Shatel: Tight BYU loss gives Huskers hope in Big Ten West title hunt

[zoogs]

http://www.omaha.com/huskers/shatel-tight-byu-loss-gives-huskers-hope-in-big-ten/article_09684d34-55c1-11e5-ad59-23d81d4e6cbc.html

An oddly unintuitive take. But hey, I'll take anything for encouragement this week.

And Staples: ... The Cornhuskers played BYU much closer than expected, and if not for a fluky play would have won. BYU is as good or better than the rest of the teams in the Big Tens West Division. If the Cornhuskers can play with the Cougars, they can play with the teams they need to beat to get to Indianapolis.

Andy Staples is SI.com's CFB cover guy, so this is an interesting bird's eye take on the relative quality of BYU. It may not be wrong. Of course, if we're still clawing it out with the likes of BYU, we're likely to claw it out with the likes of the Iowa and Minnesota, too, unless things get better. So sans improvement, a third straight 3rd place finish might be a reasonable "expected value."

Shatel does note that "Many national media types, including the entire ESPN GameDay crew, picked BYU."

We've got another tough opponent upcoming in Miami, who should be better, not worse than they were last year with the development of their QB. Let's hope Nebraska can get better fast enough to emerge from this year's OOC slate 3-1.

 

[Landlord]

The attendance number had to be affected by the hot temperatures to an extent.

None of our home games last year were under 91,000, so removing 900 seats doesn't make sense to the number dipping below it.