Nebraska Head Coach Matt Rhule Pre-Wisconsin Press Conference

Opening Statement
“I’ll just get started quarterback-wise. Heinrich (Haarberg) has a pretty good ankle sprain, we’ll see if he can do anything tomorrow. Chubba (Purdy) came out of the game a little bit banged up, you know he hasn’t played much, so he’s a little bit banged up from getting hit. Jeff (Sims) is healthy. But we’ll go through the week and probably come all the way up until game time in terms of who will play. Obviously each guy brings something a little bit different to the table so we’ll have a pretty good plan and we’ll see who’s able to go. I won’t be able to comment on Heinrich until after I see him tomorrow, if he can do anything. With regards to this week, obviously we’re really excited to have a chance to go to Madison, Wisconsin. It’s an iconic place, a place that I played at as a player. Coach (Luke) Fickell does a great job, he’s in year one. Both teams are 5-5, so we’ll get to see who wins this week on national TV. It’s a great opportunity for our guys. I’m really excited for our guys. I’ve tried to be honest with you guys every week about how I really feel about the tape and I’ll tell you. I thought defensively, and I thought many players on offense that that was by far the best game, especially by offense. I was proud of the guys and I told them that. They’re upset for losing obviously, but to me the process that we’re trying to put in place is working for a lot of guys, so the lesson for our team is ‘hey, we’re probably not going to have five turnovers and win very many games, especially in the Big Ten.’ But to have five turnovers and lose by three says a lot to have that game be close. We want to have fourth quarter shutouts. We can’t give them the ball at the 25-yard line, no matter how they got it. To have a penalty and a missed assignment, that leads to a field goal. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned but I was proud of the guys. I am excited to take them out there this week. They continue to fight each and every week. More importantly, they get better. I’m proud of where we’re headed.”

On the quarterback play and what can be fixed in the next two weeks
“I think there’s been several issues throughout the year and the number one issue is turnovers. We have three three-point games. I think we had 12 turnovers in those three-point games, correct me if I’m wrong. I think 11 of them come out of the quarterback position. To me, it’s not turning the ball over, at the same time a lot of those games were close because Heinrich (Haarberg) made great runs or Jeff (Sims) made great runs against Minnesota so a lot of good things happen from those guys. I’m one of those coaches where I don’t love to make big plays, everything to me is very incremental. Like ‘is this here,’ ‘was this here.’ I would be a fool to sit here and tell you it’s not protecting the football. In the passing game obviously in this first interception the one with Jeff and Malachi (Coleman) gets tackled and there’s a double move. I love to see our quarterbacks as I talk to them about being more intentional. We can’t keep throwing balls up, we can’t keep throwing balls up thinking the guy is going to be there. At the end of the day we have to be intentional at quarterback, every ball you throw is a ball you wanted to throw. We had twice where we had guys throw interceptions, stepping back and just letting it rip. That’s not who we are, that’s not who we should be. Obviously they’re young players and I’m trying to guide them through it. We’re trying to guide them through it. At the same time having expectations and standards for the way we want to play. What can be fixed in the next two weeks? I certainly think Sam that we fix the pocket ball security. You go back two games ago, not the pocket but Heinirch running the ball, two fumbles and we certainly worked on that. We certainly worked on the way we hold the football, this was interceptions this week. What can we do? We just keep coaching, we just keep coaching. We keep pushing, we keep grinding and we keep working. Build on the good things and try to eliminate the bad things.” 

