Nebraska Head Coach Matt Rhule Pre-USC Press Conference
Opening Statement
“Dylan (Raiola) will try to practice tomorrow, we’ll see where he’s at. We’ll get both him and Heinrich (Haarberg) ready. Obviously, we made the move with Dana (Holgorsen) last week. He will call the plays this week and serve as the offensive coordinator moving forward.”
On why Dana Holgorsen will be calling plays and what he can bring to the table
“We called him last week and had him come in. Had him look at everything. He’s got a long history of success offensively, both as a head coach and certainly as a coordinator before that. He just kind of gives us a fresh perspective. I’m looking at what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with and he was able to say ‘hey, let’s go in these directions over here.’ I just think it gives us a great opportunity to have one of the great, great offensive minds, a guy that I’ve been friends with before and that I trust – I’m excited to see what he does.”
On the relationship with Holgorsen
“I think it goes all the way back to me going to the convention as a young assistant and sitting and listening to him talk. I coached against him when he was at West Virginia. Saw the evolution of what he did there in terms of going to a cold weather place, running the football and still being really explosive. We’re represented by the same people so we see each other at a lot of different places. He’s friends with my wife and I, we come to Charlotte quite a bit. He’s just someone I respect as a coach. It’s not a friend thing, I just respect him and respect what he’s done. He got done last year and probably needed some time and I called him last week and said ‘hey, can you come in and help?’ So he and Phil (Snow) came in and kind of looked through everything. I think he felt confident. As he said to me, he likes our coaches, he likes our players and felt like he could help.”
On making a change in Week 11
“It’s probably unique. But it’s what’s needed. It’s the right thing. I think what you’re going to see now as coaches get fired, I think you’ll start to see coaches start leaving before bowl games and coaching bowl games so the players can have some familiarity with them. I think that was kind of in my head. I think you’ve seen coaches take jobs and then go there and coach the bowl game. When I went to Baylor, I sat out and didn’t do that, so I didn’t really have a chance to know the players until mid-spring. I appreciate all the work our staff has done. I love how hard they’ve grinded and cared about the kids and done their best and produced some good moments. I felt like we needed some help. I just thought this was the right thing to do. At the end of the day, it might be bold, it might be unique. I didn’t bring him in at first with that. I said ‘come and see.’ Because he got here and he felt comfortable and Marcus (Satterfield) walked in there right away and was like ‘tell me everything you need.’ Glenn (Thomas) did the same thing, and Garret (McGuire) said ‘I can translate this into your language.’ Dana (Holgorsen) is obviously a really smart guy offensively. He can figure out what we’re doing and what we can do well.”
On if Holgorsen’s hiring shifts the offensive philosophy
“I want to score points. I think the thing with Dana – he came up last year to visit. As a head coach, sometimes you get fired and you go to Alabama and work for Nick Saban or something like that. I looked at Coach Saban’s history of having Bill O’Brien and Lane Kiffin and all those guys as OCs, guys who have been head coaches, guys who have perspective. This is a lonely job sometimes, and to have someone in the building who’s done that, you have someone to bounce ideas off of. At the time, I was hoping that at some point he’d be ready to do this. If I’m being honest about myself, if I look back, we’ve always done a good job of playing really good defense. We’ve always done a good job of being physical. We’ve always done a really good job of developing players. When we’ve had good offenses, we’ve won games. Dana, when I think about what he’s done – going to Oklahoma State, what he did there. Going to West Virginia, the run game that they had. I competed against them. It was a really physical, tough team. It just made sense to me.”
