Matt Rhule sets expectation for the process of winning the Big Ten

Nebraska is a program with high expectations. In recent years, it’s also been a program that’s failed to meet those expectations. That’s why the Cornhuskers had to move on from Scott Frost and hired Matt Rhule to lead the program going forward.

In his introductory press conference, Matt Rhule was asked about what the process would look like to go about winning the Big Ten.

“It’s a great question,” Matt Rhule said. “Obviously, having been at Penn State, the Big Ten was a different way a little bit at that point. A different type of a league.”

In the mid-1990s, Matt Rhule played football for Joe Paterno at Penn State. At that point, Penn State had only recently joined the conference and several schools, like Nebraska, were still more than a decade away from joining.

“But, you know, again, it goes back to the things I talked about,” Matt Rhule said. “The margin for error in the Big Ten in most games is pretty slight. You can’t beat yourself. You have to beat a team that executes. Typically, if you look at the Big Ten, whoever has the best quarterback play is typically gonna win. So, you need to have not just a quarterback, but a system around the signal caller that lets them be successful.”

The other key thing Matt Rhule pointed out is that you have to be able to deal with bad weather.

“You have to be able to win in the elements,” Matt Rhule said. “You have to be able to win when it’s hot early in the year or cold late in the year. You have to be able to win on the East Coast. Pretty soon, you’re gonna have to win on the West Coast. So, I think having defense, I think having a run game, those things are important because if you can’t play defense in this league, there’s three, four games a year where you’re going to get run off the field.”

Nebraska has only played for the Big Ten Championship once. That was in 2012 and the Cornhuskers were blown out by Wisconsin in that game. In fact, Nebraska hasn’t won a conference championship since 1999, despite having 46 conference championships in its history.

In 2016, while Matt Rhule was at Temple, he won the AAC Championship. He played in two other championship games, once with Temple and then with Baylor.

Matt Rhule’s message to the Nebraska players

Matt Rhule knows that nobody on the Nebraska roster chose to play for him. So, he had a message for his players, he chose to coach them.

“I started reaching out to the players as I could over the last couple of days via text and some phone calls,” Matt Rhule said.

“The message I had for them was I understand the position that they’re in. Not one player in that locker room signed up to play for me. Not one player was recruited by me chose to come here for me. But I wanted them to know that, ‘Hey I chose to come coach you. I’m here to be your coach; I’d like to be your coach.'”