On the turnovers
“I think the thing that we’re trying to get the guys to do, and I show them different things. I talk a lot about basketball. Last week, we showed them Kobe (Bryant) talking about, as a rookie, shooting five airballs in the finals game seven and then coming back the next year and making all those shots. I think the biggest thing is, when you’re a basketball player, when you’re Michael Jordan, when you’re LeBron James, that’s about the end of my extent of who’s a great basketball player nowadays. You don’t go to take the last shot and think about how you're going to shoot, you just shoot the way that you’ve shot 1,000 times. To me, that’s trusting your training and that’s really our process. Our process is practicing so much and working so much that we can trust our training. As you get late in the Big Ten year and you go through the Big Ten for the first time, you start to experience these teams and the things that they’re doing. Trusting the training that we’re going to have, whether it’s a read or a decision. You look at two of the interceptions and two of them are backing up and just kind of throwing it, another one is just throwing it to a spot, hoping that it’s going to be completed and those things just can’t happen. In terms of the players, my job is to help them become great players. It’s not ‘hey, don’t throw interceptions.’ Is this what you’re trained to do? You’ve worked your whole life to get to this point, what should you do in this moment. ‘Hey, it’s not there, I should reverse out, I should go make a play.’ I want our guys to play free. I’m not giving you great answers, other than to me, it’s about trusting your training. Chubba (Purdy) comes out at the end, Chubba ran the scout cards last week. That’s just part of putting your third quarterback in. I have a lot of confidence in Chubba and if you go back to every answer you guys have ever asked me about him, I believe in the kid. I believe in Chubba and he’s kind of healthy now, you saw him running. It’s just, you put him out there and he hasn’t had a ton of reps, he’ll get some reps more this week. If he has to play, he’ll be ready to play. I think it’s that, I think it’s trusting your training, I think it’s time on task. A lot of these guys haven’t played a ton of football. Jeff (Sims) has, but Chubba hasn’t played a ton. I sat down with him yesterday, we just kind of kicked it for a little bit and talked. It was like ‘well, I played two games in 2020. I played a couple games in 2021. I started two games last year. I played a half.’ I think as a quarterback, you have to play. You have to play and play and play and get comfortable, get in a rhythm. There’s a lot of things. I always start with myself, what am I not doing right? I’m the head coach. Everything that happens here, I’m responsible for. You look at that game, a lot of things are the same thing over and over again. We don’t really get beat, but we do get beat on double moves in the secondary. If you sit there and you look at the team and you’re like ‘well, they don’t do this.’ We’re kind of a good defense. We’re going to look at the same couple things. I just challenge our staff, but really challenge myself like ‘what are the things that need to be fixed?’ I have not solved this issue in terms of the turnovers. So, I don’t go in there and say ‘guys, we’ve got 22 turnovers. We’ve got to fix it.’ They know that. I just say ‘hey, are we trusting our training? Is this the ball that you wanted thrown? Was this intentional or was this just sort of ‘oh, I don’t know what to do?’ If it is, just continue to give them those opportunities, those reps and continue to work. That’s as honest an answer as I can really give you because I don’t have the answer, if that makes sense. I’m working through it. I believe in these guys, I want to make that very clear. I believe in these guys. These guys can play, they just have to continue to work and grind through this. To give you an example, I showed them the punt fake in the game, and then I showed them the first time we practiced it in practice the Tuesday before Michigan. Literally, (Nate) Boerkircher and (Garrett) Snodgrass run into each other because we check that play. And then I showed them in the game versus a look we’ve never practiced and there’s one extra guy there, Marco Ortiz. No one ever talks about the long snapper. He makes a huge block and (Alex) Bullock and Ty Hahn and Elijah Jeudy, who I really think wants to be a tight end, makes an unbelievable block. Snodgrass comes back around and picks up the extra guy. My point to them was, ‘guys, I hate to say this, but everything takes time.’ You have to just keep working. What sometimes happens at quarterback is because it’s so visible, the weight of being the starting quarterback at Nebraska can sometimes weigh on you so much, you start searching for answers. There are no answers. You have to just go back to work every week. It’s an incremental, one better approach. I hope that we play really well this week, I hope that we solve the problem this week. The only way to solve it is just to keep getting a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. I’ll say one more thing and this is going very long so please forgive me. I showed our coaching staff a cutup and these are my friends – Ryan Day is a friend of mine. Justin Frye, the o-line coach at Ohio State, is a friend of mine. You asked me, Sam (McKewon), you asked me a question a couple weeks ago about the reverse, about Michigan State and why they got eight yards. They ran the exact same play. Ohio State ran the exact same play and they made one more block than we made, and Marvin Harrison Jr. came around for a 22-yard touchdown. We ran a wide sail route in the boundary. They ran about 12 of the same type of concepts, because we all run the same plays. My message to the coaching staff was, it’s not the plays, it’s not the application – you always want to call back here and there – it’s the players and their confidence level and their execution level. It’s not like ‘hey, players, you have to make it right.’ It’s continuing to watch these guys grow. Look at Javin Wright. Look at what reps is doing for him. This is a guy who was like ‘hey, should I even come back this year? Am I a corner, am I a safety, what am I?’ Now he’s out there ripping balls out. It’ll all come together for the quarterbacks, we’d just love for it to happen right now.”

