I’ve got a new nickname I’m workshopping for the guy who has asserted himself (unofficially, still) as the starting quarterback of Nebraska football for the rest of 2023:

Heinrich “Wild Horse” Haarberg

Think it’s got a nice ring to it.

I had a Power Five assistant coach tell me a few years ago that “you’d rather have to tell a horse ‘Whoa’ than to ‘Giddy Up’” in order to describe the passion he coached with and the energy his players brought to the field. I’m sure Matt Rhule and Marcus Satterfield have a similar philosophy when coaching Haarberg – the third-string-turned-starter at quarterback who has become the live-in caregiver of the offense and transformed into the team’s unquestioned offensive MVP from the season’s first half.

The Husker offense is not, and was never going to be, a rocketship or even a unit considered one of the five or six best offenses in the Big Ten this season. But it wasn’t supposed to be the worst offense in the conference, either. That’s exactly what it was, and then some, through two games with an offense ranked bottom 15 nationally in scoring (12.0 per game, including a goose egg in first halves) and total yards (318/game)

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Despite a return home for two Group of 5 opponents, there wasn’t a ton of confidence that the offense was going to do much of anything with a former third-stringer running the ship. It looked like things were going to get worse in a hurry, if not disastrous.

Instead, now we're talking about a realistic shot at ending the bowl drought. Hell, some of us are talking about seven or eight wins.

Instead, Haarberg was immediately impactful right out of the gate after being thrown into the fire. Under his guide, the offense has done just enough in the winnable games and averaged 27.7 points and 371 yards against non-Death Star opponents. Hold the performance vs. Michigan against him if you would like, but I’m not going to do that.

Nebraska is 3-3 through six games (again) and has won three of four games with Haarberg under center. The Huskers sporting a 3-1 record with Haarberg as the starting quarterback would not have felt believable just five or six weeks ago, and it would have felt absurd in April or May unless you were in the top 3-5 percentile of optimistic humans in the world.

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