Nebraska

The sellout streak at Memorial Stadium has run since 1962. Not a pause, not an asterisk — every game, since Lyndon Johnson was president, filled. Nebraska has been bowl-eligible in back-to-back years under Matt Rhule. Neither of those facts resolves the central tension of the program: three national titles in the 1990s, a 60-3 run from 1993 to 1997 under Tom Osborne, and then twenty-five years of conference-title drought while the Sea of Red kept showing up anyway. The sellout streak is not a brag. It is a record of what patience looks like measured in Saturdays.

Rhule has done something the five coaches before him couldn't fully manage — two straight bowl-eligible seasons, measurable progress on the roster, a staff that has stayed intact. Then the portal window opened and Raiola left. He was more than a quarterback; he was the proof-of-concept that Nebraska could sign the player who chose the program over everyone else and build a legitimate contender around him. His departure for Oregon is the newest entry in a long ledger of what almost meant something.

The 2026 season will be Rhule's third. The question he faces is not whether Nebraska is improving — by most measures it is — but whether improvement is what Lincoln means when it says it wants to matter again. Bowl eligibility is progress. A Big Ten title race is a different sentence. The Tunnel Walk fills with 90,000 people every fall who know the difference. The schedule in 2026 will offer a few early answers.