Nebraska Head Coach Matt Rhule Pre-Illinois Press Conference

Opening Statement 
“We’re right in the swing of things. Getting ready for Illinois on Friday night with a short week. We got a lot of work done yesterday, and adjusting the week for our Friday night game. Just a couple of injury updates, DeShon (Singleton) hurt his knee, he will be out for an extended period of time. We expect to have him back at some point. I don't know when that will be, but DeShon will be out this Friday. Luke (Reimer) out of the hospital. A little bit of back and forth, but Luke won’t play this Friday but hopefully we'll have him back here and healthy with us soon.” 

On the tempo of it being a shorter week 
“I think you just have to condense the work time that you’re doing. Normally Monday is a day off for us. But we worked last night and we’ll have the players come in tonight, this afternoon/this evening which normally Mondays are off for us. Those are the two main differences.” 

On if this is a “good time” to hit road
“I don’t think so. We’re blessed to have these fans. It’s like Terrance Knighton said, ‘Man we played that badly’' and let’s make sure we say this now. After the game you asked me a question, in the NFL I answered the next day and I would have answered you the next day. We didn't play very well. We didn’t play well enough. That’s not a take away against Michigan. Michigan is an excellent football team, but we could’ve played better than that. And I say ‘we’ because that’s not me throwing the players under the bus. That’s all of us. I dont think there’s a guy in that locker room that doesn’t feel that way. That wasn’t good enough. That wasn’t good enough at all. It’s not the crowd. So, I don’t care where we play next. Terrance Knighton said to me, “I can’t believe we played that badly but people were still there and they were cheering for us. You can’t help but say thank you to the people that came. Can I be honest about how I really feel? I’m trying to get the players to stop thinking about all this other stuff. Like, play. So we went out and played Minnesota. We played good football against Minnesota. We were flying around on defense, we were hitting people, we looked the way it’s supposed to look and then some things went wrong. We got a bad call at the end of the half, we score a touchdown and it doesn’t go our way. Ok great. 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 right? We had three turnovers. Everyone wants to talk about the turnovers, but I keep telling the guys, it was 13-7 with six minutes left in the third quarter and we lost 36-13. We kinda accepted the fact that we were gonna lose. To me, Bill (Walsh) said it, ‘champions behave like champions before they’re champions.’ They have a winning standard. So I want a winning mindset. We played Northern Illinois, we played LA Tech. We are a defensive football team. The defense has to learn that we’re a defensive football team. They’ve got to play great defense while the offense kinda plays body blows. We don’t need the offense out there in four wides dropping back and throwing it 50 times a game. We did that the last couple years right and everyone said ‘hey it doesn’t work here.’ So, why would the defense want us to still keep doing that? So I’m saying all that to say that we’ve got to get to the point where we go out and play and it doesn’t matter if I’m getting double teamed as a D-lineman. It doesn’t matter what the call is. It doesn’t matter if we’re down 14-0. We gotta play. That’s the winning mindset. The guys have to not listen to everything that’s out there. There’s no ‘you should be doings,’ at least in this building. Go play. It’s a football game. We have some really good players. They’re gonna play in the National Football League. They need to show up. The good players for Michigan? I can tell you who they were because I watched them on the field. Our really good players need to show up. That’s not me calling anybody out, that’s me giving them confidence that I believe they can do it. We have guys on our team that I believe can absolutely wreck a game. I wanna see them wreck the game. This whole ‘I’m just overthinking a little bit coach’ and ‘I’m worried about this and I don’t want to make a mistake’...enough. The first play there’s all these texts ‘Man what a great catch he caught on his helmet.’ We cover three and the middle safety player is five yards. That’s a missed assignment. Second play, touchdown, missed assignment. All the touchdowns are missed assignments. So we’re better than we played. You can tell I want to get that off my chest to the guys. I love our guys. All I want our guys to do is play football with confidence. I don’t want them to play football ‘afraid to lose.’ Play football with confidence. That’s my job and I haven’t gotten it done yet. So I’m anxious to play on Friday.” 

On Luke Reimer
“I just don’t want to start talking about his personal health without him saying. Nothing football related.”

