Nebraska Football: The fastest current Huskers will likely surprise fans

Nebraska football head coach Matt Rhule appeared in front of the media for the first time in a few weeks and shed some light on what he’s seen from his team over the course of winter conditioning. One of the little tidbits he shared is likely going to surprise Husker fans. He’s even aware that people were likely to be a bit surprised.

Rhule took to the podium and shed light on how he and his new staff look at players and run through drills. That includes some speed tests for all the players at all the positions. It’s pretty clear that even the Nebraska football head coach was a bit surprised by what the testing found.

When talking about the speed testing, Rhule explained that they do everything off the GPS timing. He added that he was quite impressed with what he saw, saying “our GPS times are … fast.” He then added that if he told people who had the fastest times, at least off the GPS testing, Nebraska football fans would be quite surprised.

After waiting a beat to let what he was about to tell the assembled media, he let the cat out of the bag.

"“There’s some guys that can really move, Chubba and Heinrich are two of the fastest if not the fastest guys on the team.”"

Heinrich, for those who may have forgot he was on the team, is Heinrich Haarberg. The 6-foot-5 quarterback out of Kearney Catholic has not played a down for the Huskers since arriving in Lincoln just ahead of the 2021 season.

When he was brought in by Scott Frost and company, it was thought that he was more of a pure passer than someone like Adrian Martinez or Logan Smothers. However, people who think he’s a pass-first QB might have forgotten that he did rush for over 500 yards in his senior season in high school. It appears despite his size that he’s able to run quite fast.

Chubba, is none other than Chubba Purdy who did play a bit last season, though those performances were rather up and down. Rhule’s comments about how fast Purdy is will likely surprise Nebraska football fans because they spent the end of the fall being told by Mickey Joseph and company that he was the slower runner of the two quarterbacks that stepped in for Casey Thompson when he went down with injury.

It’s worth pointing out that when Chubba did have to run, he did get some rushing yards. But yes, that he’s one of the fastest guys on this version of the Nebraska football team is more than a little surprising.