It's the coaches, and more specifically, the coaches who got paid like they'd already arrived, then lost the exact game that would have proved it.
Start in Lincoln, because nothing this weekend made the point cleaner. Nebraska carried a fourth-quarter lead against No. 7 Indiana and handed it back, losing 20-17. That pushed the Huskers to 31 straight games without a win over a ranked team, a drought that started long before Matt Rhule ever walked in the door. The response from the people in charge: Rhule signed a two-year extension that now runs through 2032.
Where the curse crowd is right
There's a real version of the "some programs are just cursed" take, and Nebraska is where it lives. A 31-game top-25 losing streak spans coaching staffs, rosters, and recruiting classes that have nothing to do with the current guy. If you want to tell me the building itself is haunted, I'll listen to that part.
But a curse doesn't call the plays in the fourth quarter. A curse doesn't sit on a lead against a top-ten team at home and let it evaporate. Nebraska had Indiana beaten and coached it away. You don't get to invoke bad luck for the stuff you controlled with the clock in your hand.
The contract is the scandal
Rhule was hired in 2022 on an eight-year deal, the kind of runway a program gives a rebuild it expects to take a while. Fine. The problem is what happened next. His record against ranked opponents has been grim everywhere, and closing out those games has become Nebraska's specific problem. The honest move, if the games aren't there yet, is to let the original deal ride and see what Year Three and Four actually produce.
Instead the athletic department added years. It guaranteed more money, through 2032, to a coach whose defining trait right now is losing the biggest games on the schedule. It's a department terrified of the search it would have to run, buying itself cover and calling it belief. The fans screaming about a wasted contract are reading the deal correctly.
The measured case, and why it loses
The reasonable pushback: it's October, rosters get hurt, schedules are brutal, and judging a season off a few bad Saturdays is how fanbases talk themselves into firing good coaches. All true, generally. None of it saves this argument.
This is a pattern you can set your watch to: lead in hand, ranked opponent across the field, Nebraska finding the exit. When a team loses the same kind of game the same way for years, that's an alibi. You can forgive a blowout to a better roster. You cannot keep forgiving the collapse of leads you built yourself.
The same story played out beyond Lincoln, too. Florida's homecoming against South Carolina got dragged into a weather delay, and the Gators didn't play like the occasion deserved. The complaint threads are full of the same story in different colors: talented rosters, catered-to coaches, games that keep slipping away in the moments that decide them.
So pick a culprit and stop splitting it. The coaches own the fourth quarter. The athletic directors own the contracts that keep those coaches around no matter how the fourth quarter goes. Nebraska just told you which one it's more afraid to touch.
