Trev Albert’s transformation creates confidence Nebraska will win big again

Not quite two years into his gig as Nebraska athletic director, Trev Alberts frames the task of resurrecting football at his alma mater as “being Nebraska,” as in, “I’m not talking about winning national championships, I’m just talking about being Nebraska. Operating in a way that’s Nebraska.”

To Alberts, an All-American Husker linebacker and Butkus Award winner in 1993, “being Nebraska” defines success. For the last 12 years, Nebraska has suffered an acute shortage of italics. “Being Nebraska” has meant a slow slide into mediocrity and an overflowing source of irrelevance in the Big Ten.

Nebraska has become one of the Big Ten’s trust-fund babies, a new generation that collects its checks and contributes little to the family business. In the last five seasons, in a conference that sponsors 27 sports, Husker teams have won three Big Ten championships – men’s indoor track in 2019, baseball in 2021 and the softball tournament in 2022.

And none of those sports is driving the Husker bus.

 “The football piece is so huge for the overall culture,” Trev Alberts told On3. “When the football culture is right, it cascades down into the rest of the athletic department.”

Football, the program that attracted the Big Ten to Lincoln, has strayed far from the success that defined the Huskers for four decades under Bob Devaney, Tom Osborne and Frank Solich. Shoot, Husker fans yearn for the seven years under Bo Pelini, a coach they hounded for alternating between winning nine and 10 games every season. Since firing Pelini at the end of the 2014 regular season, Nebraska has gone 38-57 (.400).

Financial leaders helped Trev Alberts adapt

Trev Alberts, 52, believes that Nebraska can execute a turnaround because he has done so twice in his professional life. After injuries curtailed his NFL career, Alberts made himself into a television analyst who rose to work in the ESPN College Gameday studio.

In 2009, Alberts turned his back on TV to become an athletic director at Nebraska-Omaha. He took a huge pay cut and sold his suburban Atlanta home at a significant loss to chase a dream.

Six weeks in, after the excitement of a new challenge wore off, Alberts realized he had no idea what he was doing and even less of an idea of how to do it.

“We were still living in an apartment,” Alberts said. “Three kids, a dog and a bird. I’m 40 years old and I’m wondering if we had made the single biggest mistake I could have ever made.”

Alberts went to Omaha business leaders, such as billionaires Warren Buffett and the late Walter Scott Jr., and asked for advice. He learned the importance of financial discipline so well that he cut the UNO football program. As Alberts molded UNO into an athletic program strong enough to move up to Division I, he watched his alma mater one hour to the west succeed financially and flounder competitively.

When he arrived in Lincoln, Alberts felt instantly at home. And that was the problem, “a lot of, ‘Well, this is how we did it when we were successful,’” Alberts said.

‘We haven’t had everybody pulling in the same direction’

Demanding change can be tricky in a program that reveres its tradition as much as Nebraska. Trev Alberts doesn’t want the Huskers to do what Osborne did 30 years ago. He wants the program to think the way that Osborne thought. Alberts sees Osborne as an innovator: the man who brought strength training into football and a tactical wizard in the running game.

“We can still honor and respect that tradition,” Alberts said. “But if Coach Osborne was still the coach here, I promise you he would have innovated, and he would be doing things very, very different from the way we [did] them in our best days in the early ’90s.”

When Alberts looked for a football coach last fall, he wanted someone to thread that needle. He wanted a coach who had succeeded on the field, and Matt Rhule has done that at Temple and again at Baylor. But winning alone wasn’t enough.

“We haven’t had everybody pulling in the same direction,” Albert said. “We fire a coach. Half the fan base is mad, and former coaches weren’t pleased. I just thought Matt has an ability to bring people together.”

Rhule is every bit the people person that Alberts is. He already has connected with Osborne. Last month, Alberts, Rhule, and Osborne recorded a 48-minute sitdown discussion on the Nebraska Huskers YouTube channel. Alberts handled it as if he had never left the TV studio. But he said the idea for the show came from Rhule, who wanted Husker fans to see the respect he has for Osborne.

“You come into a place like Nebraska where someone like Tom Osborne still has a significant presence whether he wants to or not,” Alberts said, “a guy like Matt can really get off on the wrong step with the fan base if you don’t understand the tradition, the history.”

They discuss physicality, a trait for which the Huskers were known under Osborne, an identity Rhule intends to reclaim.

“At its core,” Rhule said on the video, “the game of football is about one man moving another man in a direction he doesn’t want to go.”

Rhule has asked Osborne why he let his quarterback be hit in practice (to let his teammates know that the quarterback is tough, too). Rhule has asked Solich about how he used the fullback in the run game. Solich, a former Husker running back, longtime assistant and highly successful head coach, hasn’t made a public appearance at the University since Nebraska fired him 20 years ago. He is returning this week when Nebraska will honor him Saturday at the Huskers’ spring game. 

Listen closely and you can hear Husker fans swooning from Mitchell on the Wyoming border to the Tom and Nancy Osborne Athletic Complex in Lincoln. The fans are hungry, they are weary, and they are nostalgic for success. And they are still there.

“There are very, very few places in the country where you’d be 3-8 and every seat is full,” Osborne said on the video.

Rhule can’t wait to hear the 390th consecutive sellout crowd at Memorial Stadium in the home opener against Northern Illinois on Sept. 16. He has immersed himself into the Lincoln community. He took his daughters to a Husker women’s basketball game and then headed downtown afterward for ice cream. Rhule knows how to build a bridge. His record suggests he knows how to build a football team.

Alberts bet on both qualities.