Nebraska
Carriker Chronicles: Nebraska Is 5-1. Is This Team Different? Plus the Rhule Rumors
Adam Carriker poses a lot of questions in this episode of the Carriker Chronicles! First of all, Matt Rhule is already in the middle of rumors swirling about him going to Penn State. Adam shares a conversation he had with Matt Rhule a while back directly related to this very subject! Also, this Nebraska team is 5-1 and ranked, but is this Nebraska team different?! Adam talks about how Nebraska football’s schedule up to this point is actually tougher than most people realize. It’s certainly not an incredibly difficult schedule as an overall whole, but they played four Power Four teams that have a combined winning percentage of 67% for their games so far this year. Last year Nebraska was 5-1 as well to start the year, and the Four Power four teams that had played up to the middle of the season last year had a combined winning percentage of 52% of their games by the end of the season.
There’s a lot of football left to play, but Michigan will probably end the season ranked, Michigan State is the only team without a winning record at 3-3, which is still .500 and Adam is convinced that Maryland is better than most people realize. The same exact thing that Adam said after Nebraska played Cincinnati, who is now 5-1 and ranked one spot ahead of Nebraska, for some reason, at 24th in the country.
Adam talks about Nebraska’s sloppy and ugly play that they’ve had so far this year, but he also explains just how young this team is. Remember, they were the youngest team in the entire Big Ten conference coming into this season. Very different from Matt Rhule’s year three at Temple and at Baylor where he had a majority of juniors and seniors playing and over 80% of his starters returned.
When do you think of Nebraska’s top players this year, guys like Dylan Raiola, Emmett Johnson, Jacory Barney, Nyziah Hunter, the entire defensive line with the exception of one senior, the entire running back room, Luke Lindenmeyer, and more… Every single one of those guys should be back next year. And then in the case of Raiola, Barney and Hunter, they’re not even juniors, they’re all underclassmen. Matt Rhule wanted the jump that he typically has as a coach maybe one year away. That being said, Adam points out that the floor for Nebraska football this season is no longer 6-6 like he had thought it was before this season. The floor is now 8-4. All Nebraska has to do is win half the remaining games and they’ll be 8-4 in the regular season with a potential to get a win in a bowl game.
The goal is obviously much higher than that. Nebraska is a 5½-point favorite at Minnesota and will be a double-digit favorite at home versus Northwestern. It is realistic that Nebraska could be 7-1 heading into November. Adam will not engage in College Football Playoff talk unless that point comes. But if it does come, and it is realistic, Nebraska could be 7-1 heading into November and could only go .500 in November and still be 9-3, with the potential 10th win in a bowl game. This is all very realistic. The remaining schedule for Nebraska is not a killer, but it is more unpredictable than before. No one really knows what to make of UCLA, Northwestern or Penn State at this point.
Minnesota and Iowa are good football teams. Nebraska has more talent than them but has not been able to beat them in the recent past, will this year be different?! USC may be the only ranked team Nebraska plays the rest of this season potentially.
Adam talks about how this team is young, how young players improve at a faster rate than older players, and while there’s been a lot of sloppy football, what he really likes is the mental approach. The grittiness, the mental toughness, and the fact that they’ve already won twice as many one-score games as they’ve lost this year. These were all things that would have been flipped in the past. In fact, there’s a case to be made that instead of being 3-1 versus their four Power Four opponents so far, those are the types of games Nebraska would’ve lost in the past and they could’ve easily been 1-3 in the same four games, which would drastically change Nebraska’s current record and trajectory of the rest of the season.
Tune in to see if Adam Carriker truly thinks this Nebraska team is different or if they’re a year a way or in this day and age of the transfer portal and NIL, if any of those guys will actually be here next year!
Also, with the rumors of Matt Rhule going to Penn State, Adam Carriker had a conversation a while back with Matt Rhule about this very topic! Tune in to hear as Adam shares the exact details of that conversation and this can’t-miss episode of the Carriker Chronicles!
Hit the play button below, Go Big Red, and always remember to throw the bones!
☛ Get more Carriker Chronicles here on Nebraska Cornhuskers On SI, at Adam’s website and on YouTube.
