1. Nebraska destroyed everyone they played, including four top-10 teams. Miami barely survived two of their games, and the schedule doesn't seem to be (from my limited knowledge) as tough. Our closest win was by 14 points, due to late scores against 3rd stringers.
I'm not sure how true that Washington State statement is. I don't know who was in on defense, but Frazier threw a TD pass in the 4th quarter when it was 28-14. I doubt we had our 3rd string D in with our 1st O on the other side.
The other danger is comparing teams more than a couple years apart. If you put the 1971 Huskers against 2001 Miami, those Huskers would get blown out. Size, speed, conditioning, etc would all heavily favor Miami. But against their competition of the era, 71 Nebraska stands out.
95 and 01 aren't so far apart so it's not too bad to compare directly.
Frazier vs. Dorsey? No contest, Frazier was far more a force on offense.
Phillips/Green vs. Portis? Closer, but I'll take ours.
O-line? McKinnie was the best of all, but Graham, Taylor and Dishman probably makes ours a better unit.
TE/receivers? Shockey is better than anything we had.
D line? Did they have anything to compare to Tomich, Wistrom, and the Peter brothers?
LBs: Vilma was a beast, Farley was awfully good though too
DBs: They had 3 first rounders, topping Minter and Veland.
Miami had 6 first team All Americans (2 of those special teams), we had 3. I think we had a lot more depth though. We don't skip a beat when our probably Heisman winner gets suspended. We proved the year before that we can weather losing our All American QB. Other than maybe O-line, I'm not sure there really was a position that we couldn't afford to lose the starter.