This is a coaching failure, and the coach is Matt Rhule. Nebraska held Indiana to six points through three quarters. It held Oregon to six. It held Washington to three. It lost all three games. When a defense does its job that completely and the team still walks off 0-for-3, the problem lives in the final fifteen minutes, which is exactly the stretch head coaches are paid to own.
The scores tell the same story three times. No. 7 Indiana trailed before scoring 14 in the fourth quarter to win 20-17. Nebraska led Oregon 14-6 going into the fourth, then watched the Ducks reel off 11 unanswered in a 17-14 loss. Against Washington, the Blackshirts carried a 10-3 lead into the fourth and gave up 14 points in a 17-10 defeat. Three one-score losses by a combined 13 points turned a 5-0 start into 5-3 heading into November. Nebraska is the only team in FBS this season to carry a fourth-quarter lead in three straight losses.
These are college kids. Injuries happen. Nobody blows three leads on purpose, and none of that is the players' fault. The Blackshirts, under coordinator Rob Aurich, have been the best thing about Nebraska in each of these losses. You don't blame nineteen-year-olds for holding ranked offenses to single digits for 45 minutes.
Rhule took that excuse off the table himself. After the Indiana loss he said he should have called a timeout on the fourth down that beat him, and that his defense believed Indiana was in one personnel grouping when it was in another. After Washington he took the blame for dialing up a corner blitz on fourth-and-18, the exact play Washington converted to set up the go-ahead score. A thin roster doesn't excuse a missed timeout. These are decisions, made in real time, by the head coach, and he keeps describing them to reporters afterward.
The bigger picture is worse. Nebraska has now lost 31 straight games against ranked teams, going back to 2016. A win over Indiana would have been the program's biggest since it beat defending national champion Oklahoma in 2001. The chances keep coming and keep slipping away in the same quarter.
Then there's the money, which is the only thing keeping him standing. Rhule's 2025 extension pushed his buyout if fired to about $71 million, because the deal is 90 percent guaranteed. That number shrinks every year under the deal's structure. Nebraska made him close to un-fireable before the results earned that security, and now it's stuck paying for its impatience with patience it can't afford. That's a failure by the athletic department, on top of the coaching failure already in progress.
The fans have already decided which one matters. They threw trash onto the field after the Washington loss. Rhule's own words caught the mood: "I certainly understand how frustrated everyone is that this has happened three games in a row."
A blown lead can be a bad night. Three blown leads in a row, with the head coach explaining his own mistakes at the podium each time, means Nebraska can't finish games under the man hired to make sure it does. Matt Rhule is the reason Nebraska is 5-3.
