Stewart Discusses Role, Adjustments to CollegeStewart Discusses Role, Adjustments to College
Logan Kuker
Football

Stewart Discusses Role, Adjustments to College

Nebraska football general manager Pat Stewart met with members of the media following the team’s spring practice on Thursday. He spoke on the big adjustments at the college level. 

“I don’t think it’s overstated,” he said. “The rules are constantly changing. We’re going to adjust. I’ve been fortunate to have been at a couple different places, exposed to a lot of different things. We use some different mechanisms than I’ve used at those places at this level. We’ll try to correlate to how this structure works. We worked with a salary cap in the NFL. Salary cap here isn’t really the same, there’s different mechanisms you can use for moving money forward, incentivizing contracts. You really can’t do that under this setup. That’ll be a change that I’ll have to get used to.”

He talked about why he chose to come to Nebraska instead of staying in the NFL.

“That’s a good question,” he said. “I was in the NFL for 18 years and was really fortunate to be with great organizations with great people. When you’re working in the NFL, you think ‘well, there’s really only 32 of these jobs’ if eventually, you want to take the next step and apply what you’ve learned during the course of your career. Things have changed in college football. These opportunities have presented themselves now. I thought, with Matt (Rhule) being here and my familiarity with him, it would be a good transition.”

He discussed building recruiting classes.

“I think that’s something I’m adjusting to, in terms of building out a high school recruiting board,” he said. “To your point, it’s finding guys that fit in the slots. It goes back to the question about the Patriot scouting method. It’s filling roles, identifying what guys do and what they’re capable of becoming eventually. What can they do for us right now and what can they do in the future? That’s kind of what we’re looking to do. To your point, early on guys, late round draft pick guys, undrafted free agents, you need all of those players to win. We need to identify the best ones at each different level and see what we can do with them.”

The Husker Games, presented by FNBO, are set for Saturday, April 26. Fans will have the opportunity to get a preview of the 2025 Husker football, volleyball and soccer teams as part of the Husker Games events.