A year ago, University of Nebraska football coach Matt Rhule asked Husker coaching icon Tom Osborne to come offer some words of wisdom to his staff in the campus football complex that now bears Osborne’s name.
“I remember being surprised when I walked into the room at the number of people there,” Osborne said. “There seems to be an awful lot more people.”
Osborne won three national championships in the 1990s with a staff of nine full-time assistant coaches. Today, Rhule has 23 assistants. They’re backed by dozens of football support staff members bearing titles unimaginable in Osborne’s day: assistant athletic director for strategic intelligence; coordinator of sport science; director of player retention.
In college football’s latest arms race, where schools lure star players with multimillion-dollar paychecks, players change schools like sweaty socks and teams employ an army of staffers to gain any edge, the University of Nebraska is all in.
According to a Flatwater analysis of the most recent athletic spending data, Nebraska football now boasts a budget of $71 million, spending ranking it 12th among the 68 major conference schools.
That budget has more than doubled in just three years, with the growing staff a big reason why. By percentage, it was the biggest college football spending spike in the country.
That spending doesn’t even include what the school is now directly paying players – roughly $30 million this season, according to a recent report from The Athletic – a figure that also ranks in the top 20.
The bigger football spending suggests that after two decades wandering around in the college football wilderness, the traditional blue blood has moved to raise its game. The universities that spend the most on football do tend to be the ones competing at the top of the sport.
But there are also no guarantees. And the Nebraska Cornhuskers are in fact proof that spending does not always equal success.
By one measure, only Rutgers has spent more and won less in the past decade than Nebraska.
And no fanbase has turned out more loyally but seen less winning.
One of those loyal fans is T.J. Birkel. As he tailgated with family and friends Oct. 3 before Nebraska’s victory over Maryland, he dreamed of beating defending national champion Indiana this Saturday – a win that could vault the unbeaten Huskers back to national relevance.
Birkel was a teen when Osborne was leading Nebraska in the 1990s. The Lincoln native remains such a big fan he and two high school buddies co-host a weekly Husker football podcast they call “The Common Fan.”
Birkel was heartened to see the figures showing Nebraska now ranks in the upper echelon in spending for both players and operations, levels he feels are competitive.
Though it doesn’t need to happen this year, dollars, he thinks, ultimately need to translate into victories.
“As a huge Husker fan who wants nothing more than for us to get back to our winning ways,” he said, “there should be no excuses at this point.”
*******
The lyrics of “Dear Old Nebraska U,” the university’s fight song, celebrate how Nebraskans stick together in all kinds of weather.
But the song doesn’t say anything about seven-year bowl droughts.
Or losing 10 of 11 to rival Iowa.
Or a 10-year stretch of 30 consecutive losses to Top 25 teams.
It’s often been agonizing to be a Nebraska football fan in recent years, as the school that once set the standard for consistent winning has struggled in once-unthinkable ways.
Flatwater decided to see if there’s a way to statistically measure football fan misery.
On one such measure, Nebraska has no parallel.
Nebraska consistently ranks near the top annually in football attendance, its average home draw over the past five years ranking 11th nationally. It’s the kind of passion that has spurred a sellout streak that dates to the Kennedy administration, albeit one kept alive at times by corporate purchases of ticket blocks and flash ticket sales.
But Nebraska’s ratio of victories to attendance during that time? The worst in the nation. Nebraska averaged just over five wins per season, while teams with similar attendance tended to average nine or more.
Football spending stands as another measure of fan fervor, as teams that draw more fans also tend to make and spend more money.
Flatwater, using two different databases that report annual football spending, showed that, for the past decade, Nebraska has spent more per win than almost every other football program in America.
Nebraska spent nearly $10 million per victory in the decade ending with the 2024 season, the last year data was available, according to data compiled by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
That’s almost double what top winners like Ohio State and Alabama spent per victory in that time. And Nebraska has spent more per win than every other major college program except for Rutgers, according to the Knight data.
Nebraska fares only a bit better in data from the U.S. Department of Education. It spent more per win than all but four other colleges, Rutgers, Arkansas, Florida State and Vanderbilt, when that government football spending data set is used.
Iowa, which spent roughly the same amount of money on football as Nebraska during that decade, averaged almost nine wins per season compared to Nebraska’s five.
Those same databases also revealed one of the high costs of big-time football failure – buying out fired coaches.
Since 2014, Nebraska has spent $37 million on buyouts after firing Bo Pelini, Mike Riley, Scott Frost and their assistants. That was the fourth most nationally in that time, behind only Auburn, Texas A&M and Texas.
