Rhule Meets Media Ahead of Illinois Game

Nebraska football head coach Matt Rhule met with members of the media on Monday to address the upcoming game against Illinois on Friday night.

Excerpts of what Coach Rhule had to say and a full video of the press conference are below.

On the offensive balance
“I think we got into the game and they were playing cover one. I think the hard part for us sometimes is because some of those things, because we are running kind of a zone-read counter-option offense, like we call a run play hoping that it’s a handoff and if the read dictates that we pull it. Some of those plays we factor the quarterback into it; even the play right before the field goal was a quarterback draw with an RPO. When we looked at it, we were like, 'wish we would have thrown it here'.

"Part of our game plan was we were going to have to win on these deep balls...but to your point I don’t want to throw the ball 44 times and run it 25 or 30, I would like to have true balance and what I would like to be able to do is run the ball well when we want to run it and throw the ball when we want to throw it and in that game I think we came out saying 'hey we wanted to throw it verses those man looks' and we thought we would win on those routes and just didn’t win enough. It could be something as simple as a slant, and you know we are running a quarterback counter with a slant and it's a low ball, and you know you go down to get it, and we don’t come up with a catch and then we run a slant at the goal line, it's a three-step slant and we run a four- or five-step slant.

"I think that is the lesson moving forward; hindsight if we would have gotten the adjustment to the players and had the players execute it we would feel really good right now and so we are going to go to Illinois, they run a three three-stack defense, a defense we know really well, they give you a ton of different looks, they are going to pressure you. We ran that defense for three years here, we know it really well. It's a challenge and so I don’t want our guys going out there thinking too much, I don’t want our guys out there pressing, so how do we keep it simple while also not being simplistic? That's our challenge this week, that's why we had the guys in here in the evening on Sunday.”

On putting the offense in a position to succeed
“Our guys have to start to understand that they are going to do different things against us because of Anthony (Colandrea), because of the packages, because of Kwazi (Gilmer) because of Jacory (Barney Jr.)...you have good players and you have some things that are difficult to defend they are going to give you different looks, so we came around and it's like 'OK well, A) do they understand the rules well enough to make these plays?; and B) are we practicing it enough?; and C) do we have too much on the offense and are we repping enough?.'

"I think when you come out, the hindsight is why and the things went well, why, and the things that didn’t go well, why. It's easy to say what didn’t go well, what went well, but that’s what most coaches do. Great coaches say well why, they really look back on themselves. Dana (Holgorsen) has a huge part to play in it; every assistant coach has a huge part to play in it, I have a huge part to play in it, and the nutritionist and strength coach. As I said to everybody yesterday, if you want to believe when we win that you helped us win, then when we lose you have to feel like you helped us lose. It’s just real simple. You don’t get to. If you say we won because of this, then when we lose, then we also lost. I want everyone to feel empowered, so Dana has a huge part in that. I do not want Dana depressed, though. I want Dana to look at why and just keep going out and being him. When Anthony struggles, it means Glenn Thomas and Dana struggle, which means I struggle, and that means maybe the scouts team, so we are looking at: do we practice this well? Did we do this? Are we doing too many plays? Are we doing too many? I think we are looking at everything and saying to ourselves, “Well, why is this happening?”

On Nebraska’s defense struggling to defend new fourth-quarter QBs
“Because Demond Williams is an All-American quarterback who can run so they had to spy him. One quarterback was a pocket quarterback, so we didn’t have to spy him so we were attacking him. Elijah (Brown) is a really good player and then they went to Demond, he is an athletic quarterback so then some of the same things you wanted to do in zones like if you drop out and play zone in some of those plays there is not someone for the quarterback necessarily, so the 3rd and 15, we have a spy, it's not executed properly, that's when you would question, “hey why, like why didn’t we execute this properly' but he accelerates, the safety comes up, he’s just so fast and so athletic and so illusive that he bursts and he gets seven yards. The defensive ends there we had tackled that guy all day, he runs down the left sideline from the second to last drive for...20 or 30 yards so Demond is just such an athletic player that that's what it is.

When (Oregon) went to Dylan (Raiola) I mean, Dylan is an elite drop-back quarterback so they still just ran it and ran it ran it at Oregon and just kind of nudged it. Coaches played coverage, and then he’s been aggressive; he's aggressive against Indiana, a little bit more passive against Oregon. He was a little bit more, actually, significantly more aggressive; I mean, every play was basically like zero blitz the last game. We sent them all, and for me, as I sit there and talk to Rob (Aurich), this is Rob's third year as a defensive coordinator; I don’t think he has been the defensive coordinator one place for two years in a row. It's the reason why, in the NFL, the guys hire veteran defensive coordinators because those guys are scarred, like, “I got beat on this, I got beat on that”, and they keep building. I said, “go be like Phil Parker, a guy who I really respect at Iowa. When these things happen, just keep building towards our repertoire and the things we think we can do. If we get in this situation again, now we also will add a new defense; we are going to add this, we are going to add that.

"We had packages for Demond all week; we had packages for Elijah all week. When Demond went in we saw him getting warmed up we had those packages, we stopped him on the first drive but I don’t want to minimize who Demond is and his athletic ability is elite, absolutely elite, and it’s really hard to find a guy who can spy him because he’s probably a 4.3 (40-yard dash) kid so (Vincent Shavers Jr.) is really fast and plays really good but he probably can’t or probably wouldnt want to have him spy him so you got to take Donny (Donovan Jones) maybe but then Donny’s out of the coverage because he is one of our coverage guys so coach was just having to work around that."