On not having DeShon Singleton and Luke Reimer
“It’s a big deal. Some guys have to step up. Even in that game once Deshon went down Tommi (Hill) who’s been playing both ways had to play the whole game at corner, then (Quinton) Newsome had to play at safety. Phalen (Sanford) played really well. He came through for us. This week because we have some time to do it, Koby (Bretz) is a guy that can play football. We need Koby to play well. We need Phalen to step up and play well. Tommi’s  a guy who’s been playing both ways. He needs to help us at corner too. Some young guys  that have been in that redshirt mode D’Andre (Barnes) is an excellent player. He’s been practicing with the twos. He’s ready to go now if we need him. Some of those injuries could maybe affect us. I think (Cameron) Lenhardt we have a chance of getting back this week. Obviously that would be a big thing for us. Mikai (Gbayor) has been playing that jack position. He went back last week and played middle linebacker. Just some different things like that. Hopefully we can settle down this week and really lock some guys into roles. 

On the hesitance against Michigan
“We were hesitant in the way that we played. Like our pass rushers. They tried to rush to keep their quarterback in the pocket instead of cutting loose to go rush the quarterback. He ran for a touchdown because one of our young D-linemen went the wrong way and didn’t execute his assignment. You can’t play football trying not to make mistakes. You just can’t do it that way, you gotta attack. Especially a team like Michigan. You have to attack. The bigger thing for me and I’m saying this outloud so that it’s spoken into existence is that I want to be the type of team where we’re playing at a high level and then we get down 14-0 and we’re like ‘oh heck no. I’m not losing 45-7 in front of my mom.’ I’m gonna play better. I’m not jumping out and doing my own thing. I’m trusting our technique. So when people say learning how to win, if you havent won a lot, it’s hard to figure out how to win. That team we played had confidence. You go out there, and you play with a little swagger. You do your job, you play at a really high level. Their longest play was 29 yards. It was like they were just running by and we couldn't cover. We could’ve played better than that. I think it’s that hesitation of not wanting to be the guy who messes up. We need our great players to be great players. We need them to go make plays within the scheme and not outside the scheme. That was pretty clear last night. I take full responsibility. My job is to teach them how to win. If we haven't figured out yet how to win, we were so close at Minnesota. That was what it was supposed to look like and just because we lost doesn't mean you start searching for different answers, you just double down on what we did then. Here we are on the road again, we have a chance to go on the road, play a good team. Let's do what we were doing.” 

On Heinrich Haarberg as the starting quarterback
“I feel very confident with Heinrich being the starting quarterback. That being said, I also have a lot of confidence in Jeff (Sims). That’s probably not a great answer, but we practiced last night. Jeff looked awesome. Jeff looked great. Heinrich looked great. Chubba (Purdy) looked good. I’m getting them both ready. I have full confidence in Heinrich. In the midst of losing, and I know there were some bad passes and all those things, but in the midst of losing, I saw things from Heinrich that I wanted to see. I saw him compete. I saw him and Billy (Kemp IV) work well versus man, and I saw a lot of option routes. I saw some things that I think we need to add to our run game. We just have to get the run game back to what it had been doing.”

On how close they are to having a good offensive identity  
“We have an offensive identity. We’re going to run the ball. In all seriousness, I would not confuse identity, knowing what you want to do and who you are, with always having success. We lined up and we tried to run the ball against those guys. If that game stays 7-0, where we go down on that fourth and two and we go down and make it 14-7, we’re going to continue – they were running the ball and they were very consistent with their clips. If we would have stayed with that…once you get down 28-0, we’re going to play to win. We came out. We know exactly who we are. We’re going to run the ball, we’re going to run a little bit of option, we’re going to play action pass here and there, we’re going to try and convert third downs. I think we’re just trying to do it better.”

On what positives he takes away from Saturday
“That we can learn from it. There are some guys that competed. Billy Kemp competed like a son of a gun. Some other guys competed, I’m not saying our guys didn’t compete, but it’s kind of what Mitch (Sherman) was saying. We just kind of play with an air of hesitancy. Anytime your team does that, you put it on yourself as a coach. I’m not cutting them loose enough. I have to do a better job. We went out last night and we played. We didn’t really play Saturday. We kind of went out there and tried to win. You have to play. It’s a game; you have to play it.”