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This is Part One of looking back at Nebraska’s first half of the 2025 season. Coming Monday: Five coolest plays of 2025, plus honorable mentions.
Back in the summer, the weather was warm and preseason expectations were running hot for Nebraska football.
This is the year, Husker fans thought. For once in recent times, there was actual evidence to back up the feelings and the faith. Look out Big Ten, here come the Huskers, many thought, back to where they belong.
The roster was experienced with increased talent. Coach Matt Rhule’s system seemed to work. He went 7-6 the year before — the first winning season in seven years — and the Huskers won their first bowl game since 2015.
The all-important quarterback position was in good hands. Sophomore Dylan Raiola was another year experienced and had shown promise and poise the previous year to instill hope of a big 2025 season. The reasonable hope was he would overcome the inconsistencies he showed in 2024.
Even the schedule cooperated. The non-conference schedule was soft with two FCS teams and a challenging game with FBS Cincinnati.
Missing from the schedule: Big Ten monsters Ohio State and Oregon, and late-blooming monster Indiana. Michigan was a home game for the Huskers, and they played Penn State so late in the season that the game either would have little bearing on the season, or it could mean everything. Penn State would be dealt with when the time came, and not something to worry about in the summer.
Recruiting picked up. Nebraska wasn’t a favorite of those internet recruiting sites, but it was attracting football players and athletes with whom Rhule could win over.
Reports from summer camp were positive. There was talk of team unity. In the summer, all was good.
Armed those good vibes and that empirical evidence, all the football team had to do was, you know, win football games.
Nebraska proved something to itself in its 34-31 win at Maryland on Saturday. The Huskers twice had 10-point leads but were down 31-24 in the fourth quarter.
Raiola, who threw three interceptions, including a pick-six, led the Huskers on two fourth-quarter scoring drives to pull out a game they could have lost.
Maryland was an uncertainty because of talented freshman quarterback Malik Washington and a program that seems headed in the right direction. Normally, in Big Ten hierarchy, this wouldn’t be a big sweat for Nebraska. But, as the Husker faithful know, everything these days can be a big sweat.
But Nebraska showed it could win on the road, and that it could win when it didn’t bring its best and brightest game. Teams accustomed to winning tend to do that — they win.
Nebraska’s opening game, against Cincinnati at neutral-site Kansas City, was a contest that could go either way and experts thought so weeks before the game was played.
The Huskers survived, 20-17, on a last-minute interception by Malcolm Hartzog Jr., in the end zone. Husker fans took a deep breath. Hey, the season wasn’t ruined! Onward!
Nebraska’s next two games were against overmatched opponents and that’s what the results revealed — 68-0 over Akron; 59-7 over FCS Houston Christian.
Now, with the Huskers sitting at 3-0, the 2025 season was ready to being in earnest.
Michigan came to town on Sept. 20 as a 2.5-point favorite. But what Michigan represented was more than a potential victory and a continued undefeated season for the Huskers. Michigan was a monster, too. The Wolverines haven’t been great every season but they were a standard for every opponent. Beat Michigan, and your season meant something.
It’s the way lower-tier Big Ten teams look up to Nebraska.
Nebraska had every chance to defeat Michigan on that beautiful Saturday afternoon. That the Huskers didn’t says more about the Huskers than the Wolverines. As in many football games, the Huskers needed to make a play, or a couple of plays, and today they would be undefeated, ranked probably in the high-teens in the AP Top 25.
Nebraska couldn’t allow Michigan, leading 27-20 in the fourth quarter, to keep the ball for 8 minutes, 46 seconds, and drive 77 yards in 16 plays for a killer field goal and a 30-20 lead. Make a play somewhere in those 16 plays.
Three times on that drive, Nebraska had Michigan in third downs and couldn’t make a stop.
The Huskers couldn’t allow Michigan to score on three excruciatingly long touchdown runs — the Wolverines’ only touchdowns of the game. Shed a block, make a tackle, have a better scheme.
Make a play.
On offense, the Huskers made an amazing play — the 52-yard Hail Mary from Raiola to Jacory Barney Jr. at the end of the first half. It wasn’t enough.