On Chubba’s (Purdy) Interception
“First off I’ll say this, I take responsibility for that. It’s a good play call. The play is very simple. Every team in the world runs its three-man routes. It’s double under with a corner route. Basically, versus man the two guys run the under routes, they chase the under routes you have a one-on-one corner. It’s incomplete, zero blitz it’s 90 protection there’s a gap protection. (Thomas) Fidone stays in, he’s not going to get hit. It’s a confluence of events. We take a long time coming out by number one. People thought we were throwing to number one. It’s Billy (Kemp IV) flattening that run out because a guy undercuts him. I would love for Chubba (Purdy) to put that ball in the back corner and those guys get out of the way a little quicker. It wasn’t quite executed exactly right and when it comes down to execution, it falls on me. Their kid made two unbelievable plays. That corner made a double move to beat the safety and he ran back and picked the ball off. And on that play, he’s playing the guy man and comes off of it and picks it off. When you look at the tape it looks really really bad. I get that. I’m not saying that’s the players. The play clock was running down on us, things were going fast. I think (Marcus) Satterfield wanted to run a pick play by one to two and three. We wanted to see where they were. I didn’t want to put Chubba in a bad position where it goes to zone. He hasn’t had the reps in any of these plays this week. That play happened. I don’t put that on Chubba. I put that on me. That play is called Indy, it’s old Peyton Manning two unders with a corner route. First man you throw the corner route. They got too close together. That’s one of the ones I wake up two in the morning thinking about it . That’s on me.”

On Jeff Sims’ play in practice versus in the games
“I would say that we don’t talk about just one guy. In general, we don’t throw these interceptions in practice like we do in games. Again sometimes when you run the ball a lot and you finally have a chance to throw, you’re not in rhythm. We certainly came out wanting to throw the ball a little bit more in the last game because we knew how they play. So we hit a man beater and we overthrow Emmett (Johnson), that was a big play and the one where they threw the penalty on Billy (Kemp IV). Then they pulled it off and we had (Thomas) Fidone on the right. If you see that play Billy is running down the middle of the field wide open. There’s just a little different pictures for the guys. It’s not a super complex offense. It’s just different pictures that maybe guys aren’t seeing, but we certainly don’t have those interceptions in practice like we do in the game. Sometimes in the games there’s a little bit of pressure in our face, we’re not sure where to go and we kind of back up and throw it. I just don’t ever want a quarterback to never throw a ball unintentionally. I want our quarterbacks to reverse out and make plays. We have diverse quarterbacks who can run and if you’re playing man coverage against us then our quarterbacks should be running for 200 yards against them. Those things aren’t happening so you go back, you look at practice and you do better. We’ll continue to do that this week.” 

