Nebraska football coach Matt Rhule spent all offseason playing coy with local media about the potential of Dylan Raiola in his true freshman season.

Rhule tried to convince whoever would listen – with the exception of national folks such as Joel Klatt – that Raiola did not have a stranglehold on the reins of the Huskers' starting QB position from spring ball all the way up until a week or so before the August 31 opener. That included sidestepping every single question raised about the five-star true freshman.

Marcus Satterfield, on the other hand, refused to adhere to that memo and what was essentially a gag order to the rest of the program when asked about Raiola and the Nebraska QB room as a whole.

We are, thankfully and graciously, no longer living in that world. The kid gloves are off now. Well, in reality, the kid gloves were literally never once put onto their sensational first-year quarterback – at least not when it came to the behind-the-scenes operations, workouts, practices and film sessions. That’s why you have not seen Rhule and Satterfield taking baby steps with him in terms of the playcalling (from Satterfield) and what the expectations are in terms of decision-making and what comes from those decisions on any given play (“the process over the result,” as Rhule has long labeled it).

The process, from the moment Raiola stepped foot on the UNL campus through the time you're reading this column, has gone tremendously smooth for the first-year college QB. The results have followed in impressive fashion.

Now that we are one-third of the way into Raiola's first collegiate regular season, let's take a look at those results with a deep dive into many of the traditional statistics and advanced metrics that reveal just how impressive he has been through the first four games of his career.

Once again, Raiola has not been impressive "for a freshman."

He has just been flat-out impressive. The eye test says that. The numbers back it up.

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