The Huskers got 19 points in the pre-season coaches poll, which puts them 39th.
A little low compared to where some of the pre-season lists have had them, but at least they’re mentioned.
Huskers fare a bit better in the AP poll, coming in at 31st.
This article is just so accurate.
This is a telling paragraph:
From 2011-14, Nebraska went an astounding 13-5 in one-score games. That’s 72.2%.
In 10 full seasons since that 2014 win over Iowa (and the bowl game that finished up that season), Nebraska has found themselves in 63 games decided by a single touchdown. They’ve only won 17.
Good teams tend to be luckier than average teams. For a current example I would suggest the Milwaukee Brewers, who have their 2nd 10+ game winning streak of the 2025 season, and the Chicago Cubs, who can’t seem to get out of their own way on routine plays lately.
There are exceptions to any rule, of course, and in college football Penn State has been one. They’ve had pretty good teams, but they also can’t seem to get out of their own way when it comes to closing out victories in competitive games. While I know Northwestern fans who think this is karma coming back against James Franklin for cancelling games against Northwestern when he was at Vanderbilt, even JoePa had years where he seemed snake-bittten. Another snake-bitten team over the years has been Minnesota.
I hope this article is right about Nebraska having the Minnesota game circled in red, those have been even more frustrating than the Iowa games.
Good article, I look forward to reading his counterpoint to it next week.
Mike Nolan
I tend to look at one-score game records the same way I’d look at coin flips over time: unless something structural is going on, they should average out close to 50%.
My rationale is pretty simple. By definition, a one-score game means the two teams were evenly matched on that day, regardless of their season records. Over enough games, if everything else is equal, you’d expect to win about half.
The extremes are what tell you something more. Nebraska flipping from 72% wins in 2011–14 to just 27% in the last decade isn’t bad luck anymore. Over 63 games, the math says this is systemic. You’d have to try pretty hard not to regress to the mean over that many games. This isn’t just random variance. It’s a decade of being on the wrong side of the skill / execution / coaching equation.
I have enough data to really dig into this, but I don’t have the time today. I’m taking tomorrow and Friday so I’ll fire up Python and look at 2007-2019 and dig into 1-score games.