On if the Sunday practice was different than usual
“We practiced last night, full pads. We went out in full pads, we competed. We said ‘hey, it’s a short week. It’s kind of like a Tuesday. We didn’t really play at the level we wanted to on Saturday,’ so we went out, we put the ball down and we played. And you know what? Guys had fun playing.”

On Malachi Coleman
“Yeah, he was out last week. He was in the protocol. He got hit during practice.”

On figuring out the running back situation
“We’ve been going with Anthony (Grant). Anthony just has to protect the football. When he fumbled in that game early on and a lot of people said he’s in the doghouse. No one’s in the doghouse. It’s just, we can’t play the way we want to play and put the ball on the ground. It happened again in the red zone. We’re working with him all the time. I love the guy, I walked off the field with him, like ‘hey, you’ll be back, let’s go.’ (Josh) Fleeks, I think, just showed us a dynamic element. I thought Emmett (Johnson) played well. Kwinten (Ives), we’re trying to bring Kwinten along. There’s just a big difference. He’s so talented. There’s a big difference going from seeing cards to being out there, and they can be in one of seven different defenses. Kwinten’s coming, but I think Josh is the one guy who kind of jumped. He can play receiver, he can play tailback. Anthony will keep working on ball security, Fleeks will keep bringing it along, and I think Emmett is a guy who can do it all.”

On the team’s psyche a few days removed from the Michigan game
“All I know is what it better be. It better be ‘we can’t let that happen again.’ It better be ‘we better play our best game on Friday.’ It better be, for all of us, that ‘you don’t get to play for the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers and play in that stadium and play with all these facilities and get all the things that we get and then judge how we’ll we’re going to play based upon if we’re down 14-0 or not. If we’re down 13-7 with six minutes left in the third quarter against Colorado.’ We better play, play. That’s the mindset. That’s the mindset. As I’ve told the guys, they’ve got ‘hey, I know you don’t really know me, Coach Rhule, but bring me along’ to ‘hey, I believe in you’ to ‘I believe in you too much to let that happen on Saturday.’ It’s ridiculous what happened on Saturday. I believe in them too much. They’re going to play, okay? All I’m doing is, this Friday is a great test. I said that to you guys after the game. I said we’ll find out who we are on Friday. We’ll go to that bye week and we’ll look at the tape and we’ll say ‘hey, who are the lions?’ I’m not talking about being perfect. This is not a game about being perfect. Who are the ones that go out there and they attack? I’ll put my money on a lot of these guys, though. I can see Jimari Butler and Ty Robinson, I can see the look in their eyes last night.”

On the mental status of the team on Saturday’s game 
“I’m not saying fire. I’m not saying our guys we’re not fired up to play. I’m not saying they were flat, I’m saying we are a team of great guys that don’t want to make mistakes and lose the game. Okay, so we can’t play that way. You gotta do your assignment, like you don’t get to just say ‘hey I’m supposed to block ‘Sam’, but I’m going to block ‘Shawn’ instead.’ You gotta do your assignment, but like you gotta attack it. You can’t be like ‘hey I don’t want to get beat.’ If you have seven guys on offense who are trying not to get beat then you’re not knocking anybody down. The great Cornhusker teams, they talked about knockdowns. We had a hundred and some knockdowns two weeks ago and we didn’t. On the fourth and one play, I’ll always take the heated questions like ‘hey should we run this’ no one was on the ground on the fourth and one play, no one because we’re all trying not to get beat. So, again I’m setting this message so everyone on our team knows what it is. I don’t think it’s fire. That being said the process to me is never the schedule. It’s not doing practice on Sundays or Mondays. The process is that we have a standard performance and a mindset that we attack everything we go 1-0 every single day, we try to get one percent better and when we don’t we take responsibility for it. We attack like lions with everything we do and so, the only crime against the team ever is to accept losing. I thanked Coach Harbaugh at the end of the game, like ‘hey thanks for letting us play that out.’ Two weeks ago we had the lead. Northern Illinois went down and scored as the game was over and I was like no they gotta get ready for their season. We lost that day. The onside kick most times you don’t even want to show your onside kick. We did it and it didn’t look very good. We’re going to get better from it. So, that’s the mindset for me. I was on the officials to the very end of the game, like ‘hey throw that flag.’ We’re going to play ‘til the end of the game. So, that’s the process for me. That’s the methodical nature. It’s just ‘hey after every game come up and tell the truth.’ We win, we lose. What happened? We could’ve played better on Saturday. Our guys are such good guys they don’t want to lose, but we’re not going to win until we start to attack.” 

