Nebraska football unveils ‘Chasing 3’ catchphrase

Thirty years after Nebraska’s football program had “Unfinished Business” as its offseason mantra, the 2024 Husker team produced its own catchphrase in a recent in-house documentary.

It has relevance to the frustrating end of the 2023 season, during which NU fell one win short of a bowl berth.

“Chasing 3.” Points, that is. Apropos for a squad that lost four Big Ten games by a field goal — including a remarkable three conference games by the exact same score — 13-10 — in the exact same way.

In losses to Minnesota, Maryland and Iowa, Nebraska had the ball with the game tied at 10, threw an interception and allowed a game-winning field goal at the gun. A fourth narrow loss, 20-17 at Michigan State, ended with a fruitless Husker possession, as did a 24-17 overtime loss at Wisconsin, which scored first in the extra period, then ended the game with an interception.

In NU’s offseason documentary — which sports the same name as the new catchphrase — head coach Matt Rhule stands in the Huskers’ meeting auditorium to explain how close Nebraska was, and is, to being the program it wants to be. The culture, he intimated, is in place.

“We’ve got to get about 3 points better,” Rhule said in the doc, which has 53,000 views on YouTube over six days. “So when I wake up in the morning, I’m chasing three points every single day. That’s my whole mindset right now. Because I know we have good players, I know we have good coaches, I know we have good staff. I know we all have dreams about what we can do. The key is the standard from the very beginning.”

Rhule’s talk to his team echoes his Feb. 7 comments about a culture that, now 1 year old, is far ahead of last offseason, when Husker coaches surprised players with rigorous, competitive “mat drills” that extended to outside-the-facility expectations for leadership.

“They all understand how hard it was last year because they did not know what to expect,” Rhule said. “Now everyone knows what to expect. That’s half of life.”

That included a plan to better execute the “double under” pass play that likely denied Nebraska a win over Maryland — or at least made it much easier for the Terrapins to win.

On third down at Maryland’s 7, NU asked third-string Chubba Purdy to throw into the end zone either to two different receivers running slants or Billy Kemp, running a short corner route to the end zone’s near pylon.

Purdy picked Kemp. Maryland’s corner sloughed off one of the two slant routes and picked off Purdy. The Terrapins drove the field for a score. NU stood 5-5 at that point and would finish 5-7.

“We understand we’re good enough,” strength coach Corey Campbell said in the documentary. “We lost (four) games by three points. That’s the difference between 5-7 and 10-2. We are good enough. Now we’ve got to take the next step.”

Though for a program at a different echelon of college football, the comments echo Nebraska’s “Unfinished Business” catchphrase that came after an 18-16 loss to Florida State in the 1994 Orange Bowl. The Huskers missed what would have been a game-winning field goal as time expired, leaving nine months between the end of the 1993 season and start of ’94.

So the team wore shirts with “Unfinished Business” on them. At season’s end, when Nebraska beat Miami (Florida) in the Orange Bowl and won its first national title since 1971, NU’s in-house HuskerVision produced a 70-minute documentary called “Finished Business.”

Program catchphrases came up over the years — notably “Restore The Order” late in the 2005 season — and the Huskers’ most successful program, volleyball, tends to have a new slogan for each year. So does NU women’s basketball.

Husker football, in 2024, had its hook, too — turning close losses into wins.

“I’m looking for guys who would rather die than be two minutes late, honestly,” Rhule said in the documentary. “I’m looking for guys who would rather die than lose. I don’t want to lose anymore. There’s no reason for us to lose anymore. It’s time for us to win. But we have to win what? Today, tomorrow and the rest of this week.”