Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule met with members of the media to preview the Huskers’ game on Saturday against Akron. He discussed the Zips’ head coach, Joe Moorhead and the culture he has built.
“He’s really creative,” he said. “They utilize a two-quarterback system. They look to the sideline or use the headset at a high level, see what you’re in and try to attack it. Ton of skill. They have a bunch of dynamic stuff and they’re running three-level passing concepts with run plays and speed sweeps with corner routes. The level of discipline, they have every pick known to mankind so if you want to play man they’re going to pick you legally. But, they will pick you behind the line of scrimmage. It’s just a ton of really hard stuff. If you go back and look at them last year, they came on strong at the end of the year. They beat Toledo, which is hard to do. He’s an excellent football coach and they have a good team. The game last week was a hard fought game. It was three to nothing until late in the game. Wyoming scored late. You look at them defensively – they’re stout. They’re physical. They’re strong. Their defensive line plays with tremendous energy and explosiveness. They don’t give up big plays. I know they gave up some yards, but the amount of yards you give up or gain is like the most unimportant stat really. It’s really points per play and expected drive success. So the defense held them to 10 points. It’ll be a lot of things that challenge you from a X and O standpoint. I literally just told the team it’s your ability to play your man even when you think it’s a run play. It might not be a run play. Your ability to defend the reverse and ability to defend the reverse pass, RPO and quarterback run. It’s all the things that bother you in one offense. Defensively, they have a great blitz package. It’s all the things that bother you from a defensive standpoint as well.”
Rhule discussed the team’s mindset of not listening to outside noise and what he expects going into the matchup against Akron.
“We weren’t the underdogs very often,” he said. “Maybe year one or year two. Year three we were pretty damn good. In all seriousness, when Adam DiMichele was my quarterback, I was the offensive coordinator at Temple going to Penn State. Seeing Ron Vanderlinden before the game and him being like ‘you got a great quarterback now, don’t get him hurt today’. I saw Ron later, and Ron is a great man. He said ‘I was scared about him, I didn’t want you to run him too much’. I think when you go into these types of games, you really have nothing in the world to lose and everything in the world to gain. You have a bunch of players on your team that believe they should be playing at the highest level and know that they’re good players. What’s unique now that’s different from before is it used to be you play a FCS team and you saw a bunch of bounce back players. Now, when you face any group of five team, they’re going to have a lot of guys who played. One linebacker played at Illinois. They’ve played a lot of football so it’s guys who know what this level is like and can play at this level. I think the message for me always is we’re competitors and we’re going in to compete, let’s go compete. Let’s take our shots and we have nothing to lose. On this end, we don’t ever want to play the brand, we want to play the man. That’s kind of always our message. That’s whether we’re playing Ohio State or whether we’re playing Kent State. We want to play the guy lined up in front of us and play to a standard. We’re trying to attack that man. That was something we weren’t great at last year. We played Ohio State to one level, we played other games to a different level. I told the team, we lost to Illinois last year and that started with the UNI game with the standard that we played at in the UNI game. You guys always hear me say, ‘don’t listen to the outside noise, don’t listen to this, don’t listen to that’. That’s really a mindset. What do we say as football players to ourselves? We have to play at a certain level, just do that. I told our team that I’m uptight this week. This guy beat me the last time I faced him head to head. That was one of the worst moments of my coaching career. He beat me in a monumental upset back when we were the underdogs. To me, I was always into these games as we’re here to compete. We’re here to play. My third year at Temple we played Notre Dame, not many people gave us a chance. We were underdogs. It was College GameDay. We darn near won the game. We were just playing to play because we love the game. That’s what I want to see from our guys Saturday. I want to see them go out and play. They love to play and they love to play at home. Go do that.”
Rhule also talked about the team’s health.
“I think we’re pretty healthy,” he said. “We’ll have to see where Jacory (Barney) is at. He’s been pretty limited this week. He’ll play in the game. I didn’t even know he was hurt until the end of the game. That’s how much of a warrior that kid is. I came in on Sunday and they said he was questionable for Sunday. I said, ‘he’ll practice Tuesday.’ He practiced really well yesterday. He’s just infectious. He and Shavers (Vincent Shavers Jr.) changed the whole practice yesterday. Their intensity and their commitment to showing up to practice and just loving the game is so infectious. We feel it when Jacory is not out there. If you watch the tape he probably wasn’t as explosive as he is used to. But, he’s still pretty dang explosive. In terms of the volume, we’ll have to see how he feels on game day. It’s September and it’s going to be 60 degrees. I’m sure that won’t affect him but I’ll just have to wait and see. But, we’ve had a good week with the other guys and getting them ready.”
Kickoff between the Huskers and the Zips at Memorial Stadium on Saturday, Sept. 6, is set for 6:30 p.m. (CT) and will be televised on the Big Ten Network. The game can also be heard across the Huskers Radio Network.