On Marcus Satterfield and structuring the offensive coaching staff
“I’m just worried about right now. Marcus is about as good of a man as I know. He could’ve said ‘hey, fire me. Give me my money, I’m going to go home.’ He didn’t. Trust me, I get it, it’s a results business. But you’re still trying to teach some life lessons to our guys. He humbled himself and said ‘what do I need to do?’ The first day, Dana (Holgorsen) said to me when he watched practice, ‘hey, you’ve got really good coaches. I’m watching EJ (Barthel), I’m watching Donnie (Donovan Raiola), I’m watching Satt (Marcus Satterfield), I’m watching Glenn (Thomas), I’m watching Garret (McGuire), there’s great coaches here.’ We just have to find the things that our guys do well and let’s just do those things and eliminate all the other stuff. Satt is out there coaching the tight ends, Garret is coaching the wideouts, Donnie is coaching the o-line. Glenn is coaching the quarterbacks, EJ is coaching the running backs. Anything that Dana needs, they’re helping him. He can’t come in and change the offense. He can’t come in and install the air raid. We’re in week 11. You can come in and say ‘what are the things that we do well? Who are the guys that make plays? Let’s figure out how to do it with those guys.’ I think that’s the big picture that he’s doing right now.”
On if he’d consider an air raid offense after the season
“Right now, I’m just focused on right now. If you watch what Dana (Holgorsen) did at West Virginia – we’re playing Lincoln Riley this week. They all have the air raid principles in them. Everyone is going to run, mesh and cross. The plays that they invented, everyone runs. It’s really taken on a much bigger picture than that, if that makes sense. Coach (Mike) Leach was still doing, truly, the air raid. If you watch what Coach Holgorsen has done, when you watch what Coach Riley has done, they’ve built powerful offenses with big people who run the football, play action. Yeah, they have some of those principles in there, but they adopt other things. To me, this is an opportunity. I have Tony White, who I think is a great coach, who does some unique things. He’s adjusted his defense to our people. I think that’s been really good. I think Coach Holgorsen will adjust his offense to our people. I don’t know what three weeks from now holds. I have no idea. The offseason is the offseason. This is not about next year. This is about right now. This is about us giving our guys the best chance to go out there and win at USC."
On player’s response to changes
“I haven’t had a ton of those conversations. I think the players are just trying to battle through last week. Last week was a tough week for us obviously. I gave the seniors a couple days off just for them to catch their breath. They’ve done so much for the program. I wanted the young guys last week to know that this isn’t about next year. This is about now, get better now. We had some guys on the scout team that were playing. On Thursday, we all came back together and I think Dana (Holgorsen) had done a good job of saying I’m here to help. I’m sure in the locker room there’s seismic conversations. No one has come to me saying that it’s a good move or a bad move. They’ve just asked what we’re doing next. Just being out on the field, it looks like it’s flowing really well and moving really smoothly. That was the take from Phil (Snow), he came in and said that he trusts Phil with his life and that I have a really good group of kids, you have a good defensive staff. It’s just some of these games, it’s a play here, a play there. You’re knocking the quarterback out of bounds on third and eight, when you need to come around and sack, fumble the ball. It’s just little edges here and there that we’re fighting for.”
On Dylan Raiola’s reaction to the change
“Dylan trusts me and trusts the program. He just took it as ‘hey what are we doing today.’ He’s trying to get his back healthy. All the guys had a really positive reaction to it. It goes back to what I said last week, players need to play, players need to go make plays. If you watch on Saturdays, players have to go make plays. Dana (Holgorsen) and the staff will give the players the best opportunity to go make plays so we need the guys to make them. The whole play calling thing, we’ve tried to handle that, now go make some plays. Football is a game where players win games. We’ve got good players, we expect them to go win some games.”
On where playcalling fell short the first half of the season
“I think that’s too big of a picture. I think as we’ve moved throughout the year, we’ve just tried to get too many things to get too many guys involved. We’ve had too many adjustments, I’ll put that squarely on me as a head coach. I’m not putting that on anyone else. Maybe a fresh look from the outside, one with no context of the history, just kind of watching it, I think that’s the biggest thing. We’ll see what it does. I don’t know that all of the sudden we’re going to score 50 points a game, but if we can get 15 more points a game, we can recover a few more third downs. The hope is that we find what we do well and build on that.”
