Matt Rhule on recruiting against bigger NIL offers: 'Bad teams have more money'

While at Nebraska, head coach Matt Rhule knows that he has plenty of resources. In the NIL era, however, there can still be times when you’re trailing. That’s especially the case when recruiting against desperate teams.

Rhule explained the relatively simple logic to HuskerOnline. Teams that have been struggling on the field are more desperate to win. So, they’re willing to spend more money on NIL and recruiting, especially in the Transfer Portal. Therefore, they’re setting the market.

“I think the biggest message I can put out there, and this was said to me by Troy Vincent, who works for us in the personnel department,” Rhule said. “Obviously, his dad is the number two guy in the National Football League. The thing he said to me was we always have to remember the desperate team sets the market. So, young people are looking for lots of different things, but if they’re looking just for finances, bad teams have more money because they don’t have to spend as much on everybody else.”

Oftentimes, NIL is looked at as a way for teams to add transfers and high school recruits. However, for good teams, NIL is just as much about retaining talented players who are already on their rosters and avoiding poaching from those other talented teams. However, struggling teams don’t need to worry about that because they’re typically not worried about retaining players who underperformed.

“Good teams have their money allocated to other good players with lots of options. I tell our players, if you’re a good player on this team and you’ve produced, you’re going to get hit up in the portal every single time. You should not be like, ‘What’s happening?’ You’re gonna get hit up. So, a lot of our guys got hit up,” Rhule said.

“We’ve allocated the resources as best we can. So, we didn’t see a lot of need or we didn’t have a lot of resources left to go out and say, ‘Hey, let’s get a bunch of guys,’ because I think we’ve tried to make sure we take care of the guys we have here.”

None of that is to say Matt Rhule and Nebraska have ignored the Transfer Portal. The Cornhuskers have the 40th-ranked transfer class in the 2025 cycle, according to the On3 College Football Team Transfer Portal Rankings. That’s with 17 players joining the program.

Nebraska begins its regular season on August 28th with a neutral-site game against Cincinnati. That should help to give Rhule a good idea if he spent his NIL money wisely this offseason.