Nebraska football coach speaks the truth on scheduling, other fans can’t handle it

Nebraska football head coach is taking fire for being honest, but as it turns out, he just said the quiet part out loud. And he’s said it before. 

The outrage that Rhule’s comments drew on social media on Wednesday evening and now Thursday morning is fun and performative, but talking about how his squad won’t be scheduling tough teams because it simply doesn’t make sense in the College Football Playoff era, is not but any measure groundbreaking. It’s how things work. It’s how they were always going to work. Rhule is simply showing the guts to say it in public.

Nebraska football coach saying what others are afraid to say

On the Triple Option show hosted by Rob Stone, Mark Ingram II, and Urban Meyer, the Nebraska football head coach argued against difficult Non-Conference scheduling. He was doing so after the university came under fire for canceling a home-and-home against the Tennessee Volunteers.

“Why would you ever play one of those games?” Rhule said. He went on to say that he’s at a point in his career where he wants to win games more than he wants to have best-on-best games.

Matt Rhule lays out why Nebraska football is setting its schedule

Rhule also took a shot at the SEC (while claiming he wasn’t) as one of the reasons the Huskers won’t have tough non-con games anymore.

“You look at a lot of teams, and this is not anti-SEC, but there’s some SEC teams last year that only played three away games in another team’s stadium. Three,” Rhule added. “We’re in a league where some years you have five Big Ten home games, some years you have five road. You have to go on the road five times in the Big Ten with no like Florida–Georgia in a neutral site.”

It’s clear that fans of other teams are using Matt Rhule’s comments to pounce on him as a “coward.” But it’s worth pointing out they said roughly the same things about the Huskers’ head coach when NU canceled its spring game. Then a ton of other programs did the same.

Rhule tends to be more forthcoming than other coaches. That might draw criticism but it also means that recruits and players can trust the head man for the Nebraska football team. And that could pay off in the coming years.