The football spending data also revealed the recent, nation-leading spending spree at Nebraska, where the 2024-25 budget of $71 million shot up from $33 million three years earlier. During those three years, Nebraska went from spending 16% below the average for the power conference schools to 38% above average. It also rose from ranking 12th among the 18 Big Ten schools to 5th.
Nebraska in 2024-25 ranked 10th in revenue derived from football at $122 million, more than 50% above the power school average. NU athletic officials say football is critical to the financial health of the entire athletic department, driving some 80% of revenues.
The football cash cow helped Nebraska recently rank as one of no more than nine public universities nationally that don’t subsidize athletics with tuition, tax or student fee dollars. Such subsidies among public power conference schools grew 70% in the three-year period, with some schools now pouring more than $50 million of college money into athletics in an effort to stay competitive.
The three-year period covered in the data does not include money paid directly to football players, which began in 2025. Nebraska, like most schools, does not disclose what it spends on players and says it will account for that spending outside its regular football budget.
Included in the recent three-year spending increase was a one-time cost of $11 million to upgrade the school’s grass practice fields, something Rhule had sought. Spending is up pretty much across the board, from scholarship aid to recruiting to meals. But a big slice of it relates to increased staffing.
************
As some 85,000 fans filed out of Memorial Stadium following the win over Maryland, Ron Brown joined players from both teams in a post-game prayer. Then he made the long walk across the field and through the tunnel to the Osborne Legacy Complex, the splashy $165 million football facility the school opened two years ago.
Brown represents one of the last links to Nebraska’s glorious past, having coached receivers under Osborne and now coaching fullbacks and kick returners for Rhule. In an interview, Brown talked about how dramatically the game has changed in the past few years.
Osborne was an innovator, ahead of his time in terms of weight training and nutrition and his attention to detail, Brown said. But today’s game relies much more on analytics and technology as teams create gameday strategies, analyze player performance and seek to gain an edge.
And now that players are being paid, teams employ NFL-styled personnel departments as they recruit high schoolers, lure transfers and try to keep their own top players happy.
“So now you have general managers, financial people, player development and psychologists, I mean by multiple numbers, and everybody has an assistant,” said Brown, who joined Osborne’s staff in 1987. “So yeah, the numbers have exploded.”
In Osborne’s day, the Huskers had nine assistant coaches, a couple of graduate assistants and strength coaches, trainers and others that brought the total staff to around 30. The total football staff today: 81.
The biggest part of that increase has come since Rhule’s arrival, as Frost had a staff of about 50 in his last season in 2022. The growth has accelerated in the last two years after the NCAA lifted the cap that had limited the number of assistants, gave players unfettered freedom to transfer and authorized direct payment of players.
Now schools not only have to determine whether a potential recruit or transfer can play, they have to analyze how much that wideout or linebacker should be allotted out of the pool of money they have to pay players.
In addition to Rhule and his 23 on-field assistants, the football staff now includes about a dozen player personnel employees, a dozen strength, performance and athletic training staffers and five nutritionists. There’s a four-person staff devoted to branding and social media, now seen as essential to recruiting.
“What it boils down to is these individuals are trying to find success in the margins,” said Seth Dorsey, the NU athletic department’s chief financial officer. “Player recruitment, retention, development, recovery, the whole nine yards.”
Talking about payment of players during a recent radio appearance, NU Athletic Director Troy Dannen said he did not think Nebraska needs to be the biggest spender. He said the goal is to spend in the top third in the Big Ten and top 15 in the country.
“You don’t have to spend the most to win the most,” he said. “But if you’re in the ballpark, I feel like we have the facilities, the fans, the coaches, everything that’s necessary to get more bang for your buck than other schools can get.”
***********
Though retired for almost 30 years now, the 89-year-old Osborne still keeps close tabs on the Huskers and college football. A coaching job has grown infinitely more complicated, he said.
His coaches followed a few metrics like knockdowns of opposing players, but had nothing like the data and analytics available to coaches today. Trackers even monitor player movement during practice.
He wouldn’t have relished the transfer portal, noting some players now suit up for three or four schools in four years.
And he said talking to players about how much they should be paid “would be uncomfortable, to say the least.”
“The transfers coming and going and a whole lot of things coaches are dealing with today certainly adds a great deal of complexity to the whole situation,” he said. “It’s certainly a whole new ballgame.”
Osborne said Nebraska’s biggest advantage, both financially and otherwise, continues to be the loyalty of its fan base. Year after year, they have continued to fill the stadium – and the athletic department’s coffers.
“That’s been a real asset,” he said. “It has been very gratifying to see the way people have hung in there.”
Source: flatwaterfreepress.org