On Holgorsen’s style of running the ball
“We run the same plays. Coaching against him, he ran inside zone, he ran counter, power. Little more out of 11 personnel, not as many big sets. The thing I’ve always respected about Dana was he took advantage of his players. He had Will Grier when we played him, and Will got the ball out of his hands really quickly and processed information really quickly. The biggest thing when I played against Dana is he’s just a really aggressive play caller. I’m probably not a super aggressive person in that area. I thought the best move for me was to bring in someone who is that way, and offset that against me.”
On Holgorsen’s role at TCU
“He was kind of in a consulting role where he would go up there and spend a couple days there while they game planned. He wasn’t a day-to-day operations position, he was more of a consultant. It didn’t injure TCU anyway with us taking him.”
On Dylan Raiola’s availability
“It’s just a possibility, we’re getting him, Danny (Kaelin) and Heinrich (Haarberg) all ready. We practiced last night, not much of a practice, I’ll know after Tuesday practice if he can play or not.”
On Phil Snow’s role
“Phil doesn’t even come up here, Phil does everything virtually for us. He watches tape, we have a couple guys that do things like that for us. When we were playing Colorado, he’d watch Colorado’s defense, dissect the defense for us, watch the offense, dissect the offense for us. Frank Verducci does the same thing for us, though he does come up on game days so we have a couple guys that help us like in the NFL as advanced scouts just sort of their take to give to the coordinator on Sundays. So when you walk in on Sunday, you already have someone who studied them for a week who knows your way of seeing things and the other team’s strengths and weaknesses. Last week, I woke up Sunday morning, went through Sunday, and then got home and called both those guys and said ‘Can you get up here at some point’ then waited to see if they showed up on Monday or not.”
On Holgorsen’s feel of the program
“I don’t want to speak for Coach Holgorsen, but I don’t think he would put his name and come here if he didn’t feel like there were guys here that he could help, win with, and grow. He certainly doesn’t have any need to take this job other than that he wanted to. I think he felt good about the opportunity.”
On if Holgorsen identified any players that would be good in the lineup
“I want to clarify that I would not pull a kid’s redshirt if I promise he was redshirted. I just meant that some of these kids have four games, so if Dana wants to use a kid I can say we’re in the last three games of the year, so you can use him. We have a kid on the scout team, Mekhi Nelson, he’s just a dog. We used last week to see if he was ready to play. We have a lot of kids that are developing into good players. If you’re on the offensive scout team, you get some pretty good defense everyday, so you have to learn. We’ve been working those guys. I don’t know if you’ll see us look drastically different than we have. A lot of this that these guys have worked their tails off for us to get to this point. Dana is trying to learn where the locker room is and there’s just a lot of things to learn. He’s one of the most brilliant guys I know, so he’ll be just fine.”
On the difference in the offense with Heinrich Haarberg and Dylan Raiola
“That’s why I’m not going to let anybody talk to you guys tomorrow. You guys are really good at your jobs and I appreciate that. They’ve changed their quarterback, we’re watching UNLV film and spring film. The thing that I’ve learned from Coach Holgorson over the years, and the thing he’s said since he got here, and the thing that I did wrong by Marcus (Satterfield) and Glenn (Thomas) and all the guys is simplification. Just simplify to what you do well and just do those things and we have not got that done, so I don’t think you can go out there and have two offenses. In the UCLA game when Heinrich got in there, I thought he did a nice job. He could pull the ball down and run, and he found open guys. We’re going to keep our things in house and our cards as close to the vest as possible.”