On the amount of sacks per game and how that will affect this week’s game against Illinois
“That’s a great question, maybe we had one against La Tech. We’ve been going with a little bit of a four-man rush, a little more coverage. There was some times in this game where again, when I say we’re better than we play. Like Princewill (Umanmielen) won a couple times, Jamari (Butler) won a couple times, the ball was out really quickly because just the coverage, ya know. Again we moved a lot of guys around, but still ‘hey were supposed to drop down number three and that guy runs post and the guy is wide open and he throws the ball.’ So, I think we can get pressure. To me, we have to have the ability to get pressured with four, against Colorado we were bringing five and six and seven, right. We have to have the ability to give pressure with four guys and it kind of goes back to what I’m saying about attacking. You can’t rush trying to keep the guy in the pocket, we have to rush. (Luke) Altmyer is an excellent player, like he can run, he’s athletic, but we can’t just sit there and whistle all day and play man across the board. We’re going to have to rush and let our pass rushers go. We’ve been trying to emphasize it, but we’re not getting the necessary results. Michigan at the same time does a nice job of their going to chip, protect and they’re going to trust their guys to win. Their guys won on some big plays.” 

On assessing Tristan Alvano and the kicker situation
“He is just like the rest of us. I’ve got to be better, the o-line has to be better, the d-line has to be better. Tristan has to be better. Tristan can kick better than he’s kicking right now. He’s got to get it corrected. He was out there last night, he was kicking. It’s not for a lack of effort, not for a lack of trying. When I go to the game, I’m going to trust our guys to make the plays that I think they can make. That might adjust the line. He might go for a few more times. We went for it on fourth and one and it didn’t work out for us, right? Tristan can do it. I know he can do it. He’s a  young player. Sometimes I would have loved to have brought him on a little later, but he’s going through the fire right now. The good news is, I think he’s recognizing – we talk about that fear and confidence – ‘I’m missing some kicks I want to make, I’m still here, I’m still making it, I’ll be okay.’ Tristan is just going to have to get better for the rest of us.”

On younger players getting playing time
“Jaidyn (Doss) was clear to practice last week. He broke his arm and he was finally cleared last week and so he was out there last week. He’s a guy that could see some reps. I said Malachi (Coleman) was out last week. Malachi I thought was really coming on before that. He played some good snaps. The week before against LA Tech, Jaylen (Lloyd) is another guy as he masters what he’s doing in the playbook, I think he’s seeing some things out of him.”

On a dual quarterback system
“I’ll do whatever it takes to win.”

On Jeff Sims’ injury
“It was a high-ankle sprain. It is so tough that he was out there. Even last week, he’s out there but it was kind of Cam (Lenhardt) last week where they’re moving around but they just can’t do fully everything and so as a quarterback you can be available as kind of an inactive guy but as a d-lineman it’s kind of hard to push off so I think when that first happened, I usually think high ankle sprains will be four to six weeks so I would expect it to be probably around now.”

On playing a short week
“When I was in the American and the MAC, when we were in the MAC when I was an assistant coach, I couldn’t tell you if it was Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday because we would play Thursday night or Friday night or Saturday night. The only thing tough is when we play these night games on the road, we get back so late but thankfully it’s a Friday night so we play Friday, we play another Friday. I don’t really love night games that much because you’re sitting around, especially on a Friday. At least on Saturdays, you can watch other teams play. On Fridays, you’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ or something so it’s not super ideal but it is what it is. The changes in the week, this week, we’ll kind of keep our normal rhythm except we brought them in on Monday. We did more last night and I trust Mitch (Cholewinski), our sports science guy and he does a great job with the recovery and trying to make sure I don’t do too much and make sure they’re fresh for Friday night.”

