I want to go on record that I never said we won't be bowl eligible. I think nine wins is absolutely a reasonable expectation this year. But if I'm not mistaken we play more than nine games this year? So as I said, we may trip over an opponent or two. We quickly forgot the most hyped Red Out Around the World game where there was no way Texas was gonna come into our house! and beat our a$$! Texas came to our house! and beat our a$$! We then watched Texas AnM make our offensive line look like they were wearing pink skirts. They shoved us around like little girls. Then we go to Oklahoma and blow a 17 point lead in a game we knew was the last chance we had at a parting shot in the face of the biggest douche on the planet named Dan Beebe. We all know the entire team knew that there was a lot more than a football game in that Big 12 Championship. Between that Oklahoma game and the Texas game, Nebraska hasn't had bigger games than that in the last ten years! We lost them. So forgive me if I say nine wins is going to be fine by me.
If we only get 9 wins then the season is a failure since we will have regressed from our last two years.
We can still be a better team with a lesser record. Are we going to debate that this year's schedule is tougher than our Big 12 schedule. Of course it is. We don't have KSU, Kansas, Missouri, or Iowa State anymore. 10 wins in the Big 12 is good, but I think it's a lot tougher to get ten wins in the Big Ten. We may regress a bit as far as number of wins, but quality of this team will go up in my opinion. Our first major improvement is saying Bye Bye to the Watson sham of an offense. This offense will blow that out of the water. But it is only the first year trying to execute this offense.
The 4 OOC games, NW, Minny, UM, PSU and Iowa should all be wins. That leaves MSU, tOSU, and Wisky as our three toughest games. All we have to do is win one game against the three best teams on our schedule to get to 10. So 10-2 is a very reasonable expecaton. The Big 10 has some big names such as Michigan and Penn State that are not very good right now. So the schedule seems harder, when in reality it isn't.