Matt Rhule sets lofty standard for recruiting areas, coaching staff

Opening up his era in Nebraska, Matt Rhule outlined his lofty standards for recruiting and his future coaching staff at his press conference on Monday.

“I want young, energetic, dynamic coaches,” Rhule said. “There’s some leagues where you have to go hire some names. I think my ties recruiting and our ties recruiting in Texas are something that we’re going to lean on. If you look at the history of Nebraska and its ties to New Jersey, those are places we’re pretty well known. And Florida. Those are the distinct areas.

“Studying this job, the in-state talent I’m excited about. Then you draw that 500-mile radius… I want to have the best summer camps. I want to have 2,000-3,000 kids coming to our camps a year, not just prospect camps… That’s how you find players that go off to FCS schools and you see them in the draft. I don’t need celebrity coaches that are going to go to one school a day. I need coaches that are going to go and do it the old-school way. We’re going to have a hard-working staff.”

Rhule ideally wants his full staff in place before coaches go on the road recruiting on Dec. 2, but it was too early to say whether that would happen just yet.

“To me, it all comes down to fit,” Rhule said. “People have to want to be here, number one. They have to want to be in the role they’re in, and we have to all move forward… Again, when I’ve not had success, it’s when people are pulling off into one direction, and there will be a very clear vision and process for how we do things inside the walls of the football program and within the x’s and o’s.”

Trev Alberts says Rhule negotiations were ‘long and arduous’

Matt Rhule was always at the forefront of the names rumored to potentially land the Nebraska job. Cornhuskers athletic director Trev Alberts was persistent, and eventually landed the coach he believes will bring them back to relevancy in the Big Ten.

“This was a long and arduous process,” Alberts said of Rhule’s hiring process. “It’s hard enough to negotiate between two interested parties that involved agents and universities. I think that the interesting part here is that we actually had a tri-party challenge. So finding a way to structure a business arrangement that everybody was willing to sign off on was a challenge.

“Quite frankly, from day one, Matt Rhule was candidate 1A. I believed that he was the perfect person based on his experience and based on where we find ourselves today as a program and to help us rebuild and to build the foundation needed.”

In fact, Alberts said Rhule was one of the people he called after he fired former head coach Scott Frost. Rhule was still the head coach of the Carolina Panthers at the time, but rumors of his firing were ramping up and Alberts wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

It paid off for Alberts and Nebraska, and now it’s paying off even more for Rhule, who is going to make $74 million over eight seasons in Lincoln.