Nebraska Football: The ‘buy-in’ conversation unfortunately returns

With more Nebraska football struggles this season, the conversation about what players are “buying in” and which aren’t as bad. That debate is never good.

Perhaps I was naive. I had hoped that the exit of Scott Frost and the beginning of the Matt Rhule era meant that we weren’t going to have to hear about “buy-in” this fall.

I thought there wouldn’t be talk about the Nebraska football culture. That there wouldn’t be players and coaches pointing fingers and talking about “us vs them.”

Maybe I was expecting too much. I thought the kind of pressure that forces players to talk about who on their own team isn’t buying in wouldn’t arrive in Rhule’s first season on campus. I assumed everyone understood that 2023 was a rebuilding season. That people needed to see what happened before we started talking about who “cares” and who doesn’t.

Here we are. On a Wednesday morning, just five games into the Matt Rhule era. The Nebraska football team is once again talking about buy-in and culture and who wants it and who doesn’t.

Matt Rhule started it Saturday night actually. When he talked about how surprised he was by the lack of fight. But I don’t think he was trying to divide the locker room. I think he was legitimately just trying to get the Nebraska football team to understand no one really did their job.

On Tuesday afternoon, the culture talk ramped up.

Nebraska football defensive back Phalen Stanford stood at the podium and said the words that are going to convince fans they can determine who’s trying and who isn’t by who made the tackle and who didn’t.

“We’re in the process of finding out who’s one of us right now,” he said.

Hoo boy.

Nebraska football’s Red Scare returns

It’s not a bad thing that everyone on the Nebraska football team is on the same page when it comes to needing better effort. Better approach. But we’ve been through the weekly talks about culture and who really cared.

It was the centerpiece of the Scott Frost era. Everytime Frost and his coaches made a dreadful decision, it was really about the culture. Every time the Huskers lost, it wasn’t because of poor play or poor decisions. It was buy-in.

"“I can put the guys in the best scheme, the best offensive plays, the best defensive plays I can come up with. But at the end of the day, if we don’t have corners who can run through tackles and knife-knees, if we don’t have O-linemen coming off the ball, if we don’t have people holding each other accountable, and we don’t have our team making smart decisions and grinding and working hard, I’m not sure the best scheme in the world matters.”"

Frost said that back in 2019. He kept saying. All the way up to the day he was cut loose.

It wasn’t just Frost saying it, either. Once the culture train started down the tracks, people outside the university started talking about what was going on with Nebraska football.

Last summer, just before Frost started his final season with the Huskers, anonymous coaches started talking about something wrong with the culture in his administration.

Perhaps this is simply the side effect of a program that has struggled as long as the Cornhuskers have. People want to figure out what’s wrong so they can fix it immediately. But that’s also a big problem.

What’s wrong with Nebraska football isn’t something that can be fixed right away. It’s going to take time. That’s one of the reasons Matt Rhule was hired. Because he knows how to fix a problem methodically.

Now that the conversation has started, it’s not going to stop until the Huskers start winning on the regular. They’ve got a chance to start a winning streak and qualifying for a bowl in the next month or two.

Hopefully, at that point, the talk about Nebraska football culture can be shoved back in the box.