title season in 1997. Frank Solich kept the program nationally relevant for a time, going 12-1 with a Fiesta Bowl win in 1999, but was fired following a 9-3 regular season in 2003. Bo Pelini took over and led the team to an Alamo Bowl win.
Such 9-3 regular seasons became Pelini's hallmark, then he too was canned in favor of Mike Riley in 2014, but not before leading Nebraska to its last 10-win season, a 10-4 campaign in 2012. As that fact might indicate, Riley's tenure did not go to plan, then he was fired and Scott Frost was brought in. Frost never had a winning season and went 16-31 before getting his walking papers three games into the 2022 season.
Finally, the downward somersault has seemed to halt with second-year head coach Matt Rhule. Rhule's previous coaching stop was an NFL flop with the Carolina Panthers, but before that, he built Baylor from a 1-11 scandal-ridden squad in 2017 to an 11-3 campaign by 2019.
Nebraska went 5-7 in 2023 during its first year under Rhule, which was still its best record since 2019. As mentioned above, Nebraska already has five wins in 2024. If the Huskers fall to the Buckeyes on Saturday, they will still have a decent shot at their first winning season since 2016. Their remaining schedule includes home tilts with UCLA and Wisconsin with road matchups at USC and Iowa, and two wins out of four there or one win and a bowl victory will lock up a campaign with more wins than losses.
Rhule has also started recruiting more talent into the program, signing the nation's composite No. 18 class in 2024 and currently holding the No. 23 class in 2025. Among his 2024 signees is a potential program-changing talent. Speaking of which:
Raiola of hope
Nebraska hopes Dylan Raiola, its five-star freshman quarterback, can lead it to a brighter future. (Photo: Dylan Widger-Imagn Images)
Dylan Raiola is the present and future of football's most important position for Nebraska's program. A five-star recruit ranked as the No. 3 quarterback and No. 23 prospect overall in the 247Sports composite for the class of 2024, his father Dominic Raiola played center for the Huskers and won a Rimington Trophy as the nation's best at the position in 2000 before a 14-year NFL career with the Detroit Lions.
Anyone who even loosely follows Ohio State recruiting is familiar with Dylan Raiola. He committed to the Buckeyes in May 2022 before shopping around and eventually decommitting that December. He then pledged his services to Georgia in May 2023 and in that December flipped again to sign with Nebraska.
Regardless, Rhule wasted no time throwing his future into the fire right away. Raiola started Week 1 this season as a freshman and has had the ups and downs expected of a first-year player on what looks to be a mid-tier team. On the season, he's completed 66.2% of his passes for 1,592 yards and nine touchdowns but is averaging an underwhelming 7.5 yards per attempt and has thrown six interceptions.
Three of those picks and none of those touchdowns came against the Hoosiers this past Saturday. His outing against Rutgers in Nebraska's previous game wasn't much better, as he went a meager 13-of-27 (48.1%) for 134 yards with no touchdowns and an interception.
That said, Raiola put on a good show in regulation in his team's 31-24 overtime loss to Illinois on Sept. 20, going 24-of-35 (68.6%) for 297 yards and three touchdowns against one interception.
Strong run defense
Nebraska's two Big Ten wins this season, a 14-7 win over Rutgers and a 28-10 victory at Purdue, came on the back of great defensive outings. Those are two of four defensive performances for the Huskers this year in which they've allowed fewer than 270 yards of total offense. They rank 19th nationally in scoring defense (17.7 points allowed per game) and 18th in total yardage allowed per contest (304.3).
Run defense is the team's strong suit. Nebraska is 16th in rushing yards allowed per game (102.9) and 20th in yards allowed per carry (3.3). Conversely, it is 42nd in passing yards given up per contest (201.4) and tied for 37th in yards allowed per pass attempt (6.5).
Isaac Gifford stars at Rover, the fifth defensive back position in the 4-2-5 scheme of defensive coordinator Tony White. He paces the Huskers with 40 tackles, adding three tackles for loss and a pass breakup.
