Spring football roundups: New Rhules for rebuilds
Nebraska is undertaking yet another stab at rebuilding the program which hasn't been the since Tom Osborne retired. What's different about Matt Rhule's plan?
Matt Rhule tore Baylor down to the studs when they hired him.
He kind of had to. Art Briles and his staff had run a full-bore, gimmicky, original take on the Veer and Shoot offense and produced offensive players who didn’t really know how to do much else. Defensively they were gutted by some departures and the broken up 2015 recruiting class which got waivers to abandon ship and head to competitors.
Rhule wanted to install a very different offense and build a much more diverse defensive package in line with what he’d learned as a product of the Joe Paterno Penn State program (a background he downplayed in replacing Art Briles in Waco).
So he focused on recruiting and development at Baylor, snatching up raw athletes rather than quick fixes and slowly remade Bear football from the ground up.
1-11 in 2016, 7-6 in 2017, 11-3 in 2018, and then zip! He was gone to the NFL for a massive contract. It was easy to see coming, he’d flirted with jobs after 2017 only to come back and make a public showing of “learning to appreciate Waco” by doing things like going to the Texas Ranger museum.
If you grew up in Texas as I did, the Ranger museum might have been one of a few reasons you would have stopped in Waco other than the plentitude of fast food restaurants or the Czech Stop when driving between Austin and Dallas. Nowadays there’s also the Magnolia Silos, so Waco is moving up a bit in the world. The Texas Rangers (the real ones, not the ball club) have a truly interesting history…their museum isn’t a good reason to live in Waco.
As soon as he had his roster together though the Bears were very successful and he could cash in. But it took a little time, Baylor didn’t have the transfer portal back then and Rhule was no necromancer. He got the Baylor job because he found and cranked out some phenomenal defensive talents at Temple, like walk-on Haason Reddick, and he succeeded at Baylor for similar reasons. So how does it look now in Nebraska when he has a wildly different recruiting landscape and the new portal context to explore in building a winning team?
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