Matt Rhule makes no excuses for turnovers in Nebraska spring game

Nebraska Football held its first public scrimmage under new head coach Matt Rhule over the weekend, where thousands of Cornhusker fans gathered to get a first peek at their brand new football team under the new regime. Everything went smoothly and the game showcased plenty of positives for the team. However, there was one area where Coach Rhule demands improvement, and that’s in the turnover department, where fumbles were an issue last Saturday.

“To me, on offense, there’s no excuse for fumbles. No excuse,” Rhule said in his post-scrimmage press conference. “I can live with an interception here or there. It will result in not playing, to be quite honest. Now, we’re not here to play in fear. It’s not one time and you’re done, but you have to have the ability to protect the football.”

Either you take care of the football or take a seat on the sidelines, says Matt Rhule. He continued, detailing one of the turnovers before continuing to emphasize the importance of not fumbling the football.

“And it looked like, you know, I looked up on the Jumbotron, and they kept going over to review them. I think one of them, the other gentleman said to me, hey, had we reviewed that, it would have been an incompletion – the one on (Heinrich) Haarberg that was a touchdown, it was an incomplete pass. I knew we were gonna play a lot of plays today and I didn’t want to be out there for four hours watching replays, so I just said hey, let’s play like it’s 1985 and you’re making the call.

“We can’t have those fumbles, but I love the fact that they got their hands on the ball. That’s really, really important. If we can take the ball away – what I talked about at halftime, it’s not that you’re not that you’re playing badly, it’s just that you start with the ball on the 30-yard line because your offense keeps turning the ball over.

Rhule knows that one fumble can swing a game entirely, and it’s an entirely preventable mistake. Sure, interceptions happen on freak plays, says Rhule, but you’ll never fumble the football if taking proper care of it.

“You always talk about situational football and complimentary football, people say that. That’s what happened. The fumbled snaps and all that, I’d have to go back and look at it. You’ll rotate a lot of guys through there, but we don’t make excuses and that just can’t happen. If it weren’t for 66,000 people, I would throw my headset on a normal Saturday, because that was really frustrating to me. But you know what, it’s also important our guys learn to keep their composure and play through it. We kind of fixed it and moved on.”

Expect tighter grips on the pigskin moving forward for the Huskers.