On the offense sequence
“Everything falls on me, we’re not going to start being like who’s this, who’s that. No one’s going to become divisive. Everything falls on me. To be on the headset, on the five yard line and they try to run guys into the game, the clock was winding really fast that game. You are up against it, you have a new quarterback, you have to get in the huddle and get out. All these things are kind of talked about ahead of time. So, if it’s wrong it’s on me. Let's just leave it at that. It’s way easier that way. I have a say in everything, we don’t run a fake punt without me doing it. I don’t micromanage every play, but if it’s a big play we’re going to do it. Can I be honest with you guys? I just want our guys to play. How are we going to build a championship team if we cannot make a mistake? If I could go back, would I have thrown the ball there or kicked a field goal, then given them the ball and gone down the field? We’re also trying to play and I want these guys to learn how to win. When I talk about the process I really mean it. Turn the game on on Saturdays and those teams that score 45, they play. They had some interceptions there and they played. I want our guys to play, I want it to be smart. Did we practice it? Did we rep it? We didn’t just quite execute 100% to the level we want. We put our third quarterback and I say third quarterback only out of respect because of the reps. Put him in a tough position and all of that falls on me. It doesn’t fall on anybody else, but me. I take all that on with a grain of salt, but if we sit here and we just keep everything really simple. We’re never going to win at a high level, we’re just going to learn to be competitive. On defense, Tony (White) is at his best when we’re bringing heat and we’re going zero blitzes, every once and a while we get beat. We just gotta play. You know how I feel in my chest when we call the fake punt? I’m just oh my gosh is this going to work? We gotta go play, we gotta give the guys the chance. Everything falls on me and I mean that. Sometimes we walk up there and they’re like hey they’re going to ask you this. Everything falls on me 100% and I would just say that I believe our guys are going to get better, and better. I wish we would’ve won that game on Saturday.” 

On being a part of a program where players are tentative of making mistakes and reactions from the fanbase
“I think all players, until they kill the bear, they’re all nervous about playing well. They’re a young player and eventually they kill that thing in their mind. They go play. If you want to live then you have to die. You have to be dead to all of those things to live. Again, there’s a big difference between making mistakes and doing things outside of your training. Does that make sense? I told our players after the game, I had one of our really good players, no one is noticing right now, he made a play and it hurt us. He texted me and he said ‘I’m so sorry’. I said ‘don’t ever send me that stuff’, as long as you prepare and you get to the game, and you’re not selfish. You make it about your team and you go play hard. This is a game of mistakes, things happen. We don’t want to play in fear and it’s really hard at first for players to play for me. They hear me saying it all the time, ‘do things right, don’t beat ourselves up, execute’ and at the same time they hear me say, ‘play free, go play’ and they can’t get it. When you become a good player you get it. You want to take the last shot, you want the ball in your hand. It’s the same thing with Chubba (Purdy). Chubba took us 90 yards to go win that game and we’re about that far away. I think it’s in general, our players care greatly, they desperately want to win, they desperately want to win for our fans, our fan base, for themselves, for the state, and that’s all I can ask for.” 

When the fans are critical of the staff
“The fans should do that. I have no problem with that. The fans can be critical of me. The fans should be critical of Satt (Marcus Satterfield), the fans should be critical. You come to the game and you sit there. For me, it’s not ‘oh we got this many guys,’ That’s not me. I think even within the coaching community we play them, then they talk to us afterwards. I think in year one, with as many injuries that we’ve had and different things that have happened, I think we’ve never made an excuse. We show up each week and we battle, we have a chance to be in every game. I think our guys are fighting their tails off. I never talk about changing the culture, but I do believe in instilling a culture. When you want to instill a culture, a mindset and I think all of that is happening. I think if people can’t feel that, but if you say to yourself ‘hey is this headed in the right direction?’ I got two freshmen, Jaylen (Lloyd) catching balls behind his hip, it’s going to continue to get better and better. The answer in life sometimes is always to just change everything. Players want to transfer, everybody wants their head coach to fire everybody. Has that worked out here? Where has that worked out? Just firing assistant coaches and coordinators? So we want the whole offense to start over again with a whole new language next year? I’m not doing that, that’s ridiculous. We’re going to be exactly who I said we were going to be. We’re going to be a day by day organization that gets better and better. We’re going to get through year one. Most of our guys on offense are coming back who will get better and better. Some of you guys are out on the field before the game. Usually you see me walk around the field, a lot of times I walk with players, a lot of times I walk with hurt players and I’m walking with (Luke) Reimer and DeShon (Singleton). ‘Hey Gabe Ervin, just imagine you at 220 pounds coming down the stretch here in November next year.’ Marcus (Washington) is fighting, scratching, punching and just willing to do what all the guys are doing. I’m just proud, I can’t tell you how proud I am of our guys. Malcom (Hartzog) didn’t practice last week and all of a sudden he has to go from playing. He comes in and he practices on Friday a little bit. He’s got to go from safety to corner. He goes out in the game and they hit him on a big play. He’s fighting for the team and what do you want me to do? Yell at him? Fans should absolutely. I’m just saying for me, I prefer to take all the heat for what happens. Everything that happens here runs by me. Five turnovers, just so we’re on the same page. Falls dead on my face. Just trust me, you guys know I don’t see very much to begin with. Five turnovers, talking about Marcus (Satterfield). What is the answer? The answer is to keep getting just a little better as best as I can and hope that this week we put it all together.” 