On his line of thinking in hiring Holgorsen
“I don’t think it was about a ‘spark.’ Those things are all good, but they’re fleeting. If you go back to after the UCLA game, I answered a question saying that we’re just so inconsistent and I have to find a way to be more consistent. Part of that was that the past three games, we’ve played two top five teams. If you look at our responses in those games, they were very up and down. To beat Colorado, we had to block a field goal, Rahmir (Johnson) made an amazing catch. It’s still very similar, we had to make some plays that you forget about after the fact. I’m still teaching the same process, getting better every day, all the things I one hundred percent believe in. With that being said, when I look at moving forward, I would like Dana to come in and be our offensive coordinator. I would like him to call the plays and run the offense moving forward. I think it’s a great fit with me, I think it’s a great fit with our players. My hope is that he would come in, consult, like what he sees here and stay here and be the coordinator moving forward. I don’t know what is going to happen in three weeks. He might get a head coaching job. To me it was more about that than anything else. Honestly, I wanted him to be around our players and coaches. As we go to make changes in the offseason, it would be great. To me this was about the right things moving forward. Can he help us this week, can he help us next week, can he help us the week after. Can he help us in the bowl season and then can he be the guy moving forward that takes us where we need to be.”
On Big Ten teams between 4-6 wins and how hiring Holgorsen can move the Huskers’ up in that group
“There’s three games left for us. You see the parody, we’re playing three really good teams. Three teams that are in the same sort of area we’re in. I watched Iowa play UCLA on Friday night. I thought UCLA had really good personnel. they had played LSU, they had played Oregon, they had played really good teams. The scores sometimes got away from them at the end of the game and they were closer than it looked to me. When I watched UCLA, this is a really really talented team that’s kind of hitting their stride right now. That’s what they looked like on Friday night. They turned the ball over twice on Iowa’s goal line or it would’ve been two more touchdowns. It’s just about watching the film and seeing the different teams. Bringing in Coach Holgorsen is about helping our offense being better against USC, it’s about helping our offense be better next year. It’s just about everything moving forward. So many things that we’re doing are right and trending in the right direction. This was an area that was struggling. I tried to fix it, I hadn’t been able to fix it, so I called somebody that I knew could fix it. I think Dana will fix it. Tony will continue to do a great job, special teams will continue to improve and play better. Strength program will continue. We’re on the road recruiting, we’re going to continue to recruit well. We’ll continue to learn how things are in the new Big Ten. This is an area not at the level that we wanted it to, so I went out and found someone I trust.”
On Holgorsen’s red zone offense
“He’s always had the things that you’re looking for to beat man and zero in the red zone. When you get down in the red zone, you’re looking to have receivers who can run options. We played him when he had David Sills. We still have a two-point play called mountaineer that he beat Texas with, which gives the quarterback a lot of flexibility and variations. His commitment to both running the football and being aggressive in the passing game is good. It’s tough to defend because you’re always defending 50/50. If you play outside leverage, he’s going to run a slant, if you play inside leverage, he’s going to run a fade. There’s so many things when you’re going against him that are hard and difficult to do. They beat us really badly one year at West Virginia, and then he left the next year, and Jake Spavital took over at Texas State. We brought Jake in and he went through every single play call with our defense. Phil Snow sat there and our entire defense sat there, and we listened to him go through every play. He was like ‘do you really want me to do this?’ That improved us, we went on the next year and won 11 games and were really a great defense. Just having that inside knowledge of why they did what they did against us and how they did it. But the options they give guys and the freedom they play with is something that our offense players probably need. I’m probably more of a defensive guy, I’m just looking at myself very honestly. We’re doing 95% of the right things, this area just hasn’t come along the way I wanted, so I found someone who can help. I say that because it’s really important to me, as a leader I have to make the right decisions, and I’m hoping I made the right one. I feel very good about it since Dana has been here for a week.”
On how Holgorsen can help the receivers
“I think it goes back to the simplicity of what we do well. Maybe we’re asking the guys to do 20 things, if we ask them to do four things, they’ll do those better. It then goes on the player, if you’re not trying to screen them open then they’ve got to get open. I think that freedom of mindset of going to get open is important. I think the repetitive nature of what they do well and just doing those things is helpful. I don’t think it’s a technical thing, we have good players, maybe we are not throwing it too much, maybe we’re throwing it too much. There’s a non reactionary quality that he has that can hopefully help us.”
