Nebraska football is proof we are living in a simulation

LONG post. Will it be worth your time to read? Probably not. But we’ll see.

Many people are saying that Nebraska football is “cursed” or “bad” or “some combination of cursed and bad.” When you look at our performance in one score games since 2018 there is certainly a large body of evidence to support both theories.

However, after looking into this a bit deeper I’ve concluded that neither is a sufficient explanation. The only logical explanation left is that we are living in a simulation. Hear me out.

According to Eric on twitter, since 2018 there have been 28 games where Nebraska was tied or down by one score in the 4th quarter with the ball. Those offensive drives resulted in 11 turnovers and only 3 scores. Only once did Nebraska end up winning the game- 27 out of 28 of those ended in a loss.

Football is a complicated game. There’s a ridiculous amount of variables that go into whether a close game ends as a win or a loss…but let’s simplify. If the offense has the ball near the end of a one score game with a chance to win- either they do or they don’t. Let’s call it a coin flip.

What are the odds of flipping a coin 28 times and getting the same result 27 of the 28 times? 0.000147%, which is 1 in 9.587 million. (my math is solid trust me bro I used google) That statistic in and of itself is nearly impossible to fathom, but it runs much deeper when you start looking into the variables that lead to many of the losses that existed beyond offense- the conjunction of baffling coaching decisions or catastrophic defensive and special teams breakdowns.

By no means am I trying to completely absolve Nebraska of its horrifying errors that have lead to these results. But consider the variables in football- how is it possible that in 27 of those 28 games there was not a single game winning play made by a Husker player just by sheer accident? For example, yesterday Nebraska intercepted the ball with 30ish seconds remaining and returned it to the edge of field goal range. Holding is called on the return to push us out of field goal range. Then, while trying to gain 15 yards to get back into field goal range, we throw our only interception of the game. Then Iowa runs the ball, and if it’s a short gain we may still go to overtime…only there’s a defensive breakdown that results in a 22 yard run and sets up Iowa for the game winning field goal.

From the time that the ball was intercepted and Nebraska had a chance to make a game winning play, 4 straight things went wrong to emphatically ensure Nebraska’s loss. And no one was surprised.

How does something so statistically ridiculous keep happening again and again and again? Saying “Nebraska is bad” is a tired, lazy answer at this point. This is bigger than that, my friends.

If you’ve played video games you are probably aware of **procedural generation.** Nebraska’s losses since 2018 feel procedurally generated. What is procedural generation? It’s essentially code that produces different combinations of the same ingredients- remixes of lines of code programmed to feel like a unique human creation each time. Sometimes this can work, but sometimes there aren’t enough ingredients or variation in the code to produce truly unique results, which can break the player’s suspension of disbelief and immersion in the game.

That would explain how, in the same season, you can lose 3 football games in the exact same way by the exact same score. Late in the 4th quarter, tied, turnover, opponent drives down the field to kick the game winning field goal as time expires. Final score 10-13. This same sequences happened three times! I’d need someone actually good at math to help calculate the odds of ending 3 games the exact same way on the exact same score in the same season, but 1 in 9 million would likely be generous.

There is only one logical conclusion left: we are living in a highly advanced simulation being run by an advanced alien race from a higher dimension. The aliens didn’t expect very many people to care about Nebraska football, so they wrote us a shallow procedural generation code that produces either complete dominance and national championships, 9 win seasons tainted by soul-crushing blowout losses, or losing seasons full of one score losses. There is nothing in between because these are the only outcomes written into the code, with a few procedurally generated routes to get to those results.

I think that awareness of the simulation is troubling to our alien overlords, and the more aware we become the more incentivized they will be to correct its shortcomings. A simple rebalancing of the likelihood of 4th quarter self-destruction occurrences in close games from 27 in 28 to maybe 1 out of 2 would be a good start.

GBR

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