On how the locker room has handled the rollercoaster of a season
“I think they’ve just really grown. Take the Michigan game out of it, because obviously that got away from us and we talked a lot about that and we went out there on Sunday and practiced. As I watch a lot of scores in the Big Ten West, sometimes there’s these wild shifts of ‘hey, team wins two and then they lose by 21.’ Our guys are in every game, they battle in every game. I’m proud of our guys and the way they work. We’ve had injuries and other guys have stepped up and been ready to go. We’ve had guys change positions on the fly. It’s like Ty Robinson said to me – I said to him yesterday ‘you going to have the team ready to go?’ He was like ‘Coach, one thing about Nebraskans – he’s obviously from Arizona – it doesn’t matter if you’re from somewhere else, when you’re here, you just keep going back to work and you just keep fighting. That’s the one thing you learn when you’re here. The guys who can’t figure that out, they have to go, and they’ve gone in the past. We’ll be ready to go.’ I think they’ve just grown. They’ve handled it really well and they’ve gotten to a point where I now know each week, when we go to the game, our guys are going to be ready to go. I couldn’t say that early on. I couldn’t say that week one, week two. It was still very emotional. The way I look at things is, the seeds of championships are sown now. That might sound corny to people, I get all that. They had a long run on the last drive and we blitzed from the left and the d-line slanted it into the blitz. They went the wrong way. That’s why that play hit. Cam Lenhardt is a freshman, imagine when he’s a senior and he’s out there. If it’s not him, imagine Ethan Nation. Imagine those guys when they’re seniors. The lessons they’re learning this year, that’s what we’re preaching to those guys. As I’ve said 100 times, I want to win for the guys who are out there right now. I want (Luke) Reimer to go out on top, I want those guys to go out on top. I don’t worry about them. They are competitors and they’re winners. When I first got here, they were very much like ‘well, it’s hard to win when the offense turns the ball over.’ Now they’re kind of like ‘let’s control what we can control.’ I think we’ve seen some really good defensive football as a result because they have a pretty good mindset. As that melds over to the offense eventually, that way of playing, offense, defense and special teams all come together. I think we’ll have a pretty good team.”

On Justin Evans-Jenkins
“I think he’s done a great job. I think Justin has done a great job. He’s really a center by trade, so to go over and play guard, that’s a whole challenge. You’re facing all these three-four teams, bear teams, guys right up on top of you. I think Justin has been awesome. I think Teddy Prochazka has really, really hit his stride. We’ve got Ben Scott playing on a hurt MCL. Noure (Nouili) has surgery, they say four weeks. He comes back in a week and a half and he’s practicing. I’m thankful for those guys. (Bryce) Benhart does a great job for us. And (Henry) Lutovsky rotated in every two series last game. I’m really pleased with that group and how hard they’ve worked. The tight ends – (Luke) Lindenmeyer is an unsung hero on this team. He just does all the dirty work. (Nate) Boerkircher played his best game. He got hurt and came back in and played on a sprained ankle. When I look at the overall offensive picture and scoring 10 points and having five turnovers, obviously, I’m not a fool. I’m disappointed, but when I look at the tape, I’m like ‘man, we’re getting better. We’re getting better. We’re getting better,’ and just encouraging the guys to continue to do it. I think Donnie (Raiola) does a great job in that room. The players take tremendous accountability to do their job at a high level.”