Next, Nebraska handled Michigan State — well, the Huskers won, 38-27, in a mistake-filled game. That was like a March Madness game — win and survive. The Huskers won. Aesthetics, step aside.
Nebraska is 5-1. The Huskers were 5-1 in 2024 and lost their next four games.
There are clear strengths on this year’s team (nation’s No. 1 pass defense going into the Maryland game; passing game; running back Emmett Johnson) and weaknesses (rushing defense). There is inconsistent play and some brilliant play. It feels as if Nebraska is trying to find out what kind of football team it is.
The Huskers have six regular-season games to play. Optimists might have thought the Huskers would be undefeated at this point. A measured look in August at Nebraska and its schedule might predict a 5-1 start without being accused of frenzied fandom.
Five-and-one. That’s about right.
Nebraska’s remaining schedule is fascinating — as most future Big Ten schedules will be. Can the Huskers win out? How about 5-1, or 4-2?
There are season-making or season-breaking games ahead. Let’s be optimistic and say Nebraska will defeat Minnesota — that’s going to be a dogfight. Next is Northwestern, which just won at Penn State. UCLA has joined the party with two consecutive victories after starting the season 0-4. Nebraska travels to UCLA in November.
But think about this: Nebraska still has USC, Penn State and Iowa on the schedule. USC looked unstoppable in beating Michigan on Saturday. Penn State’s wheels have fallen off with three consecutive losses and quarterback Drew Allar reportedly out for the season, but it’s still Penn State on the road. Think about what a win over one of those teams will mean to the Huskers. Or more than one win.
Nebraska met expectations in the first half of a season when much was expected. It was rarely pretty, but it didn’t have to be.
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The face of the Nebraska program went through a metamorphosis of nearly biblical proportions as the hours melted away on beautiful Maryland Saturday in October.
Dylan Raiola, who Matt Rhule famously proclaimed had “blood in his eye” against Michigan State a week earlier, lost his flinty-faced look and acquired the visage of jolly old Saint Nick as he almost singlehandedly gave away a 10-point lead.
But as the sunny afternoon faded to darkness, Raiola forsook his Santa Claus role, and reassumed the role of a coldhearted assassin when he absolutely had to, leading the Huskers on a pair of long scoring drives in the fourth quarter to rescue a 34-31 win for the Big Red.
Nebraska is 5-1 overall and 2-1 in the Big Ten at the midway point of the season, just as it was last season, and Raiola, who threw for four touchdowns in one of the most up-and-down-and-up games you’ll ever see, careened from extremely hot to disturbingly cold, with hardly enough time for anxious TV executives to fit in a station break in between.
Ahh, but those execs love the drama that the 6-foot-3, 230-pound sophomore can provide — for example, somehow delivering a win for Nebraska despite going minus-three in turnovers.
Drama was there in spades on Saturday, with Raiola covering both the highs (a prolonged rollout and 7-yard touchdown laser to Luke Lindenmeyer in the back corner of the end zone midway through the second quarter, or a clutch 33-yard pass to Nyziah Hunter which was delivered as he stumbled and fell backward) and the lows (which culminated in a hideous “cover-your-children’s-eyes” 64-yard pick-six by Dontay Joyner, giving the Terrapins a go-ahead touchdown with 6:40 remaining in the third quarter).
But eventually, Raiola got the blood back in his own eye. He completed six passes for 50 yards which, along with a jaw-dropping 50-yard run by junior Emmett Johnson, overcame a pair of holding penalties and set up Kyle Cunanan for his second field goal of the day, a 27-yarder, that cut Maryland’s lead to 31-27 with 7:47 left in the game.
And after forcing a Maryland punt, Nebraska took over at its own 19-yard line with 3:42 remaining. Then came Raiola’s unlikely B-film toss to Hunter, and a surgical 13-yard strike to Heinrich Haarberg to set up his game-winning 3-yard pass to Dane Key with 1:08 remaining.
And yet there was more — much more. Before delivering rapturous celebration, Raiola provided his share of wailing and gnashing of teeth to Husker Nation, as well. He doled out interceptions like candy at an Independence Day parade, eventually finishing with three for the day, including two in the second quarter where the Huskers led 24-14 and had the Terrapins on the ropes, ready for an early knockout.
