You shouldn’t. Nebraska is a very unique case. They had so many things go right for them during their glory days, and when all those things went away, they naturally worsened as a program.
1) Nebraska was basically the first football program to do strength and conditioning the right way. All of modern CFB’s strength and conditioning has its foundation in Nebraska. They were massively ahead of every other CFB program at the time. Nowadays, every single team has the right information. No more advantage.
2) PED’s. Some Nebraska fans vehemently deny it for some reason, but Nebraska was absolutely using PED’s on a large scale. It wasn’t just individuals that did it and the coaches turned a blind eye. They actively incorporated it into their regimen. Obviously you can’t do that anymore. Advantage gone.
3) Nebraska high schools from the 80’s-90’s basically ALL ran Nebraska’s triple option offense. So these kids that have been playing in Nebraska’s offense their whole lives, naturally were able to pick it up easily once they got into college. Of course, very few high schools teams nowadays run the triple option, and neither does Nebraska. Advantage gone.
4) Nebraska abused player counts. They had something that people call “county scholarships”. Essentially, their Walkons were actually better than normal walkons, and they were getting their school paid for by boosters. There isn’t as much proof for this as the PED claim, but I do think it’s true. They also had something called partial qualifiers, which is just being able to take in athletes that don’t qualify academically. Apparently the longhorns used their power to get rid of this advantage when the big 12 formed long ago. Yet another few advantages gone.
Some other things that just naturally happen, is that other teams got better and were able to give playing time. For example, legendary coach Bill Snyder built Kansas State into a quality program, and they were able to steal sole recruits from Nebraska. Their move from the Big 12 to the B1G also dramatically reduced their Texas recruiting pipeline, and they didn’t replace it with anything. Although, I do think an elite coach would be able to bring it back, and that brings us the the last point. They have had some very bad hires since firing Bo Pelini. So Nebraska didn’t really get dramatically worse because they moved to the B1G. That was only a small part, that can probably be fixed with a home run hire. Their advantages, some which were legit, and others which were cheating, went away and the rest of the CFB world caught up to them.
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