CBS Sports: Five Teams With Lots of Off-Season Hype

[Mavric]

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4. Nebraska

There's a perfect storm brewing in Lincoln this offseason. If you judge Nebraska simply by its record, there was no improvement to speak of in 2018. The Huskers went 4-8 in Mike Riley's final season, and 4-8 in Scott Frost's first. That doesn't tell the entire story, however. Nebraska started the season 0-6 before winning four of its last six games, and its two losses were a five-point loss on the road against Ohio State and a three-point loss on the road to Iowa. It was a much more competitive team over the second half of the season.

 

Part of that is documented in the team's improvement in point differential. Nebraska went 4-8 in 2017 while being outscored by 128 points. In 2018, they were 4-8 while being outscored by only 15 points. That's a 113-point improvement, and as I went over a few weeks ago, that was the third-best improvement in the Big Ten this season. Nebraska is also in the Big Ten West, which always provides room for improvement and was won by a Northwestern team losing a lot of critical parts. Plenty of people will expect a bump in Frost's second year, and the Cornhuskers will appear in a lot of sentences with the words "dark" and "horse" between now and next season.

 

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