Raiola was moving the Huskers downfield late in the first half with a chance to take a three-score lead, but he not only failed to deliver the knockout blow, he downright invited the Terrapins (4-2, 1-2) back into the game when he lapsed into his disconcerting habit of throwing off his back foot, not infrequently lowering his arm angle for good measure, even when he’s not under pressure, something he did twice against Maryland. The first only resulted in an incompletion, but the second — a lazy wounded duck that wobbled far from any Husker receiver and directly into the arms of Maryland defensive back Jamare Glasker along the sideline.
Part of the charm and drama that is Dylan Raiola is that he gets some unlikely completions when he drops his arm angle to deliver throws under pressure. This one was nothing but bad news, and totally avoidable if he had simply set his back foot and thrown the ball with normal mechanics. And it ended a promising drive, allowing the Terps to move from their own 15-yard line to the Husker 19, kicking a 37-yard field goal made it a one-score game at the half.
That’s part of what you get with Raiola. But you also get leadership that can transform a team from almost winning games against beatable teams, to actually winning those games on the regular.
After the game, Matt Rhule summarized the change in his team since last season when he said, “They love each other, they play for each other, they don’t panic and they fight the whole way. No one was panicked on the sidelines. Our guys are very, very comfortable in the fourth quarter.”
A year ago at the midway point, Raiola had nine touchdown passes and three interceptions. This year he has 16 TDs and five picks. Last year, Raiola added only four more touchdowns and threw six more interceptions in the back half of the season. What does Raiola have in store over the remainder of 2025?
It will no doubt be packed with adversity. Wise Husker fans have learned not to look beyond the next game. But it could also be prodigious if Raiola can count on a Nebraska running game that perked up against Maryland. Johnson carried the ball 21 times for 176 yards, the most for a Nebraska player in a Big Ten game in five seasons. Freshman Isaiah Mozee added 24 yards on five carries and the Huskers as a team netted 193 yards on the ground, by far their best showing of the season.
That goes double if the Blackshirts can hold up as they did late in the game. Led by freshman quarterback Malik Washington, who gave the Husker pass defense its biggest test of the season so far, Maryland piled up 379 total yards. But after the pick-six, the Blackshirts held firm, giving up only 89 yards and no points over the final 21 minutes.
As they head to Minnesota Friday to play P.J. Fleck’s Gophers on a short week, the Huskers have a new face to show the world, one replacing the narrative that said the Huskers are fated to lose every one-score game they come up against. That’s just what Raiola came to Lincoln to do.
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The Nebraska football team is looking to start the season 5-1 for the second year in a row. To do that, they’ll need to beat a Maryland Terrapins team that can put up quite a fight and is one second-half collapse away from being undefeated coming into Saturday afternoon.
There’s also the added degree of difficulty in that the Huskers haven’t played an actual road game all season. The farthest they’ve traveled away from Lincoln is Kansas City this year. Now they’re more than 1,200 miles away in College Station.
Despite all of that, Nebraska is a solid favorite, especially considering they’re on the road and playing another team that is 4-1. The College Football world knows that if the Cornhuskers are really taking the next step, they’ll need to find a way to win these games. Last week’s game against Michigan State was a step in the right direction. NU needs to take another step this afternoon.
Nebraska vs Maryland final odds
The Huskers opened the week as 5.5-point favorites against Maryland and that spread has gone up just a little bit.
Nebraska is now -6.5 in their first road game of the season. It would appear for now that Vegas believes in NU as they’re a touchdown favorite against a decent team on the road.
The total for the game, according to FanDuel Sportsbook, is relatively low. The 47.5 point total is likely relatively low thanks to both teams showing real defensive prowess and predictions of rainy, less than great weather in Maryland this afternoon.
Nebraska football vs Maryland final prediction
The Huskers showed the kind of fight in the fourth quarter that fans have been looking forward to seeing for more than a decade. Now they need to build on it.
Nebraska football wins 24-17 to improve to 5-1.
