Nebraska Football: The Pre-Season is Over and the Huskers Better Get Ready for What is Coming Illinois Rutgers Iowa Wisconsin Indiana UCLA Ohio State Purdue

The pre-season is over, or some would say the non-conference season is over, and Nebraska football better get ready for some of these teams on the upcoming schedule.

Nebraska has played UTEP, Colorado and Northern Iowa. While we thought Colorado would be a huge game, and it certainly was, we can also walk away knowing that the Buffaloes are not a good team and to Nebraska’s credit they did exactly what they should have done to that team.

The game against Northern Iowa, while the result was what they wanted, even Matt Rhule said that the Huskers did not play up to the standard. I think that Northern Iowa did a great job controlling the line of scrimmage on offense and possessed the ball almost the entire game.

The part that makes me nervous is that Illinois is going to do the same thing this weekend and they are going to have actually have a defense behind them to slow down Dylan Raiola and the Nebraska offense.

A lot of national media are talking about Nebraska going 7-0 for sure but I for one think that the chance of the Huskers going undefeated before playing Ohio State has actually diminished compared to what we thought at the beginning of the season.

While at the same time, the end of the schedule is looking much easier. So things have somewhat flipped for the Huskers and their schedule.

Wisconsin is worse than we thought and they lost their starting quarterback. UCLA is bad. Iowa again doesn’t have a quarterback to go with a real good defense.

On the other hand, Illinois is now ranked #24 in the AP poll with a win over then #19 ranked Kansas.

Indiana blew out UCLA 42-13 last weekend and could be 6-0 by the time Nebraska heads to Bloomington. They will be ranked by that time as well as I expect them to beat Maryland and Northwestern.

Rutgers has a matchup at Virginia Tech this coming weekend and then they play Washington at the following week. I would probably pick Rutgers to win both of those games. If that happens they will be ranked by the time Nebraska gets to play them.

So over the next four games, if Nebraska is to get to 7-0 then they likely will have to beat three ranked teams and Purdue.

The road for Nebraska has changed from when we first started this season and all they can do is beat the teams in front of them. The upcoming schedule is going to show us how good this team can be. Hopefully they will be ready for what is coming.