An obvious position group to start with, a legacy 5 star player is going to lead Nebraska’s offense into the 2025 season for his second year as a starter. Dylan Raiola started off with a bang, as he had 9 TDs and 2 INTs through the fist 5 games. But whether he got a little banged up or defenses caught on to what we were trying to do, he ended up with 4 TDs and 9 INTs to finish out the last 8 games of his rookie season. Hardly anything to be extremely excited about. But all of us saw what happened when Holgo took over. Only one game with less than 70% completion percentage (and that was 68.8%) while our offense looked completely different. That’s where the optimism comes from. We go where Raiola and Holgo take us offensively in 2025.
But let’s back up for just a second. I have to give Matt Rhule and 1890 credit for what they did with the QB room from 2024 to 2025. In 2024, Nebraska had Raiola as the starter, Danny Kaelin redshirting which I always found fascinating, Haarberg as your hybrid guy, and then a couple walk-ons to fill the void if anything crazy happened. Then Kaelin announced he was transferring after the season, and I thought to myself there was just no way Rhule and company could make this room better than it was in 2024. We would be right back where we were in 2024, and maybe even worse because a guy left who would have been in his second year in the system. I knew Lateef was coming in, but my thought all along was that Lateef would come in and Kaelin would still be here, and then you hope to have the walk-ons with HH sitting there in an emergency.
Kaelin leaves, but somehow they convince Marcos Davila who is the same age as DK to transfer in from Purdue as he was also a 4 star prospect. That is a very big get for Nebraska as it allows them to not burn Lateefs redshirt or put a walk-on in if something would have happened to Raiola. I still don’t understand how they convinced someone the same age as Raiola to come here and be his backup, but i’m glad they did.
Getting in to what I have seen this spring, the reports are accurate, Raiola does look much better from a physical standpoint. It always blew me away the people who have our training table that had pads on for 2 hours a day and were running around that would struggle with that, but it happens everywhere to a lot of people. Raiola gives Holgo a 5 star QB to run his offense with. And he has done some pretty impressive things with QBs ranked that highly. I believe that’s one of the reasons he wanted to come here.
I’ll talk about the two guys behind him on the depth chart in Davila and Lateef at the same time. Davila physically just looks ready if he was needed. A year at a college program already, so he knows what B1G and big boy football looks like. He can spin the football and while I’m sure there’s a drop off between him and Raiola, I don’t believe there’s a drop off between him and DK. That’s huge. Lateef when watching him, he makes some plays that you can see why he was a highly rated prospect. With that said, he is definitely lankier and more inconsistent than Davila. Getting acclimated to college life is tough, figuring out college football is even tougher sometimes. The tools are there, it’s just a bit of a stretch for him at this point, which is to be expected.
After that you have Gramstad, Soukop, and Longval as walk-ons that I assume are battling it out for 2 spots at most, and possibly just 1 depending on how the 105 looks.
We also need to remember that while Haarberg is a full-time TE now, he will definitely be able to step in during emergency situations if need be. Further, he was put in with Raiola at the same time for some “2 QB formations” and could even go back to being the big bodied short-yardage QB.
I feel really good about this position with Raiola and Holgo getting a full year together. Behind them they have some people more than capable to spot start if needed.
Join us tomorrow where we go over a position that really intrigues me, the RB room.
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Some things I’m curious about Raiola to get your take. I do love his ability to make throws off platform, he made a ton of plays that way last year.
I also know he was a freshman, growing pains should be expected.
It just seemed like he rarely stepped up in the pocket and threw on-time darts. Also, a running joke was the back-shoulder pass interference was our best play during the 1st half of the season. While effective, there were times it seemed like the actual deep ball maybe was there, he just didn’t go for it.
Did he fall into this trap maybe a little too much, or was it just that we just didn’t have the guys open often enough so he just had to force things?
Either way, we looked miles better with Holgorsen at the helm, so confident it will look much better overall.
With him calling plays, there were just so many times it felt like we got easy yards bc it was finally the right call at the right time, we didn’t need someone to make a great play.