I always find these remarks interesting. First, fans are always biased. But, second, the reason fans get hung up on the 90's is because it's players like Benning, Jason Peter, etc., that use the 90's as a point of reference for just about everything they talk about. This is what those former players know, of course, so I'm certainly not saying they have to use difference points of reference because that'd be just ridiculous. But the fans and former players feed off of one another when it comes to 90's references, and like I said, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact former players and analysts regularly use the 90's as a point of reference.
IMHO that's the standard Nebraska should be held to. Maybe not THAT dominant, but at least in the same realm. That's why I don't have a problem using the 90's or being biased towards them. Any team should strive to do things the way we did, the way Alabama is now.
I think that you have to put all of this in perspective. The 90's are a rarity. Of the 125 schools out there, only 1 seems to own a decade. We had the 90's, bama has this decade locked up, etc. What Nebraska is doing right now is on par with the 80's. Yeah the losses are happening at the wrong part of the season and that costs us ranking, but still. I think that this is a fair place to expect our team to be. If we start losing 5, 6 games a season, somethings gone horribly wrong. It's completely unrealistic to hold our team to the standard of the 90's. Why? Because when a team gets dominant the rest of the league figures out how to counter it, the nature of football is its cyclical. The teams that value football will find ways to stay relevant, the teams that don't won't.