Is Nebraska football back?

The reporters wouldn't back down – they just had to know.

At last month's Big 12 Conference media days in Irving, Texas, journalists from around the nation gathered around coach Bo Pelini and his players, and nearly all of them asked the same question.

Is Nebraska back?

It's a loaded question, and one that's hard to assess after only one season with a new coaching staff.

The leader of that staff wasn't interesting in giving the writers what they wanted.

"All of the expectations, that's for the fans and the media," Pelini said. "I know one thing: Our players don't feel like Nebraska's back."

A 9-4 season that ended with exhilarating wins over Colorado and Clemson has helped re-energize a slumping program that endured two losing seasons under former coach Bill Callahan.

The four-win turnaround in Pelini's first year set a high standard for year two. NU was tabbed as the favorite to win the Big 12 North this year by the conference media.

With the success found in year one, the writers' question of whether Nebraska has returned to the top of the college football heap has some merit. The standard to assess such claims, though, is difficult to determine.

In order for NU to return to a spot among the nation's elite football programs, what needs to take place? Is the sign of progress wins, conference titles and bowl games?

Certainly, progress can be measured by numbers. NU's three national championship teams of the 1990s put up an average of 44 points per game and held opponents to 15 points per game.

During that decade, the Huskers went 28-12-1 against ranked opponents and had an average end-of-season Associated Press poll ranking of No. 9. The program enjoyed a 54-week streak in the AP top 10 that began in 1999 and ended with a loss to Penn State in 2002.

But NU went 13-8 between that game and the end of the 2003 regular season. Then-athletic director Steve Peterson famously declared it was time to change coaches and refused to "let the program gravitate into mediocrity."

When Pelini took over last year following the four-year, 27-22 Callahan regime, he inherited a broken team that had given up more than 42 points per game in conference play in 2007.

Sure, the pass-happy spread offenses became popular and flourished during this time, but the problem was undoubtedly more about NU's Blackshirt-less defense.

Pelini and his staff turned a defense that ranked 112th in the nation in 2007 into the 55th-ranked total defense in the nation. His team gave up more than 125 fewer yards per game and finished second in the Big 12 in total defense.

"I think they showed considerable improvement last year, particularly on the defensive side of the ball," athletic director Tom Osborne said. "Sure, you don't want to just be 55th in the nation, but the defensive improvement was excellent."

The numbers were better, and so were the things stats can't measure.

When Osborne fired Callahan, he told reporters he didn't see the ferocity that his old defenses used to play with, and that was one of the most troubling facts about the old staff.

"You have to play with intensity," he said then. "Sometimes, you just didn't see the effort and intensity you like to see in a football game. We used to be a team people hated to play, because they felt it for two or three weeks."

Former NU star defensive tackle Jason Peter said under the old coaching staff, there wasn't that confidence and swagger that he and his teammates used to flaunt and use to their advantage in the 1990s.