LINCOLN, Neb. — Twenty games in under Matt Rhule as coach, Nebraska is going all in this week on a gamble that it’s arrived at a defining moment in the long-awaited rebuild.
With the Huskers hosting UCLA on Saturday, Rhule is 10-10. Nebraska has been treading water — or gasping under the surface — for the better part of eight years.
But on the heels of a four-point loss at Ohio State, identified by Rhule as the most sustained stretch of championship-level football in his two seasons, the coach and his players have not backed down from voicing their beliefs that Nebraska is on the cusp of a breakthrough.
“I think we’re finally starting to see the tipping point,” senior defensive end Ty Robinson said.
Rhule and the Huskers said they see a jump in accountability. They see a rising sense of confidence. They see Nebraska making improvement, minus the one-game step back on Oct. 19 at Indiana in a 56-7 loss.
“The best thing we do as a team is we improve,” Rhule said. “We get better at the things that are beating us.”
So if this is the launching point, how does it look on the inside?
For Rhule, it starts with something simple that he’s strived to achieve — and that he watched come into focus as a result of the adversity Nebraska faced a week ago after its lowest moment with Rhule in charge.
The most difficult challenge Rhule conquered in taking Temple from two wins in 2013 to 10 in 2015 and Baylor from one win in 2017 to 11 in 2019, Rhule said, involved getting the players in those programs to “not expect to lose.”
“Getting everyone, including the people around the program,” he said, “not to focus always on what’s wrong, but what’s right. And that’s hard.”
Against the Hoosiers on Oct. 19, as Nebraska’s mistakes snowballed and Indiana gathered momentum, he said, “We looked around, like, ‘What’s happening to us?’”
The days after, according to Rhule, made for a difficult week, “but a week that I knew, because of my experiences, would turn into something good.”
When Nebraska got down 14-3 at Ohio State and the Huskers felt the officials cost them opportunities to score — one of which prompted the Big Ten on Monday to issue a statement acknowledging a significant officiating error — they didn’t act like victims.
“They were excited to get back out there and play,” Rhule said.
The coach said he felt like the principles he discussed for almost two years finally took hold. It represented a key step, he said.
Rhule said he recognizes a fit for his vision at Nebraska with freshman standouts Dylan Raiola at quarterback and wide receiver Jacory Barney, among other young Huskers.
Raiola and Barney picked Nebraska over options to join established winning teams. The QB was committed to Ohio State, then Georgia before his flip to Nebraska last December. Miami continued to recruit the hometown Barney for months after his pledge to Nebraska in the summer before his senior year of high school.
“They came here to build,” Rhule said.
Nebraska last week hit a standard that he seeks.
“It has to be where we are now,” Rhule said, “that we play this way every week.”
Enter the accountability piece.
“That’s the formula,” defensive coordinator Tony White said on Tuesday. “That’s the key to it all, getting any team, any locker in any sport, getting your team to be that confident, to be that aggressive, to be that ready to perform.”
White said he trusts that the Huskers, 20 games in, know what it looks like to be ready.
More importantly, White said, they know how Monday meetings and Tuesday and Wednesday practices are supposed to look. If they continue to dive into the process, results will follow.
There’s no secret to sustaining high expectations and a championship level of play, Robinson said.
“It’s the locker room,” he said. “It’s the older guys, but it’s also everybody in that locker room.”
Robinson said he’s told young players to hold him accountable, just as he expects them to meet a certain standard.
“I’m not doing it out of spite,” he said he’s told teammates. “I’m not doing it because I’m angry. I do it because I love you, and I want you to get better and have a better career than I did here.”
For Raiola, accountability on Tuesday led him to stand up for offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield. The Huskers’ offense ranks 93rd nationally in yards per game. Their defense ranks 16th. Nebraska has not allowed more than 14 points in any of its 10 wins under Rhule. It’s not scored more than 17 in any of its losses.
Satterfield has taken heat for the perception that his offense is not carrying its weight.
“I think that’s unfair to him,” Raiola said. “He can’t go out there and make plays.”
It is a gamble. Because what if the plan again veers off course? No guarantee exists that Nebraska will maintain the improvement that Rhule identified.
“We have four games left — games that in the preseason, people thought we’d be underdogs and struggle to (win),” Rhule said. “We will find out. I will say, we learned a lot with our mindset these last two weeks.”
No matter what happens against the Bruins, then at USC, home against Wisconsin and at Iowa, Rhule said, he’ll continue to push. Nebraska players have needed a push, Rhule said, in part because they operate in a culture that too often tells them “This isn’t good enough.”
The more they push on their own, as Rhule saw last week, the Huskers get closer to knocking down a wall.
And that’s it on the horizon, the Huskers believe — the tipping point.
(Top photo: Dylan Widger / USA Today)
