Does Nebraska Deserve a Top 25 Ranking?

Earlier today, SI.com released their Top 25 preseason college football rankings and Nebraska was not included. How can this be? Nebraska is a blue blood that has consistently won 9-10 games a year during Bo Pelini's tenure. They ran the gauntlet against the Big Ten's best last year and made it to the conference championship game. They hung with Georgia until the fourth quarter. The same Georgia team that almost knocked out Alabama in the National Championship game. I mean the SEC Championship game. How could they possibly be ranked below Michigan, Michigan State, or Northwestern; three teams they beat last year?

Unfortunately for Nebraska, no one outside of the state remembers this. Nationally, the perception of Nebraska is a team that wins the games that they are suppose to and then gets blown out by the better competition. The two loses last year to Ohio State and Wisconsin have defined the 2012 Huskers and that trickles over into this years preseason polls. On top of this, Nebraska had a lot of close games that could have gone either way. The Huskers, some perceive, were just fortunate to get those wins and could have easily been a 7-6 team.

Don't overreact to this Husker fans. Preseason polls are complete guesses based upon what happened the previous year and what the new year might bring. Nebraska is replacing a lot of their defense. Why should this years defense be any different if they spent most of last year on the bench behind the guys who struggled?

So vent if you must, but just realize that if the Huskers go out and win, they will soon be back in the Top 25. If they win a lot, they may even break into the Top 10. If they go undefeated, then we will be in Pasadena this year. The polls don't really matter. If you win, things tend to take care of themselves. Besides, we could be Wisconsin Badger fans. They probably have more of a beef than we do for being left out since they won the conference title last year.

— Andy Staples (@Andy_Staples) August 14, 2013