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Nebraska Head Coach Matt Rhule Pre-Akron Quotes
On Janiran Bonner’s season-ending ACL tear
“It's a tremendous loss on the field. He's a great football player, plays on all special teams, he’s a wide out, he’s a running back, he’s a fullback, he’s a tight end, he can just do it all. Selfless, he’s a great teammate. I'm sure he will continue to inspire his teammates though with his attitude. I just know how much he means to everybody. He doesn’t mean a lot to us because he's a good player, he means a lot to us because of who he is, so everyone will rally around him and watch him come back better than ever.”
On younger players on the d-line
“I think anytime you give up 200 yards on rushing, you’re not going to be real happy. With that being said, 96 (yards) of it was the quarterback and a lot of it was pass rush, not even designed runs, him getting out and running, so we’ll have to work on that. We talk a lot about it, but I don’t know if we did a good enough job as coaches of doing it. You know you’re facing Dylan (Raiola), TJ (Lateef) and Jalyn (Gramstad), you’re facing a lot of guys who are pocket pro style quarterbacks, though TJ can move, but the holy grail of things that most defensive coaches don’t like are excellent outside zone team, tempo team and a running quarterback. Cincinnati has all three of those and Coach (Scott) Satterfield has been for a long time, so when you face those types of teams, you build your team differently, you’re a three-four team, you play with four eyes, you make the ball run to the sideline. We don’t face a lot of that in the Big Ten, so it was a tough match up for us in that regard, but we have to play better, we have to get off blocks better, we have to level out our rush better and we saw it on tape, we tried to adjust it during the game and even watching last night, watching Notre Dame and Miami. Notre Dame kept hurting Miami with the quarterback draw, yet Miami continued to rush and at the end of the day they got there, so we’ll have to pick our spots a little bit better, but it wasn’t like their running back – he had 100 yards rushing, 106 yards maybe – so it wasn’t the traditional run game, it was the quarterback. I thought he was a heck-of-a player. I walked right up to him after the game. I knew before the game, I saw a lot of scouts like higher up guys I know and they were all there to see him and the tight end. So after the game, I told him – they didn’t have 100 yards rushing in the first half, 100 yards of offense in the first half I don’t believe – they did a nice job of adjusting and saying, hey we’re going to run this guy to try and get a win and so we have to do a better job up front, but I thought some guys did some really good things and some other guys will have to make some improvement this week.”
On the second and third-string running backs’ playing time
“I wasn’t happy with it. Dana (Holgorsen) made the call, so I let my coordinators coach. I wanted to get Isaiah (Mozee) and Mekhi (Nelson) in, but once Dana said to me ‘hey coach, I made that call’ I said ‘okay, cool.’ Emmett (Johnson) was hot, we went with Emmett, we’ll have to get Isaiah, we’ll have to get Mekhi and we’ll have to get Kwinten (Ives) in the game more. Mekhi has a great run that he cut back and got vertical, unfortunately we missed one block or else it might have gone for a ways, so I’m just biding my time with those guys. I wanted to play them more, but Dana was feeling it, he went with what he went with and that’s his call so I was good with him once he said that, but that won’t be the plan moving forward I don't think. I think we’ll have to play more guys.”
On Williams Nwaneri
“I thought Will did a nice job, he made a lot of plays running to the sidelines. Like everybody else, there’s things we’ll want to improve on this week. He lined up a little bit wide at times and so he had some good rushes that maybe he was a step away on, that if he had been a little bit tighter, he's got a great speed to power move and we'll have to continue to emphasize that this week. I love seeing him run around, seeing him run to the ball. He ran down on the first third down, ran down, made the tackle after we overran it, made the play on the fumble. Javin (Wright) might've scooped and scored if he’d not done that, though they called it incomplete so they probably would've blown it dead. I was happy to see Will fly around like that.”
On Thursday’s game and the team’s response
“We wanted to lift at 11, I told you guys we were going to lift and we didn’t get home until 4 a.m., so I didn’t make them lift at 11. Our non-travel guys didn’t get back until 5 a.m., like my kids and the coach's kids that took the bus didn’t get back until about 5 a.m., so I didn’t make them lift at 11 a.m. They did come in and watch tape at 3:30, we went through methodically on Friday and we came back, gave them Saturday off. They came back in yesterday and we went through it again, a little bit more crisp. I wanted them to take some time, I asked them to grade themselves from Friday to Sunday, so they graded themselves on the things they can control, their effort, their technique, their assignment discipline and yesterday we came in, we had another day to lift, another day to recover. A lot of guys came in on Saturday, I know, to recover and then we had an actual practice yesterday, so it was good to have. Obviously Akron played Thursday so we had the chance to see what they're doing and we went out, got a lot of work yesterday too.”