Gifford is one of seven seniors in Nebraska's veteran defensive starting lineup, which features exclusively upperclassmen. Defensive tackle Ty Robinson leads the charge up front with a team-high six TFLs and four sacks. Linebacker John Bullock is another name to watch with 36 tackles, five TFLs, two sacks, three PBUs and an interception this year.
Perhaps the most fun story on Nebraska's defense is that of defensive end and pass rush specialist James Williams. A former walk-on, Williams is tied for the team lead with four sacks despite playing just 17.6 defensive snaps per game, per Pro Football Focus. As such, he's earned the nickname “Sack Man.” After a two-sack performance against the Scarlet Knights, he opened up to the Huskers' media about his journey.
“I just have been through so much since I've been here," Williams said. "I've only been here since last July, very late June, and I've been through hell and back. I lost family, I lost so much. To be here today, in this moment, is not where I thought I would be.”
Bugeaters to Cornhuskers
Nebraska is one of 10 Great Plains states in the USA, and each of those states has some level of corn production in its farming yield. Two of those 10 rise above the rest in that regard, Iowa and Nebraska, which were two of the top three (first and third, respectively) corn-yielding states in 2023.
The Crimson and Cream didn't adopt its colors until after its first two seasons of football in 1890 and 1891, and during that time the team was known as the Old Gold Knights. When they claimed their current color scheme in 1892, it appropriately came with a nickname change to none other than the Bugeaters, named for the common nighthawk birds that hunt insects across the plains. The birds are nicknamed "bullbats" for their bat-like flight patterns.
Nebraska sportswriter Charles S. Sherman, who later helped found the AP Poll, decided it was time for another moniker adjustment after the 1899 season, the then-Bugeaters' first losing campaign in school history.
This is where Iowa comes back into play. Consistently the top corn-producing state in the country even at that time, Iowa supporters were sometimes referred to as Cornhuskers, but that program seemed to already be moving in the direction of being called the Hawkeyes.
So Sherman started referring to the team as the Cornhuskers and they embraced it their very next season in 1900. It caught so much fire that the state of Nebraska itself became the Cornhusker State in 1945.
Remember Memorial
Ohio State might not be playing there this Saturday, but Nebraska's Memorial Stadium has a tradition that stacks up with the Shoe. The two cathedrals of college football were actually built in the exact same year, 1922.
Constructed for $450,000 (roughly $8.45 million today) with an initial capacity of 31,080, Memorial has since been expanded to hold 85,000 fans. Its attendance record is 92,003, not set during a football game but during a volleyball match last year. It's the most fans ever to attend a women's sporting event.
That's not to say its football games are sparsely seen, though, as Nebraska has sold out a record 401 consecutive home games dating back to 1962. It's a major point of pride among its fanbase, and it had to be to maintain a consistent Sea of Red through six consecutive losing seasons (2020 isn't included in the streak due to the COVID-19 pandemic) in the last year of Riley, Frost's entire tenure and Rhule's first year.
As one might guess, the name Memorial is tied to the remembrance of United States veterans who died serving their country. The original proposal for the stadium also included a gymnasium and museum complex. The death of former Nebraska football captain Dusty Rhodes, killed in action during World War I, was a rallying point for fundraising efforts.
Memorial was dedicated to Nebraskans who died in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the 751 – including Rhodes – who perished in World War I. The following inscriptions, written by former Nebraska professor of philosophy Hartley Burr Alexander, are posted at the stadium's four corners:
Southeast: "In Commemoration of the men of Nebraska who served and fell in the Nations Wars."
Southwest: "Not the victory but the action; Not the goal but the game; In the deed the glory."
Northwest: "Courage; Generosity; Fairness; Honor; In these are the true awards of manly sport."
Northeast: "Their Lives they held their countrys trust; They kept its faith; They died its heroes."