On Chubba Purdy’s injury
“He just got banged up from being in the game. He hadn’t been hit in a while. I called him yesterday and was like ‘hey, stop by my office.’ He’s like ‘I’m in treatment.’ Obviously, for him to go in there and for that game to end the way it did, I just wanted to make sure I talked to him. I always worry about the things I say in the press conference. Sam (McKewon), you asked me after the game why we threw it on first down. I was kind of caught, because we didn’t throw it, but then I remembered he pulled it and threw it. So I just wanted to make sure he knew that when those things happen, there’s some accountability to him to know that play. That play is a base play, day one, it’s a handoff. But for me, that means that we haven’t done a good enough job of getting him reps. We just have to make sure we’re on the same page. He’s fine, he’s just sore from getting hit at quarterback.”

On the first interception of the game
“So that’s four verticals. For us, we have different versions of it. A lot of times we’ll say number three, (Thomas) Fidone is a really good matchup for us in man. If it’s man, we’re going to work Fidone as the man-beater, kind of like we did in the NFL. Number three is a good man-beater for us. It played out like man, though, and it was kind of like a zone quarters that looked like man. If we would have recognized the ball, it would have gone to Billy (Kemp IV) and he would have gone through. Also, if it’s man, the post player should go through the middle. The post player jumped it, but at the end of the end zone, Fidone is still open. Again, just kind of pressure in his face, Heinrich (Haarberg) steps backwards. The reason I don’t want to talk about Heinrich all the time is because people talk a lot about Heinrich’s slow release. Really all it is is the fact that the ball goes below his elbow as he’s going back. There’s a lot of quarterbacks in the NFL who do that. They always struggle. A lot of them struggle in the NFL with the ability to be accurate because his feet always have to be right. So on that play, he doesn’t step and throw because he has some pressure and has to wing that ball. It’s overthrown and intercepted. Obviously you have a big play possibility down the field to number two, you have the man-beater which is open. We have to throw it and catch it. When you talk about Coach Satterfield or any of the coaches, I look at it as, it’s going to be really hard to run the ball into free safety pressures the entire game. We’re going to have to be able to throw the football and we call a play where guys rope, and we expect our guys to go make the plays. When they don’t, I don’t say ‘hey, you guys aren’t good enough,’ I say ‘hey, we’ve got to keep practicing.’ That’s kind of the yin and the yang to the way my brain works – taking accountability but also giving the players a chance to make a play. I think when I said number two was running down the field, you nodded your head, so I think you saw it. There are some things that are there. I hope over the years that what you guys will see from me is that I don’t want to just take a short, quick, easy answer. There’s always all these different layers of everything, and I try to unpack them for myself and for everybody so that if all of a sudden, that ball is two inches to the right because we stepped and threw, it’s a completion. If the ball is right down the middle of the field, it’s a touchdown. At the end of the day, it just takes reps because you practice against one thing and get to the game and they have coaches too. They do different things. You want players who are seasoned who can, in a running offense, throw the ball versus all the looks they get and it just takes time. That was the thought with that.”

On if there’s a relationship between Heinrich Haarberg being 19-44 since Marcus Satterfield went to the box
“I don’t think so. I really don’t.”

On Elijah Robinson as Texas A&M’s interim head coach
"I didn’t know that until Keith (Mann) mentioned it to me on the way up. I was fired up. He’s like my blood. I love Elijah. I hired Elijah at Temple to be the d-line coach, he was player development at Penn State and then got put on the field for a little bit. I did not know Elijah. Fran Brown, who’s the DB coach at Georgia, recommended him to me. You can’t talk about someone who’s better with people. An elite recruiter, tremendous man, great d-line coach, was with me at Temple, went with me to Baylor. Then he got too expensive and I couldn’t keep him. He’s a real coach. He’s had opportunity after opportunity. He’s really loved A&M and wanted to stay there. I think it’s a great choice for them for the interim coach and I hope he gets consideration to be the head coach because people in college football know who he is. I’ve tried to hire him back, people have tried to hire him back. People called me trying to convince him to come be their d-coordinator. He’s just an awesome, awesome, awesome person and I don’t really have a coaching tree. I don’t have enough games to have a coaching tree, but it’s pretty cool for me to say there’s two coaches in Texas that were on my staff, both E (Elijah Robinson) and Joey McGuire. I think Elijah will do a great job, the players will play for him.”

