The holiday fog has cleared. Nebraska football is on the ground in Las Vegas.
It’s game week ahead of the Huskers’ clash against Utah on Wednesday at Allegiant Stadium.
An eight-win season is out there for Matt Rhule’s team. But attention is trained elsewhere. As a program, Nebraska will return to Lincoln as the new year dawns, focused on the transfer portal, which opens next Friday. Regardless of the result against the Utes, the two weeks that follow for Nebraska will shape its immediate future — and perhaps set the ceiling for Rhule’s long-term success.
What happens in Vegas, as they say, stays there.
LNK ✈️ LAS
📍 Your Huskers have landed in Las Vegas.@HuskerFootball x @LNKairport pic.twitter.com/MYyi4jxh1f
— Nebraska Huskers (@Huskers) December 26, 2025
When the calendar flips, it’s time to move on. Opportunity awaits. The Huskers’ January objectives: retain, refine and improve the roster.
And I’ll say it. Reset.
Last week, Rhule offered resistance to the suggestion that Nebraska is undertaking a “program reset” in the wake of a 7-5 regular season that ended with back-to-back blowout losses against Penn State and Iowa.
“That’s ridiculous,” Rhule said. “I’ve never heard the term ‘program reset.’ We’re building.”
Rhule fired his defensive coordinator, John Butler, and line coaches on both sides, Donovan Raiola and Terry Bradden. Five-star quarterback Dylan Raiola, who served as the front man for two seasons, is leaving Nebraska.
Rhule added four assistant coaches, including a run game coordinator. And he’s not done with adjustments to the coaching staff.
Nebraska is looking to sign multiple quarterbacks via the transfer portal. It must replace Emmett Johnson, the All-America running back who opted out of the bowl game to head to the NFL a year early.
Two more departing starters, offensive guard Rocco Spindler and linebacker Dasan McCullough, will sit next week to get healthy early in the offseason. In addition to Raiola, eight Huskers are set to enter the portal. There will be more.
If this is not a reset, the time is appropriate for a re-set.
Call it what you want, the pressure to do more than make the postseason is building as Rhule enters his fourth season. He said he hears all the time from Nebraska fans who want to know why the Huskers haven’t moved as fast as Indiana in assembling a championship contender.
Is the focus for Nebraska in all of the right places? Take a step back. Revisit priorities, teaching methods and routines. Rhule asked Corey Campbell, the Huskers’ strength coach, to evaluate everything about their training.
And here in December, Rhule threw himself into the coaching mix with Nebraska’s defensive tackles. He put on a hat before practice and flipped the bill to the back. He told the Huskers who work in the trenches to call him by his first name.
“I’m not Coach Rhule anymore,” he said. “I’m just Matt. And they’re calling me Matt. And I’m coaching like that. I’m going to move forward like that.”
It’s gimmicky, but whatever. Matt is an effective motivator. The 50-year-old coach regrets that he didn’t show the Huskers this side of himself sooner.
“We all have to live with our decisions,” he said. “We all have to live with our regrets.”
Cornerback Ceyair Wright, a season-long team leader, suggested Rhule take this on full time. Defensive tackle Riley Van Poppel said the same to Rhule. He enables the lineman to play with more attitude and energy, Van Poppel said.
“I’m not Knute Rockne,” Rhule said. “I’m not saying that. But I think them seeing me as a football coach is a really good thing.”
It’s a reset. Not the kind of move in which the coach hits a button and starts over. That would imply the work that Rhule and his staff have completed in three years was for naught. They’ve accomplished plenty in turning a four-win regular season from 2022 into a five-win season in 2023, a six-win regular season in 2024 and seven wins this year.
“If anyone ever just understood what we walked into,” Rhule said, “they’d be amazed at what we’ve done behind the scenes. I had to do a lot of that stuff, because someone else didn’t do it.”
Rhule stood in the gap as fences were mended between the program and factions that wielded political and financial influence. He updated facility renovations in midstream, reshaped attitudes about pay-for-play football and pulled Nebraska into the everchanging modern era.
It fell on Rhule, because previous coaching staffs, former administrators and university leaders too often dropped the ball. In fact, Rhule said the program at Nebraska was “dead for 10 years” before his December 2022 arrival.
Nebraska showed life in many instances over the decade before Rhule took this job. But the point hits. These comments alone represent a turn from Rhule, who previously took the high road in evaluating the work done before he landed in Lincoln.
“We went to back-to-back bowl games,” Rhule said. “We are moving forward.”
Rhule also offered an analogy.
“I’m just trying to do what coach (Fred) Hoiberg did,” he said. “Just keep building and building and building.”
An interesting comparison, for sure, because Hoiberg engineered a successful reset of the Nebraska men’s basketball program right in front of Rhule, who regularly sits among the fans at Pinnacle Bank Arena. Hoiberg won fewer than 30 percent of his games before the Huskers’ late-season surge in his fourth year. He altered strategies on the court and in recruiting and shuffled his coaching staff.
Players bought in. And since the end of the 2022-23 season, Hoiberg’s teams are 56-25. The Huskers haven’t lost since March. They’re ranked 13th nationally, the highest mark for Nebraska since 1991.
The reset worked wonders.
It’s not a bad word. Interpret as you wish and embrace the work ahead. Keep building, yes, but, refresh, rejuvenate, regain an edge.
Reset. It starts with a mindset. A better version of Nebraska football awaits in 2026.