The Blackshirts

Depth Chart

Three Backs, No Starter: Are They Good, or Just Unproven?

A card reading Three Backs, No Starter, listing Mozee OR Nelson OR Rule and their 5.4 yards a carry, with Kernel — an ear of corn in black-rim glasses and an officer's cap — standing at the right.
Graphic by The Blackshirts

Husker fans, Nebraska put out its depth chart for Ohio and did something you don’t see often. It listed three running backs and refused to pick one.

Isaiah Mozee OR Mekhi Nelson OR Jamal Rule. That’s the whole entry. An OR means the job hasn’t been won, and there are two of them stacked in a row.

Three backs is wonderful — if all three can play. So can they?

What they’re replacing

Let’s be honest about the hole first.

Emmett Johnson carried it 251 times last season for 1,451 yards and 12 touchdowns. He was a first-team All-American and the Big Ten Running Back of the Year, and he accounted for more than 75 percent of everything Nebraska gained on the ground.

Now the number that should stop you: every running back on the 2026 roster, added together, has 87 career carries.

Johnson had nearly three times that in one season.

The case that they’re good

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Nebraska’s returning backs didn’t carry it much — but when they did, they were devastating. Nelson, Kwinten Ives and Mozee combined to average 5.4 yards a carry on 73 attempts last season.

That average is higher than any team in the Big Ten managed in 2025. Any of them!

Go one at a time and it holds up:

  • Mekhi Nelson started the Las Vegas Bowl and put up 136 scrimmage yards on 15 touches against a top-15 Utah team — 88 rushing, 48 receiving.
  • Isaiah Mozee produced 270 scrimmage yards on 40 touches. That’s 6.8 yards every time he handled it, and he returned kicks at 23.3 besides.
  • Kwinten Ives averaged a team-high 6.7 yards a carry — 133 yards on 20 totes, two scores.
  • Jamal Rule, the freshman, went for 119 yards on nine carries in the Spring Game and ran for more than 160 a game as a junior and senior at Charlotte Christian.

The case that we don’t know

Now the other side, because it’s real.

Those averages come on 26, 26 and 28 carries. That is not a season. That is about two games of Emmett Johnson.

Efficiency on a light workload is the easiest number in football to love and the hardest to trust. A back who touches it four times a game gets the clean looks — the defense is not keying him, the box is not stacked for him, and he is fresh. Twenty carries in November is a different job.

Rule’s 119 yards? A spring game. Against his own defense.

And here’s the odd part

Look again at who is not in that three-way.

Kwinten Ives has the best yards-per-carry on the roster and he is listed fourth, behind a true freshman. Nebraska’s own game notes call Nelson, Ives and Mozee the three primary returning backs — but the depth chart’s trio swaps Ives out for Rule.

Somebody on that staff saw something in camp.

So, are they good?

Here’s the happy answer: Nebraska has three backs it cannot separate. That is a very different thing from having none it trusts.

The efficiency is real. 5.4 yards a carry is better than any Big Ten team managed across all of last season — not a hot week, a whole year. And EJ Barthel coached an All-American last fall and watched him go in the fifth round, so when he says this is the most talented room he’s had, he is not a man short of reference points.

There’s also a version of this that is flat-out better than one workhorse. Johnson took 251 carries and three quarters of the rushing offense went through him. Three fresh backs trading series is how a run game still has legs in November — and how you survive the week somebody tweaks an ankle.

Husker fans, 11:00 a.m. Saturday. Count how many different backs get a carry in the first quarter. Three guys good enough to argue about is a fine way to start a season.

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