On moving to Lincoln in November and the community
“Honestly we don’t have too much time to think about that. Vivi in volleyball and softball so we’re kind of all around. I just know we’re grateful to Trev (Alberts) and the opportunity to be here and grateful to be part of the community. It’s been so good for our family. The only caveat being that my son’s not here. My son still being in Charlotte is miserable. It’s been really cool. I bring Leona here on Sundays and I walked out yesterday. She’s eight. I walked out yesterday and there’s posters all over the facility she’s taped up. She says ‘if people doubt how far you can go, keep going so you can’t hear them.’ She’s putting them up for the players. That has been awesome. When it comes to the coaching carousel, I’m very sensitive to that. I was hired and fired last year. I get sad at the vitriol when I see coaches getting yelled and screamed at. I can promise you there’s not a coach in America not trying hard to win. Why are people so hurtful? What’s gonna happen is gonna happen. To be like that I don’t understand. This is competitive. This is the life we’ve chosen. This world to me is like the mafia you get hired you eventually get whacked you live as much as you can in between. I have a lot of friends in coaching who get jobs who don’t get jobs. I always think about the families. I think there are coaches on our staff that would be great head coaches. One of the sad things for me in my career is that not many of my guys have gotten head coaching opportunities. I feel like the way we do things, the attention to detail, the way we care about our players, the way we recruit would be really good for a lot of places. It really saddens me the two places I was at followed up with an outside hire. I love those ADs I just wanted it to be one of my guys. To see Joey (McGuire) doing well at Texas Tech and to see Elijah (Robinson) get that opportunity and doing well warms my soul. There’s two types of college football coaches. There are those who believe that the players are there for them and those who believe that they are there for the players. Elijah knows he’s there for the players. Joey know he’s there for the players. That’s what we believe here. So hopefully everyone hires the right people.”

On Wisconsin
“They’re a really good football team with really good players.  Big. Physical.  Raw Athletic. Explosive. Luke Fickell is an excellent football coach. I don’t know him great but I know him well enough. We never really crossed paths. I left the American. We’ve become friendly over time. Tanner Mordecai. I was probably his first offer. He was right down the street at Midway High School in Texas. He lived two developments over from me. I could never convince him to come play for us. Josh Martin, who is on our staff was with him at SMU. Tanner’s a winner. He’s a sixth-year quarterback. Think about how much football he’s played. I’m familiar with Coach (Phil) Longo’s system. I was in the draft process with Sam Howell, with all the running backs, with all the wide backs. Being at media day seeing Braelon (Allen) how big he is at running back. It’s gonna be a heck of a game. I’ve been to Madison once as a player, never as a coach. Cold. National TV. Jump Around. Unbelievable experience. Coach (Barry) Alvarez. It should be awesome. I’m excited about it. They’re an excellent football team. It’ll be a lot like the other games. It’ll come down to the fourth quarter. We’ll try to make one more play than them. They’ll have to make one more play than us. We’ll see who does it.”

On the psychological effect on Wisconsin winning 9 straight against NU
“I don’t think about any of those things. Maybe once I’m here, I’ll always address previous years' games. I wasn’t here so it’s hard for me to address those games. I’ve talked to players, there’s certain games where you’ve played against them year after year or you play Maryland for the third time. I think about us and the conversations we’ve had today. All of the issues we’ve had, good and bad, are on us. And they have to do with the way we play. That’s really how I try to spend my time. It's a really iconic place to play college football. It’s an iconic opportunity to be on NBC. I really care too much about those things. I care about how we play. It’s a cool opportunity. So I’d love to see our guys play well and we’ll work our way to get ourselves there.” 

On Nebraska fans etiquette toward Maryland
“I would hate to comment on that. This is the first I've heard of that. My experience with Nebraska fans and Husker fans has been unbelievable. My wife walks home after the games she doesn’t drive. All Husker fans have been amazing. Everyone wants to win. All the Husker fans I think have been amazing, the way we are on the road. Story after story people have told about coming here and experiences they’ve had. I unfortunately haven’t heard about it and I’d hate it if that was true. I haven’t met anyone but great people since I’ve been here. I’m just glad to be a part of the community.”