Is Nebraska football’s success limited by its physical geography?

The Nebraska football program has recently been the subject of many fascinated college football studies in “what went wrong” for a team over the years.

Today’s Huskers bear little resemblance to the Nebraska football teams of yesteryear, such as title-winning teams in 1970 and 1971. Most notably, the Huskers won three national titles during the 1990s and were arguably one of college football’s most iconic dynasties of the 20th century. Even within the last decade, Nebraska was putting teams on the field that could win 9-10 wins per season.

But those days feel like a distant memory now. The team has suffered five consecutive losing seasons and has languished for four years with its native son and former quarterbacking great Scott Frost as head coach.

Given the recent changes sweeping through college football, is the Nebraska football program at a disadvantage due to its physical geography?

Despite the COVID-impacted 2020 season and the excruciating stretch of one-possession losses in 2021, there has to be a lingering sentiment among the Husker Nation faithful: if Scott Frost can’t turn it around, can anyone?

Frost led Central Florida from a winless season to a powerhouse within just two years, helping the Knights finish 13-0 (including a defeat of Auburn) and claim the 2017 national championship. He came to Nebraska as the heralded savior who could bring the program back to respectability and back to the national stage, where so many previous Huskers teams had belonged.

Clearly, the school’s physical geography did not hamper the success of past Huskers teams. But today’s college football landscape has drastically changed in recent years: there’s been a proliferation of monetary deals that helps players benefit from their own name, image and likeness (and are probably being used as a constant recruiting tool), the transfer portal is open for anyone and everyone with no penalty, and media rights deals are making the conference realignment wheels spin faster than ever.

Nebraska’s conferences have been impacted by the changes several times since the program’s best glory days, with the Big 8 expanding to add four Texas-based teams in 1996 — and later to the Huskers joining the Big Ten, which itself has expanded and will add UCLA and USC by the 2023 season.

Here are the aspects of Nebraska’s physical geography that impact the Huskers program in the modern day:

1) It’s 303 miles to the nearest Big Ten school.

That would be a drive of 300+ miles along I-80 to Iowa City, home of the Iowa Hawkeyes. Nebraska is currently the westernmost outpost of the Big Ten, but that’ll change once the Bruins and Trojans add Los Angeles to the league’s list of hometowns next year. Though it has changed conferences, Nebraska remains physically much closer to schools like Kansas and Kansas State of the Big 12.

2) Nebraska’s state population is just shy of 2 million.

The figure of 1,988,536 people as the official 2022 population estimate for the state of Nebraska puts it at No. 37 in the United States, with fewer people than Mississippi, Kansas, or New Mexico. Nebraska shares borders with two of the five least populated states in the country (South Dakota and Wyoming). The biggest nearby metro area of a bordering state would be Kansas City, which with a modest 2.19 million people ranks No. 30 in the country.

3) Lack of big-time local high school recruits.

This point is related to No. 2 — are there enough big-time high school football players in the neighborhood that will don a Huskers uniform at the collegiate level? The state produced just three total four-star recruits (according to 247Sports) in the six years between 2015 – 2020. It doesn’t help that some of the state’s best players in the past two years have ended up at Oregon, Iowa, and Oklahoma, either. For reference, the state of Georgia produced a jaw-dropping 45 players rated as either four-star or five-star recruits in the Class of 2022 alone.

4) Is there significant media market demand?

Omaha is the state’s largest metro area with a population just barely over one million people. It’s not a highly desirable media market that everyone loves to talk about whenever it’s time to consider another round of conference realignment. The flip side here, of course, is that there is no professional sports team in the Cornhusker state — and a large number of dedicated Nebraska fans are known to travel well to away games and postseason destinations.

5) There’s isolation from population centers.

Consider the list of college football’s national champions in the past quarter-century, after Nebraska defeated Peyton Manning and Tennessee in the Orange Bowl, 42-17, to split the 1997 national championship with Michigan. It’s filled with schools that all have ready access to some of the game’s most fertile recruiting grounds. Miami (Fla.), Florida, Florida State, Ohio State, Alabama, Auburn, LSU, and Georgia are all in states that supply many of college football’s best players out of high school. Even outliers like Oklahoma, which won the 2000 national title, have easy access to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex (7.5 million people).

In conclusion, Nebraska football’s physical geography has clearly not hampered its success in years past — consider that two of its three Heisman Trophy winners (Johnny Rodgers and Eric Crouch) were born in-state.

But with the rapid changes that are sweeping throughout college football today, it’s worth asking if the Huskers are playing at a disadvantage both in the Big Ten and nationally in terms of returning to the days of being a powerhouse college football program.