On condensing the corrections during a short week
“I think you’re trying to condense what you’re doing. To me, in the NFL you’re going Sunday to Thursday and that’s really hard. I remember I was with Coach (Tom) Coughlin and we just walked through that whole week. We went out and we played somebody and we just ran our training camp offense and we had more success because the guys were really familiar with it so I learned something there. I think on a week like this, now you’re playing defense right, you’re playing kind of a defense that plays some man, that plays some zone, facing an offense that can be big, that can spread it out, that can be big on you, be little on you so you have to face so many different things with Illinois, they’re so well-coached that you do have to prepare a lot so we try to do a good job with walkthroughs but again that’s what I said last night. We went out and practiced last night. Nothing is ever a punishment, it’s always an opportunity. It’s an opportunity. We have to get that game out of our system. We have to go compete so I thought the guys, they had a great look about them when we got done last night.”

On avoiding the outside noise
“No way. I don’t even tell them to think. They aren’t going to listen to me anyways. I try to tell my son, ‘Hey don’t look at Twitter’ and he’s like ‘Okay’ as he’s looking at Twitter so I think this is the modern world and you have to decide where you put your attention to so I’ll just say this. If being 2-3 is the end of the world for us then, there’s a lot of 2-3 teams in the world right now. We’re facing one on Friday so I think Nebraska has been 2-3 or some version of it in the last couple years and when you look back at last year when they got here last year, I thought the team accelerated. They got better and they had some chances to win games down the stretch so why don’t we just do that? That was the message last night. Do that. The most important thing to me in this program is that the guys become great adults and so I would never tell them to not look at this and look at that.”

On Illinois’ progression and the principles in its program
“I don’t know Bret (Bielema) really well, other than since I’ve gotten to the league. When you go to the meetings, he’s one of the more ‘elder statesman,’ he weighs in on topics, has really good perspective. Obviously, you watch even early on, just kind of watching them from afar, they ran the ball, played defense. They’re much more diverse now, much more explosive. I think they do a great job of taking advantage of the guys they have. Last year, they had a bunch of guys get drafted. They come back this year, they’re tailoring what they do to those players. They do an excellent job. They’re going to challenge you up front on their defensive line, they’re going to challenge you up front offensively. Anytime you have a quarterback who can run, it’s going to be a challenge. It’ll be a heck of a football game.”

On if he has a someone that he’s coached before that is a model for attacking
“I haven’t done that. That’s a great question, I might do that now. I show them the ones that did, though. I showed them Tommi Hill. Tommi Hill took that kickoff return in that game after last week, where he fumbled. He fumbled last week and he went down and got the ball. He’s playing both ways, he catches a kickoff return this week and he gets hit hard. He gets back up, he goes out, he continues to play on defense. We need him on offense, we yell for him, he goes on offense. It’s the end of the game, it’s 45-whatever and I say I’m going to put one of the young guys in, and he’s like ‘no, I’m going.’ Last week, I took him off of kickoff because he was playing however many snaps and he’s like ‘no, I’m going on kickoff, don’t ever take me off again.’ I say ‘gotcha, Tommi.’ Kickoff, he goes off, catches a ball, doesn’t get a great block, and if you go back and watch the play, he literally carries people like seven yards. And not everyone on the play is pushing the pile for him. He carries people seven yards. I told him when he walked off the field, I said in my own way ‘I’ll mess with you forever, I love guys like that.’ From what I hear from people, maybe Tommi wouldn’t have done that last year. But Tommi Hill, man. Give me a bunch of guys like that. He doesn’t want it to be easy, he wants it to be difficult. He loves to compete, so I showed the team that, so that they all know. ‘Hey, what’s Coach Rhule looking for?’ I show them that. And tonight, we’re going to show them what last night looked like, because last night was winning football. Then, we’re going to do the same thing tomorrow. They’ll get it.”