On how Heinrich Haarberg has stayed ready
“Talk about the ultimate team guy, he’s been playing for the punt team. He asked me last week if he needed to go to the punt meeting or stay in the quarterback meeting. Guys like that are why you coach. This is a good opportunity for him to come in. As Dana (Holgorsen) has been here, it’s mostly been Heinrich and Danny (Kaelin) taking the reps, so he’s been able to see them play and see what they do. I think they’ve done a really good job. Heinrich has done a really good job. We’re not going to put the I-formation back in, but maybe we will. I think he brings a lot to the table.”
On scouting Jayden Maiava
“You’re looking at what they do well, they do a lot well. The tailback, like all Lincoln Riley offenses, (Woody) Marks is a fantastic tailback. He’s explosive, dynamic. I’ve coached against Riley for a long time, he’s going to find a way to run the football. He’s elite at what he does. Even in the last game against Washington, they got back in the game just by running the football at a high level. (Zachariah) Branch is an excellent slot. They have some guys that can really go on the outside for big matchups. Maiava has the ability to move and so does Miller (Moss). That added part of the run game, when they’re running their shallow cross plays, and QB draws like they did with Jalen Hurts. Now as a defensive, you’re trying to defend the counter, the tackle trap and all of these plays they run. They also have the opportunity to pull the ball and run, he’s a dual threat player. There’s some more difficulties for us this week on defense and you don’t know exactly what direction they’re going to go with him.”
On his sense of the Huskers’ mindset coming out of the bye week
“I thought they were excellent last night. We did what we did last week. I also think that we have to get to the point here pretty quickly that it’s not this reactionary. We were down 13-6 at Ohio State and our locker room was electric. We were down 13-7 to UCLA and our locker room was blah. I have to find the most competitive guys on the team and get them out there and turn them loose. You go through this process, you’re teaching and teaching and teaching and teaching, then you finally get to the point where the players take it and run with it. I made this move that I made and I’ll make any other move I have to make. The players have to make moves. They have to play their best football moving forward. They have to go to USC and come home and play Wisconsin then go to Iowa. They have to play three games and play their best football. We shouldn’t be in a great mood right now. We should be a little pissed off. At the same time, I told them that UCLA was good. I told them, but they chose, in their brains, to listen to something else. Those same blitzes that were hitting Dylan (Raiola), where the crowd was booing, which I get – those same blitzes were hitting Iowa. You just have to play better football. We have to coach better football. We can’t be this emotional of a team. That’s what we worked on last week and that’s what we’re working on right now and you have to go to USC. USC can score, they can play great defense. You have to go play for 60 minutes. It can’t be a 42-minute game. It’s got to be 60 minutes and if you do that, you’ll always have a chance.”
On when he decided to make the change from Satterfield to Holgorsen as offensive coordinator
“I called Dana on Sunday. I asked him to come in and consult and help out with the hope that this would work out. He got here Monday and Tuesday and felt like he could call it, so I said ‘let’s do it.’”
On the advantage that would come from Nebraska fans traveling to USC
“I think the impact of our fans on the road is always elite. You go to some place like Ohio State, where everyone was wearing red so you couldn’t tell who was for you and who was against you. You go to Purdue, last year at Illinois – it’s a real impact. When they do show up in mass, it limits the need for silent cadences and all the things that make being on the road hard. I don’t know how many times Nebraska has played in the Coliseum, but this is an iconic moment for me at least – to have a chance to go coach in that. I coached there as a graduate assistant, but to be out there and think about the world we live in in college football now, where Nebraska is playing at USC in a league game – you wouldn’t have thought of that a long time ago. Our fans show up and they make being on the road fun. At Purdue, you could really feel it because they were behind us. Directly behind us. That’s an advantage when they sit back there, because it’s not quite as loud, you’re able to communicate better. I’m certain that they’ll be there.”