Thoughts on Nebraska Football: Matt Rhule

I’ll never forget it. About 20 years ago, maybe a few years less, Nebraska announced that they were parting ways with the Tom Osborne disciple Frank Solich. I was shocked - even as a 6th grader who was dealing with puberty and braces, I understood how stupid this was. Even then I think I foresaw the terrible darkness that would descend upon Nebraska football for years to come. Maybe not immediately after the firing, but at least once we announced that we would hire Bill Callahan to destroy Nebraska football and would move on from Frank Solich.

Why would we fire a coach who had just taken us to a national championship two years earlier and just completed a 9-3 campaign in which we would finish 10-3 after (future head coach) Bo Pelini led us to a 17-3 victory over Michigan State in our bowl game. This greedy attitude initially drug us down to the depths of shitball coached by Bill Callahan, who would manage to mangle us a hopeless program by the time Bo Pelini would take the reigns in 2008. The Callahan years were bad though - they got rid of the option, wiped away any respect for the Blackshirts, and left us without an identity or a core to our program.

Bo Pelini was a decent coach but his averageness got him fired before we made the unthinkable hiring of Mike Riley from Oregon State. I remember the doom that hung over Nebraska that day as I sat in Omaha, shocked that we fired a winning coach for another coach from Shitsburg, USA. Riley fizzled out quickly and then we hired Scott Frost - the posterboy, Golden Child, savior of Husk-oh shit, nevermind. He just liked banging co-eds and getting drunk. The man who “won a championship at UCF” couldn’t manage a winning season at his Alma Mater. We’re fucked.

“This gutter seems nice.. No, not a new gutter!”

You have to understand what it’s like to be a Nebraska fan that is 31 years old. This is the saddest Husker fan that you will ever meet - especially if this Husker fan actually attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I remember crying during the 2002 championship and thinking that this might be the last one I ever see - mainly because I loved Eric Crouch so much, but also because of how much faster the other team seemed than our slow option style offense. The game was changing and it was leaving us in the dust. Not because we were slow necessarily, but because the wrong leadership was in place at our university for a long time.

Frank Solich wasn’t the problem - our facilities and culture maybe could have been looked at, but we really needed to focus on how we were going to build new recruiting pipelines and modernize our offense. You do that and I think ol Frank retires from UNL with 1 or 2 titles. Maybe not, but firing him started off this shitball hellfire that we’ve watched for 20-something years.

I’ve seen every good record and streak stopped, every bad one for us smashed by teams like Kansas, Missouri, Purdue, and Illinois. I watched Wisconsin score 70 points on us in our only Big Ten Championship, the year after we beat them for the first time. I watched Kansas also score 70 points on us before Bill Callahan got fired. I saw our first losing season since like 1962, I haven’t seen a Husker bowl game in five years, and I didn’t watch a single game during the 2020 season and for the first time in my life, I didn’t watch a Husker game that year.

It’s been really hard y’all.

Enter Trev Alberts and Matt Rhule

I’ve been cautiously optimistic watching Trev Alberts operate, but I am now a huge fan. He pulled the trigger on Scott after losing to Georgia Southern, which was a huge move because it changed the trajectory of the season. We probably don’t win another game if we keep him in play at coach. Mickey Joseph (rip in peace in the slammer) coached the team well enough for us to piece together some wins and keep a somewhat respectable season in play for guys like Garret Nelson and others. It was really hard to watch this season, but things are now looking better.

I wanted Dave Aranda like you won’t believe, but when it appeared that it wouldn’t be happening, I knew we would be getting Matt Rhule. This is actually the best hire that we could have made. Looking at it and thinking about it and reading about it, he seems to be the perfect fit for Nebraska.

1. He’s just generally a really nice awesome guy - the way he carried himself after being fired at Carolina says a lot about who he is. There’s a certain personality needed in Lincoln right now and Rhule has got it.
2. Hell of a coach. Baylor was about to get a revolver and blow the head of it’s football program after the Art Brile’s disaster that should have made football at Baylor obsolete. Rhule took a heavily sanctioned program and made them an 11-3 national championship contender within 3 years. AT FUCKING BAYLOR.
3. This is a perfect marriage - a sputtering Nebraska program that needs picked up by a guy who has proven he can fix the culture, recruiting, and the attitude of a program. Rhule should be out to prove himself after his Carolina failure.

Don’t drink the koolaid because you are likely to be disappointed - however, you should believe that things will get better in Lincoln soon, because they will. Matt Rhule has never had the resources like he has right now and is putting together a monster sized staff right now that will have us back in play as a Big 10 Big Daddy within the next 3-5 years. Young Husker fans, get ready for some real fun like you’ve never experienced before!