Tad Stryker: Make ’Em Earn It

Matt Rhule’s hard-nosed yet positive outlook proving to be effective for Nebraska

Photos by Alex Gould/The Republic (left) and Dylan Widger-USA TODAY Sports

Is Matt Rhule the coach who runs quarterbacks out of town?

About a week ago, you could find groups of disgruntled Nebraska fans who believed that to be true, maybe enough to fill a section of Memorial Stadium if you gathered them all together. At least, they talked loud enough to give you that impression, if speech on social media could register a decibel level.

Just look at how he treated Casey Thompson last spring, they said. And now, they murmured, look at the way he’s mishandled potential transfer portal prize Kyle McCord. Lost him to Syracuse!

I hear from those folks quite often. Once in a while, they’re right. Often they’re not. They’re the ones who said Nebraska is too backward to pay a competitive salary for assistant coaches, and too cheap to be competitive in NIL. They’ll be quiet now, at least for a few weeks, but they’ll be back.

Of course, one of the biggest holes in their quarterbacks theory is that Rhule has been bringing in some good ones. If Rhule is the coach who runs ‘em out of town, how come Dylan Raiola and Daniel Kaelin are on their way in?

The more I find out about Rhule, the better I feel about him running the Husker football program. He’s an interesting mix of hard-nosed and cerebral, tough-minded, yet relentlessly positive, which is an difficult combination to carry off. He doesn’t rage against the darkness, including the revenue-run-amok ways of major college football; he lights a candle. He obviously has no issues with creatively using NIL, but he runs his program with an old-school mentality. Build it from the ground up. Develop players.

It sounds good right now, anyway, in the off-season. Mike Riley and Scott Frost had their share of off-season success, so it’s fair to judge Rhule by his team’s performance on the field. Certainly I was as critical as anyone about some of his game-management decisions last month, but let’s give him some time to put things together for 2024, and I think we’ll see it pay off in the league standings.

To win, you have to have tough-minded players, guys who aren’t afraid to compete. Especially at quarterback. And increasingly it appears that a major component of Rhule’s mentality is a pervasive reluctance to promise starting roles to anyone. Sounds remarkably similar to Tom Osborne’s philosophy.

Carriker Gut Reaction: Dylan Raiola Commits to the Huskers

I often hear that major college football is “not the same game” that Osborne coached more than a generation ago, and in many ways, it’s not. This principle, though, is timeless: Make ‘em earn it.

I think that’s where Casey Thompson 2023 and Kyle McCord 2024 come into the picture. Both of them could have earned the starting quarterback job at Nebraska, but were they willing to go through the process? Nobody knows for sure, but I wonder.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve read that Rhule “ran Casey Thompson out of town” early in 2023. Usually I saw that phrase tossed around after an interception thrown by Jeff Sims, Heinrich Haarberg or Chubba Purdy, so I saw it a bunch.

It’s not hard to imagine Rhule, Casey Thompson and his father, Charles Thompson, sitting down in Rhule’s office last winter to talk about the 2023 season. None of us was there, so nobody should be dogmatic about what was said, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Charles asked for a guarantee that Casey would start in the fall of 2023, and Rhule refused to commit, saying something like, “If you need that, I’d recommend you look elsewhere.”

Casey Thompson, who ended up at Florida Atlantic before suffering a season-ending knee injury, later released a statement indicating he “never wanted to leave Lincoln.” Wouldn’t it be something if he came back and contributed to the quarterback room again?

McCord’s situation, which also included his father in meetings with Rhule, seems remarkably similar. Again, I wonder if someone asked for a guarantee that McCord would start, and Rhule made no promises. While nothing about his Nebraska discussions can be proven, it’s a fact that McCord ended up at a school that just graduated its starting quarterback, with no proven backups on the roster.

No coach worth his salt should allow a quarterback — or a quarterback’s father — to walk in and tell him how things are going to be. Whether it’s a demand to run a certain type of offense or a guarantee that said quarterback will be the starter. Eventually, competition and merit should carry the day.

Rhule emphasizes the importance of players learning not only to make it to the NFL, but to be good enough to get their second contract. That demands battling through tough competition. As he said last week on the Pat McAfee Show, “You have to find players that are coming here for the right reasons,” and, “You have to tell them exactly what it’s gonna be like and people want transparency.”

Tough competition apparently is something that McCord did not want to face in Lincoln. That may not serve him well once he gets to the NFL.

Conversely, Kaelin, fresh out of Bellevue West, deserves all kinds of credit for deciding to stay and compete for the Husker quarterback job. Raiola is much more decorated, but to succeed, will have to walk the talk, to prove he can stand up under the load when the inevitable Big Ten tribulations come his way. To prepare them for battle, Rhule now needs to bring in a top-notch quarterback coach and shuffle his offensive staff accordingly.

Purdy and Haarberg, if they stay in the quarterback room for 2024, deserve the same amount of credit, but by 2025, it could well come down to Raiola and Kaelin. My quick assessment, which could be wrong, is that Raiola is closer to game-ready than Kaelin, just as Tommie Frazier was farther along than Brook Berringer in 1992. But in August 1995, Osborne had one of the deepest dilemmas of his career in trying to decide who should start, and although Frazier won that battle, it was Berringer who proved to be the better NFL prospect.

Someone from the Husker quarterback room may hit the transfer portal before the Aug. 31 opener against UTEP, and if so, I’ll wish him well. One wonders if Berringer would have done the same under the current conditions, and if so, what would have happened to the Huskers’ 1994 season. For now, though, I like the aggressive way Rhule pursued improving the Huskers’ biggest weakness, and hope the entire crop proves too resilient to be run out.

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