It’s been a hard task trying to find an edge that we hold over Nebraska on paper. It seems as if Nebraska is the current-day bizzaro Clemson from the Great Plains. This post started out as a “Pep me up” that was supposed to make you feel all gooey inside and go out and spend a good chunk of your bank account making last minute plans to Jacksonville for New Years. Are we maybe just be a little too perfectly matched for one another?

There are some scary similarities between us. Disregard the elephant in the room that is the fact that they hold 800 plus wins and they have four more national championships than we do, there are some heartbeats that our two schools share. The University of Nebraska – Lincoln is also a land-grant university that started out as a sleepy little agriculture school way out in the country. They’re also well known for their energetic and friendly fans, as are we. They travel well, they crave hard-nose football, and they would do anything including selling a second or third born child to get back to “the way things used to be.” But the similarities aren’t creepy enough to make you start burning receipts and photo identification in a trash can in your bathroom or scratch off your finger prints with sandpaper, but they’re there. Lurking about like a troll on a message board, burning terrible thoughts and images into your brain.

WHO BEAT WHO

Some of the only ammunition you can find to throw at them is that they play a weak schedule and haven’t really beaten anyone. We thought we had them cornered as they’ve only beaten one BCS team with a winning record in the form of a Kansas team that went only 7-5. Then you remember that we’re in the same boat only having beaten a 9-3 Boston College team. But we beat bowl bound N.C. State who is sitting at .500, that gives us the slight edge right? You could also lean on the ACC’s success this season against the other conferences, especially the Big 12 where we went 4-0 against three less than average teams and Nebraska. Wake beat Baylor, Miami cruised over Texas A&M, Florida State beat Colorado (in Jacksonville, no less), and Virginia Tech pulled out a road win over Nebraska.

FOOTBALL ISN’T PLAYED ON A STAT SHEET

As for the teams themselves, there are still some striking similarities. They have a talented and athletic running back who is an east-to-west runner in the form of Roy Helu Jr. as do we in CJ Spiller. Bo Pelini was once the interim head coach of the Cornhuskers for the 2003 Alamo Bowl and is now the main guy in Lincoln. No need to bring up the Dabo situation. The way things are lining up, we could be looking at a bowl game that would go on forever. The media outlets aren’t making it any easier to place a bet either. Nebraska has a great offense but we have a seasoned and hard nosed defense. Clemson has a decent offense who put up some good stats in the ACC, but Nebraska just dusted off the black jerseys to hand back out to their defense. But here’s where the likeness of our two teams kind of fades away.

If you just peruse through some of their highlight videos on YouTube, you’ll find that not only are they poorly filmed and have hilarious graphics but the big plays themselves aren’t all that impressive. This is evidenced in the following:

Colorado

Kansas State

The highlights are by no means bad, but we’re just used to seeing faster. Ganz certainly is their biggest threat that deserves the most attention, but most of the film on them makes the Cornhuskers and the team they’re playing against look like they’re running in brick shoes. The Huskers lack the ability to make big plays like we can. Plus they play in the big 12 North, which is… the Big 12 North. Sort of, meh. In seven of their last nine games opponents have scored 28 or more points on their “New Black Shirt” defense. They definitely are a worthy opponent, but the safer bet would probably be us. But don’t take our word for it. On August 29th the safer bet was Clemson as well, albeit the circumstances were completely different. Take it to the comments section.