LINCOLN, Neb. — Nebraska began work early this week to put the pieces back together, no small task after its 56-7 loss at Indiana with No. 4 Ohio State on tap Saturday in a return to the road.
Coach Matt Rhule, after the Huskers endured the third-worst margin of defeat in program history, guided them through an afternoon walkthrough on Monday and a two-hour film session in the morning.
In talking to Nebraska’s players, Rhule stressed the importance of sticking to assignments. Mistakes against the Hoosiers snowballed into a rout.
Rhule’s hope? To illustrate the interconnected nature of the errors from Saturday in Bloomington, bring the Huskers back to an emotional center and pull them away from talk in public that “we stink,” Rhule said.
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“Indiana came out and challenged us,” the second-year coach said. “I don’t know how well we challenged them. And so, I’m taking that personally.”
He met for 30 minutes on Monday with media members, discussing the challenges new and old for the Huskers and what’s ahead as the Buckeyes loom.
Here are five Rhule excerpts, with our analysis, from Rhule’s news conference:
“I hate when coaches walk in after games and say, ‘Hey, that’s on me.’ But I really felt that way, because I know what we’re capable of doing. And we didn’t do it. We just weren’t ready for that moment. We weren’t ready for that game.”
Analysis: Rhule doubled down Monday on his statement from after the game that he didn’t foresee a poor performance by the Huskers after they took a 5-1 record into the game against unbeaten Indiana.
“If I saw this coming, then you guys all should be very nervous,” he said.
By “you guys,” it seems that Rhule was referring to Husker Nation at large.
Rhule believed the Huskers had prepared well. The undressing by Indiana of his players on Fox’s Big Noon national stage caught him off guard. That’s better than the alternative, according to Rhule, because it speaks to his confidence in Nebraska’s ability — and not an indication that he has to get a read on the mindset and abilities of his team.
“There’s a challenge sent to the coaches. There’s a challenge sent to the players. These are grown men. If you’re supposed to block that guy, block him. Block him.”
Analysis: Rhule is patient by nature. His process takes time because Rhule focuses more on foundational pieces than on the results, at least in the early stages. None of his eight losses at Nebraska before Saturday fell outside of his blueprint to rebuild.
The latest contest did not fit the blueprint. It was an outlier among the 19 games he has coached in Lincoln. With it comes a test of Rhule’s patience and the patience of all associated with Nebraska football.
So while taking the blame for the debacle, he has issued this “challenge” to his coaches and players. Rhule expects improvement this week across the board.
“Everyone’s got to do their job,” Rhule said, “and everyone’s got to do it at a high level. This happened to us. We allowed it to happen. It stunk. It hurt. We’ll find out a lot about ourselves moving forward. We’ll find out about the coaches. We’ll find out about the players. We’ll find out about me. The last thing we’re going to do is sit around and be victims.”
“My main thing in life as a coach is not to panic, not to overreact, not to change everything, just to keep getting better at it until you’re the best at it.”
Analysis: At his professional core, this is Rhule. It is the coach Trev Alberts chose to hire nearly two years ago. It’s the coach Nebraska fans embraced, the coach first-year athletic director Troy Dannen has thrown his support behind.
A blowout defeat is not going to change Rhule.
At Purdue, Oklahoma and Utah already this fall, offensive coordinators were fired or pushed out. Arguably, enough evidence exists during the past several games at Nebraska for Rhule to shift coaching assignments among his offensive staff. There’s an urgency to find a system that works best for freshman quarterback Dylan Raiola.
Whatever that system is, it’s not what Nebraska put forward against Rutgers, in a 14-7 win on Oct. 5, and at Indiana. Rhule added Glenn Thomas this year to the Nebraska staff as the quarterbacks coach and co-offensive coordinator. Thomas has called plays for Rhule before. He could do it again.
But Rhule is counting on the people he has in place to fix the problems at hand.
“If you have the right team, the right group of men in the room, if anything, 56-7 should snap you back to reality,” he said.
“If I’m going to be completely honest, my battle since I’ve been here has been the, ‘Oh, here we go again (mindset),’ which predates us.”
Analysis: Here was a rare deviation by Rhule from his standard practice to offer only praise for the players that he inherited in 2022 — and the coaching regime that brought them to Nebraska.
It’s well known that Nebraska won only seven of 33 games decided by eight points or fewer from 2018 to 2022. Rhule took over a culture of losing. He has won just two of eight one-score games and has overseen an extension of the Huskers’ losing streak against AP-ranked teams from 21 to 26.
Junior defensive end Jimari Butler said on Saturday that the Huskers struggled with confidence as Indiana began to roll. IU coach Curt Cignetti, in fact, predicted in private, according to one of the Hoosiers, that they could rattle Nebraska and force the Huskers into mistakes.
“The vocal narrative is always very much like, ‘Here’s what they’re not good at,’” Rhule said. “So our kids are reading what they’re not good at. And that’s life. I’m not complaining about that. You want to come play at Nebraska? Deal with it.”
“You’re facing the best team in the country, the best roster in the country. If we spend the whole game playing Ohio State, look at the scoreboard, hoping to win, we’ll get our faces beat in.”
Analysis: That’s a word of warning Rhule to his players. They must play to win and show no hesitation against the Buckeyes, no matter how long the odds appear. Ohio State is a 25.5-point favorite, according to BetMGM, the fourth-largest underdog margin for Nebraska during the past 20 seasons.
Rhule stressed that even when Indiana led by four scores early in the second half on Saturday, he wanted to continue to show fight. Nebraska could have likely kept the final margin smaller if it had played more conservatively. But he refused to show that weakness in front of his players.
One regret: Rhule said he would have elected to kick a field goal on fourth-and-8 early in the second half when Nebraska trailed 28-7. Raiola’s throw was intercepted and taken back 78 yards, setting up an Indiana score.
Rhule said he wanted to expose Raiola and other young players to “moments of intense pressure.” In the big picture, Rhule said, Nebraska heads to Ohio State at 5-2, and it’s not an awful spot.
“Find the things you’re good at, build off them,” Rhule said, “work on the things you’re not good at, come back and go compete.”
(Top photo: Steven Branscombe / Getty Images)
