Rhule eager to see who goes out and attacks on Friday. It wasn’t the empty seats that caught Terrance Knighton’s eye so much as the fact there were also still some fans in red left, going all 15 rounds beneath the baking sun amid Saturday’s Husker blowout loss to Michigan.
The defensive line coach told Matt Rhule he couldn’t believe Nebraska played that poorly and there were still people cheering Nebraska to the end.
A hat tip to those fans, which was tied on a string to a passionate Rhule answer during Monday’s press conference that showed exactly how little the Husker head coach – and presumingly many players – thought of the team’s showing in that 45-7 loss to Michigan.
«We didn’t play very well. … Michigan’s an excellent football team but we could’ve played better than that. I say ‘we.’ That’s not me throwing the players under the bus. That’s all of us and I don’t think there’s a guy in that locker room that doesn’t feel that way,» Rhule said. «That wasn’t good enough at all.»
The coach was just getting started.
Four days before his team plays on the road against Illinois in the kind of game both 2-3 squads need to boost bowl hopes for 2023, Rhule asked rhetorically if he could get into saying how he really feels.
Here’s how, by the way.
“I’m trying to get the players to stop thinking about all of this other stuff. Like, ‘play.’ We went and played Minnesota. We played good football against Minnesota. We were flying around on defense. We were hitting people. We looked the way it was supposed to look, and then some things went wrong.
We got a bad call at the end of the half. We scored a touchdown – it doesn’t go our way. OK, great, whatever. We come back, we battle. We fumble the ball at the end of the game. We throw a pick. We lose the game. We go to Colorado. We’re playing pretty well. We had three turnovers. Everyone wants to talk about the turnovers. I keep saying to the guys, ‘It was 13-7 with six minutes left in the third quarter, we lost 36-14.’ Like we kind of accepted the fact we were going to lose.”
That final sentence was in many ways the crux of the thought.
Rhule mentioned something the late, great Bill Walsh used to speak on: Champions behave like champions before they’re champions.
Finishing the thought, Rhule said, “You can tell that I wanted to get that off my chest to the guys. I love our guys. And all I want our guys is to play football with confidence. I don’t want them playing football afraid to lose. Play football with confidence. That’s my job. I haven’t gotten that done yet. So I’m anxious to play on Friday.”
Rhule’s team will have to shift its defensive lineup with starting safety DeShon Singleton out for a while due to a knee injury, and senior linebacker Luke Reimer to miss Friday’s game from a non-football related physical setback that required a hospital visit over the weekend.
Certainly those losses didn’t help Saturday and Nebraska had to maneuver some pieces on the fly in the secondary after Singleton left the game on the second play.