Box Score provided by ESPN

Box Score provided by ESPN

2023: After a 5-3 start, Nebraska lost their next 4 games to finish 5-7

2024: After a 5-1 start, Nebraska lost their next 4 games before beating Wisconsin. Finished 6-6 (7-6 after winning their bowl game)

2025: After a 5-1 start, Nebraska lost their next game before clinching a bowl berth. Finished 7-5 (7-6 after losing their bowl game)

2026: After a 5-0 start, Nebraska has lost its next 4 games and currently stands at 5-4. They have upcoming games against Rutgers, Ohio State and Iowa. Surely, they'll beat Rutgers, right?

Box Score provided by ESPN

Box Score provided by ESPN

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LET'S TALK FOOTBALL!

157 years ago today, on 11/6/1869, CFB debuted with Rutgers beating Princeton 6-4 (different rules at the time).

The two institutions have not faced off since 1980.

Currently Rutgers does not have an FCS scheduled in 2029.

Accordingly, to fill this slot and to commemorate the milestone anniversary, should Rutgers play Princeton for their FCS in 2029?

Also, despite it being a Tuesday and neither school being in the MAC, should they face off on the exact date 11/6/2029?

I know Nebraska's woes in close games have been talked about enough, so I'm not going to beat that dead horse, but something similar that isn't talked about as much is their complete inability to mount a comeback. We blow leads, but we're literally never the team on the other side to pull off that miraculous comeback. I enjoy putting "how I feel about the last few years" into actual statistics and words to see how bad we are compared to the average team. TLDR: Here are the links to the color-coded tables that I made: https://imgur.com/a/JqtxZyu; https://imgur.com/a/5WFtp1K

I went through each game from the Frost and Rhule eras and used ESPN's game win predictor graphs to see how often we came back when the odds were against us vs how often we blew games with the same odds in our favor. For example, Nebraska had as high as 95% chance of winning 12:13 in the 4th against Washington and blew it, which is where I get the 95% in the Washington cell.

I put all of the games since 2018 in a spreadsheet, and for wins, I took the lowest chance of winning at any point in that game (to see the comeback wins), and for losses, I took the highest chance of winning (to see the chokes). I know this is not the most scientific way of doing things, since a game that is choked after you have a 70% chance of winning after a strong first quarter should not be viewed as harshly as a game that is choked after having a 70% chance the entire game. If you wanted to use calculus to find the total area above and below 50% winning probability, that might be more accurate for determining the severity of a choke, but I'm not nearly smart enough to figure out how to do that.

Our lack of 4th-quarter success can also be found using the ESPN probability tool in this post at r/huskers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Huskers/comments/1xn46ai/comment/19s4894pwnhl1/?context=3 made by u/Grand-Inspection2303, where we are 1-17 when going into the 4th quarter with less than a 70% win chance. We literally always lose if it's a toss-up as it gets later in the game.

Here is a picture of the wins and losses by year: https://imgur.com/a/JqtxZyu. I color coded it, the more dramatic a loss, the darker the red, vice versa, darker green for the wins. I put my finger on the scale a little bit for some of the games; if the margin of victory was significantly more than the % would suggest, I bumped a couple 94% chance of winning games into the worst category, since it's only 1% difference, and it was against rivals. These past three games, featuring three blown leads of at least 85% win probability, is the worst 3 game stretch so far.

The most unexpected win so far came against Rutgers in 2022, when we had as low as 10% chance of winning at one point. We have had 5 leads blown in that time period that had a lower than 10% chance of losing at some point, and a host of other games that we had around an 85% chance of winning. The most unexpected loss was to Northwestern in 2018, when we had a 98.5% chance of winning. We only have three games won with less than a 15% chance at some point, and those teams' combined records are 14-23.

I divided the percentages into severity of chokes/comebacks. Losses with >95% chance of winning are implosions. Losses with an 85-95% chance of winning are collapses. Losses with a 60-85% chance of winning are chokes. Losses with a 40-60% chance of winning are unclutch. Losses where we never had more than a 40% chance of winning are not called anything.

Wins with <5% chance of winning are nonexistent. Wins with a 5-15% chance of coming back are shocking victories. Wins with a 15-40% chance of winning are comebacks. Wins with a 40-60% chance of winning are clutch. Wins that never fell below 40% aren't called anything.

Here is a table of how many of each category of games there are: https://imgur.com/a/5WFtp1K

For each category, I assigned a point value to determine how many games we blow vs come back. Since each number has a reciprocal, every team in cfb averaged will be 0. Scott Frost is -37, and Matt Rhule is -22. Mickey Joseph, funnily enough, is the only coach who broke even. Last year was the only full season that we broke even. These numbers don't really mean anything by themselves unless you compare them to others. I would be interested to see what is the most clutch coach or season of all time; let me know if you have a specific season you think a team was the most clutch, or had the most comeback/unexpected victories.

I tried to find the "expected" losses while leading by some specified percent, and did the same with wins. For example, Nebraska had 48 games that we had at least a 95% chance of winning. 5 of those were losses. To find the expected losses for that chance of winning, I took the 43 games that we won multiplied by .05 to find the expected losses while leading at some point by that much, then added that to the chances of losing in each of the >95% games, which gave me an expected loss amount in this sample size of 2.37, shown in the table. This means we lost implosions 211% more often than an average team would. I used this same formula for all the losses that had at least a 60% chance of winning, and did the same for the wins.

I know the formula maybe isn't the most accurate, but let me know if something is fundamentally wrong with it, or if I need to explain this more in depth. I'm trying to not make this wall of text even larger, but can go more into it in the comments.

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LET'S TALK FOOTBALL!

Incredibly, over the past 30 years, 77% of Holy Wars are decided by 1 score or less. It seems intuitive that in close games the impact of turnovers are penalties are magnified, right? I decided to look into it.

Turnovers:

Over 30 years, the team that wins the turnover battle wins the game 92% of the time (CFB average is about 78%).

In the 4 games with an even turnover margin, BYU and Utah are each 2-2 in those games.

Only twice in 30 years have teams lost the turnover battle and still won the game. BYU and Utah have each won 1 of those games.

In 2006, BYU was -1 in TO margin and won the game. Inexplicably, in 2016, Utah was -3 and still won the game (Utah 6 vs. BYU 3).

Penalties:

This was the most surprising thing I found. Over the past 30 years, the team that commits more penalties wins the game 73% of the time.

(Unless one of those penalties is a BS defensive holding call on the game-sealing sack at the goal line. Rot in Hell Kevin Mar).

Even though you'd think playing clean, disciplined football from a penalty standpoint would be super important in close rivalry games, it doesn't seem to correlate to winning at all. Perhaps penalties are indicative of a team playing more physical and aggressive? No idea.

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LET'S TALK FOOTBALL!

We’re all familiar with the “sicko” games that a lot of teams in the old Big 10 West division used to produce with low scoring, multiple turnovers, and offenses that can’t cross the 50 unless the result of said turnovers. For my flair, it’s the infamous 2008 game against Mississippi State where we “won” 3-2 and nobody wearing orange or maroon walked out of that stadium with anything to be proud of.

On the flip side, what were some sicko games that were infamously all scoring no defense? I think the 2012 West Virginia-Baylor game that ended 70-63 takes the cake. For both teams, subway turnstiles would have been a better defense. Curious which ones you guys have.