You can't convince me that the front four perform as well as the front four the year before.
Of course they didn't. The 2009 front four was the best defensive line at Nebraska since Grant Wistrom and Jason Peter. Ndamukong Suh, arguably the greatest defensive player ever at Nebraska, was on that line, along with Jared Crick (who right now is generally seen as the team's best player), Barry Turner and Pierre Allen.
To lose Suh and Turner and then expect the defensive line to dominate the same way is completely insane. We may not see a defensive line at Nebraska that good again in our lifetime. That's the only college defense in my memory, including the 90's Nebraska defenses, who could create all the pressure they wanted while still containing the QB and the run game, without using blitzes or spies. It was completely ridiculous.
If that is your measuring stick for our defense, your expectations are WAY out of control. We're not going to see that again. The truth of the matter is that Pelini has lined up championship defenses in 2009 AND in 2010. Nebraska's 2010 defense was
better than Oregon's or Auburn's. Now, you can always nitpick with each player or unit and say that they could be better in this way or that - but to honestly expect them to be at a 2009 level year in and year out, that will never, ever happen.
A Championship defense would have had a better showing against Iowa State last year and not play it down to the wire. It would have played a much better game against Texas and perhaps won it for us, given Hagg's punt return for TD. And it certainly would have been able to shutdown Washington's Locker a second time in the bowl game.
Iowa State: The defense was put in awful position by turnovers in that game, and they scored 6 of their own (Cassidy), AND it was Eric Hagg who came down with the game-sealing INT. The defense wasn't the reason that game was close, it was the reason we won it at all.
Texas: The defense gave up early points following Helu's fumble inside our own 20 yard line, and still held Texas to just 20 points. Furthermore, this wasn't the 2010 defense yet. The 2010 defense, as the history books should read, included Courtney Osborne and Austin Cassidy as starting safeties - not Rickey Thenarse and P.J. Smith, the safeties who played and missed tackles throughout the entire Texas game. Also, the punt return was a play by the defense (Hagg), not by the special teams. Texas lined up to go for it on 4th down and then pooched - the Blackshirts scored those 6 points, the only reason the final score looked even remotely competitive.
Washington: The Blackshirts DID shut down Washington's Locker a second time in the bowl game. The score to the first game was 56-21, Nebraska. The score to the second game was 19-7, in favor of UW. How in the world do you look at those two games and come to the conclusion, "Well, if the defense had just played like they had in the first game, we would have won?"
Anyways, championship defenses have bad games sometimes. 1997 Nebraska's defense, featuring Grant Wistrom, Jason Peter, Mike Rucker, Mike Brown, Ralph Brown, etc, almost lost us the national championship that year - they gave up 38 points to a mediocre Missouri offense, and were saved by one of the luckiest plays in the history of college football, and by the fact that our legendary coach announced he was retiring before the bowl season started.
Finally, the games you chose to bring up merely proves my point that your expectations for the defense are out of control. The one game you can easily argue that the defense got its butt kicked would be the Oklahoma State game. But, even though that was an inferior performance, you don't bring it up simply because the offense saved the day. You're not looking at the defensive performance objectively, you're just looking at games that were close or that we lost and blaming the defense without taking the whole story into consideration.
We did have a championship defense in 2010. Our problem was that we only had a championship offense for about 1/3 of the season, and when it wasn't performing like a championship offense, it usually looked like an offense from the Sun Belt Conference.
