Matt Rhule thankful for buy-in from Nebraska players during spring practice

Nebraska football underwent a big coaching change this offseason, and as always with such an overhaul, the players needed some time to adjust to the new leadership.

According to the guy who took over the Cornhuskers, Matt Rhule, the team has really taken well to his style of coaching. He said after the spring scrimmage this past weekend that the players are buying in.

“Well, I’m grateful to the players for how hard they’ve tried to buy into what we’re asking them to do,” said Rhule. “This will be so much easier for them next year. Like every day is hard for them because it’s hard for the new coaches because everything’s so new, you know, when I say like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this drill,’ it’s like they don’t know what the drill is. Next year they’ll know what to expect. So, I just really appreciate that part about them and they’re going to just get better and better and better.”

Rhule also said that he’s prioritized meeting with players to figure out how they and the staff view themselves as apart of the team. However, that was a new experience for some of the guys.

“Sometimes I talk to the players that played at other places, and they said, ‘You know, we’ve gone three or four years and I’ve never sat down with their coach.’ We’ll do it after every season after every spring. We’ll sit down with each player. We’ll talk about what we say see in their game, talking about what their role would be if we played today. We don’t predict the future. We say if we played today, this would be a role.

“So the younger players would talk about some long-term things in terms of development, and then we talk about their commitment level and off-the-field stuff, and then we ask them to speak their mind to give us give us their part.

“So that’s this week, they’ll do it with their position coach and coordinator, and they’ll do it with me. And, you know, they all have a right to not only understand where we see it, but a lot of times you sit down with these guys and you say, ‘Hey, I see this and they say, Coach, you’re missing x-y-z and they’re right. So it should be a dialogue. So I’m excited to do it.”

Sounds like the Huskers are about to really get down to business figuring out what their roster looks like.