LINCOLN, Neb. — It was dark on the Nebraska campus Monday morning and a surge of fall air pushed the temperature down to 32 degrees for the first time this season. Coach Matt Rhule had gone home a few hours earlier, but he couldn’t sleep. Indiana was on his mind.
So he returned to his office at the Osborne Legacy Complex around 4:30 a.m. to watch film. His black coffee was still hot when Rhule fell asleep. He awoke to a bang on his office door, then the entrance of Dylan Raiola.
The freshman quarterback is setting the pace — with his teammates and now, six games into his collegiate career, with Rhule.
“Dylan dives into everything,” the coach said.
Raiola ranks as the nation’s leading true freshman passer, completing 67 percent of his throws for 1,358 yards with nine touchdowns and three interceptions. And for all of his success in helping lead the Huskers to a 5-1 start as they visit the 16th-ranked Hoosiers on Saturday, Raiola has turned into a leader away from the field more quickly and smoothly than anyone could have expected among a team deep in experience.
His secret?
“A constant urge to get better,” Raiola said.
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Coaches see and hear it at all hours. Raiola, while flying to visit family last week after the Huskers finished three days of practice in their bye week, texted Rhule from the air, asking him to watch a specific play from Indiana’s Week 3 win against UCLA.
“He’s so self-aware and he’s not afraid,” Rhule said. “A lot of guys don’t see corrections. He wants to get corrected and he wants to be better. It’s a lot of fun coaching guys like that.”
Teammates know all about it, too. It’s why Raiola, the former five-star signee out of Buford, Ga., doesn’t encounter resistance in his efforts to direct the Huskers from the front. He leads teammates out of the tunnel before each game and greets offensive players as they walk from the locker room to the field for warmups ahead of each game.
The Nebraska roster includes 19 seniors, 18 of whom have extensive starting experience in college. One includes Raiola’s top backup, junior Heinrich Haarberg, who quarterbacked the Huskers to five wins in six starts a year ago.
But no drama exists around Raiola, according to teammates and coaches. He’s done everything right to earn their respect. At the same time, Raiola deftly navigates the NIL landscape, a new element in the mix that pays young stars handsomely and could lead to discord with teammates.
“What I love about Dylan is that, yes, he’s embraced that leadership role head on, with the challenges that he’s facing, learning everything for the first time,” senior defensive lineman Ty Robinson said. “But he’s also listening to older guys.
“I know he’s listening to Heinrich. And even on the defensive side of the ball, he’s come and talked to us older guys about what we might be thinking or what we might do.”
Wide receiver Jahmal Banks said he sees a reflection of himself in Raiola.
“I know exactly how he feels,” said Banks, the lone offensive player voted by teammates to receive a single-digit jersey given to the toughest players on the roster.
Nebraska freshman QB Dylan Raiola ranks 26th in the FBS in completion percentage and seventh among Big Ten QBs. (Dylan Widger / Imagn Images)
Banks and fellow seniors on offense, wide receiver Isaiah Neyor and running back Rahmir Johnson, have praised Raiola repeatedly since August for his poise and work ethic.
The “urgency to win” motivates Raiola to move past adversity, such as the ineffective second half that Nebraska experienced offensively in its most recent outing, a 14-7 win against Rutgers on Oct. 5.
Raiola completed just one pass for positive yardage after halftime. Still, after the game, offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield paid notice to Raiola’s celebration in the locker room with teammates.
“Some guys, you’d think, would be down,” Satterfield said.
Not Raiola. When kickoff arrives, it’s Raiola’s aim, he said, to feel content in the training he logged. The 60 minutes of game clock provide him an opportunity to “cut it loose,” he said.
“You’ve got to earn that right during the week,” Raiola said.
Raiola wants to feel tired at the end of every day. If he has enough energy to sit at home and play video games, he said, he probably didn’t work hard enough.
“Winning is fun,” he said. “And doing the stuff to win is hard. But it’s all worth it.”
His grasp of the work needed to win games and earn the respect of veteran leaders is “rare,” said Robinson, a 23-year-old who turned down a shot at the NFL this year to play a final season in Lincoln.
But Raiola’s path did not surprise Robinson. He watched Raiola in the winter and spring — even earlier as Raiola played his junior season of high school in Robinson’s native Arizona — and Robinson paid special attention to Raiola’s love for the Nebraska program.
“How much time and effort he puts into everything,” Robinson said, “the care and the passion that he has for this program, it just goes hand in hand.”
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Rhule said he asks Raiola after every game to write in a journal about how he felt on the field. Then after Raiola reviews the tape of the game, he writes a second set of notes on what he saw.
Sometimes, the notes don’t match. In that instance, Raiola’s got a jump-start on his learning curve ahead of his next performance.
“He’s just on a whole other level,” Rhule said. “But at the end of the day, it still comes down to being in the moment. That’s the hardest thing for all of us. How often are you watching a TV show and you’re on your phone? I do it all the time. It’s a bad habit.
“Being in the moment, anticipating it, and then making the right decision, that’s the secret sauce. It’s the difference between winning and losing, especially for a ballclub like us, (where) everything is going to be close.”
Another sign of his maturity and readiness to embrace a leadership role at age 19?
Raiola doesn’t listen to outside voices, Rhule said. “He’s just really focused on what he’s being asked to do here.”
Dylan spent time away during the bye week with his mom, Yyvonne, he said. His dad, Dominic Raiola, the former Nebraska All-American, has forever loomed large in Dylan’s development. His sister, Taylor, who works for the Huskers, is often by Dylan’s side in Lincoln. He leans on his coaches, teammates, his younger brother Dayton — who committed to Nebraska as a QB in the 2026 class — and a trusted group of trainers.
On the field, Rhule said he treats Raiola like a junior with two years under his belt and his eye on an NFL future. The QB has responded by acting like a savvy vet away from the field.
If that means he awakens his coach on a Monday morning at the office, so be it.
(Top photo: Dylan Widger / Imagn Images)
