Huskers Talk Offseason, Preview Spring Ball

Head coach Matt Rhule, wide receiver Jahmal Banks, defensive lineman Jimari Butler and defensive back Marques Buford Jr. met with the media on Monday, March 18. The group previewed spring practice, which begins next week. 

Quotes from Coach Rhule and players are below.

Nebraska Football Press Conference
March 18, 2023

Head Coach Matt Rhule 
Opening statement
“It’s our team commitment week before we head into spring ball next week. It’s an exciting week for me personally. This Saturday they have the admitted students day. My son Bryant, coming to Nebraska in the fall so the sacrifice he’s made to live apart from us for a year, really excited to get him back and join all the other prospective Huskers as they come here so excited for that just on a family note. Obviously last week, really sad to see Trev and Angie (Alberts) go. More than just a great boss, I consider Trev a friend. He’ll be a friend of mine forever. Angie, the way she reached out to Julie and has taken care of my family. I just think they’re class people and I wish them the best. This business is hard. People move from job to job. You build relationships but just really grateful for them and sad to see them go. In the aftermath of that, just have been overwhelmed by the amount of people that have really stepped up. Chris Kabourek, serving in the Interim President role, immediately just connecting with me and I’m sure many of the other coaches. I only got to know Chris for a short amount of time but just been really pleased just with his level of professionalism and how quickly he’s responded to me. I’m grateful for Governor (Jim) Pillen, his leadership in a time like this, him reaching out. It’s obviously difficult when you come here and the President leaves and then the football coach leaves but knowing that the top of the state and nothing political, but at the end of the day we have a Husker there and that’s meant a lot to me. I’m really excited about Dennis Leblanc. Dennis is what’s great about college athletics. He cares about the student athlete. This is one of those jobs where you work in college athletics and you can work a ton of hours or a few hours and Dennis works a ton of hours because he cares about young people and he’s saved a lot of young people’s lives. I trust him and he’s done an amazing job for us as our sport administrator and excited to see him. Any time Tom Osborne calls you or all the different donors and fans have reached out, just really appreciative of everybody through what can be seen as a tough time but I think this is a tremendous opportunity. Everyone kind of wonders why Trev left and that’s his story to tell. I don’t know why. I know he was very forthcoming with me and very forthright with me and I have no complaints about the way he handled anything at least with me so very grateful for him but this is an opportunity for us to look at everything within our athletic department. Everything within our university and how can we be better because this is an amazing place and I started off by talking about my son coming here. I would not send my son here if I didn’t think it was an amazing place. My wife’s opening a business down in Southpointe. We would not invest our money and our futures in a place that we did not believe in. We love the state of Nebraska, we love Lincoln, we love Omaha, we love everyone everywhere that we’ve been and we love everyone that we’ve met and I just think sometimes we forget some of those things. We forget how great a place this is to raise our kids and we forget how great a place this is to live and to work and to be around and so while it is a tough time losing someone of Trev’s caliber, all I’ll say is I believe he put 15 years in here in athletic administration and from everything I see in our athletic department, this is a well-run athletic department, this is a well-run place. I know he’s allowed me to do the things I think are necessary. He’s left the place better than he’s found it. I think it’s an unbelieve opportunity for us to move forward and the one thing Trev would always say to me is and I think he took this really seriously as the Husker that he is. He said to me, ‘I’m only standing in this position as the athletic director at Nebraska, you’re only standing in the position you’re in because of the decision of coaches like Tom Osborne and administrators made 20 years ago to put us in this position where we’re financially stable, we’re secure, we have elite facilities, we have tremendous commitment.’ Now the onus on Trev or now the next AD, the onus on me and the coaches and leadership here is that 20 years from now we look back and we say, ‘The people that guarded this place during this time were tremendous stewards of the university.’ I think that’s really really important. We can’t take a step backward, we have to take a step forward and the thing that I’ll say is we have to be unabashed in our desire to be the best. We can not worry about optics. We can’t worry about what people say. The way to win in college athletics today is that you invest. I can’t think of a state that knows that better than this amazing state, whether it’s all the amazing financial institutions, people all across the world read about the people in Omaha and Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You don’t get a return until you’ve invested. All the agriculture across our state. You don’t get a harvest unless you’ve invested, unless you’ve sowed seed and watered it. Whether it’s salaries, facilities, upgrades, whatever it is, we need to return to the days where everyone across the country is coming to the University of Nebraska to see how things are being done. I called Kirby Smart last week to ask if I could come down and visit Georgia. We sent our performance nutrition team to go down and see Florida and Alabama. I want people coming here. When Julie was the head dietitian at Temple she was putting together the Training Table she studied Nebraska. That to me is the place that we’re at. I usually don’t read a lot but I’ve been reading because you kind of hear what people are saying and we don’t have major problems. We have an unbelievable athletic department. We have an unbelievable opportunity, but we must have vision for the future for 20 years from now. And that’s what Trev had. Make no mistake. We’ve spent the last year trying to tell everybody, ‘Hey guys, revenue sharing is coming. We have to have a plan for revenue sharing when 20 million dollars is probably going to the athletes at some point. I don’t know if anyone really listened. I don’t know if I really listened. Now all of the sudden, those lawsuits are starting to come to fruition and it’s like, ‘Oh wait, Trev was right.’ And so we are going to have to think of things differently, so as know that he leaves and he transitions, that’s what has to happen here. We have to have amazing leadership that is saying to themselves, ‘Hey, what’s the next 20 years going to be like and how do we make the University of Nebraska athletic department is relevant in all of that. And that doesn’t preclude the University. It’s such a hard time in college athletics because college athletics is big, big, big business, and if you look at the business, the University of Nebraska athletics is one of the best businesses in college athletics. It has the least debt. We don’t take student fees. We don’t take money from the University. Most schools even in our conference are doing that so we have a tremendous financial model. I think we have to have a ton of vision moving forward to get to that. I don’t think the issues that maybe everyone is thinking are out there. I don’t know that they are out there. I don’t think they’re out there. I just think that we are on the precipice of a really important time to get the right leadership in here who isn’t worried about making tough decisions. Not worried about investing. Who is not worried about ‘Man, what are people going to say if we hire a few more people.’ This is the time. And it’s not just about who we hire. It’s about who we retain. We have to retain that leadership. We have to retain our student athletes. We have to be the model of that across the country because that’s what Tom Osborne, Bob Devaney did. They build the best player development university in the country. You can’t develop people if you don’t retain people. That to me is the place where we’re at. I’m just so grateful for Trev and Angie, but I’m also really excited about the future and grateful for Governor Pillen and Chris Kabourek and everyone else that’s reached out to us at this time. I think when you look at our University now you start talking about, ‘hey, are we relevant?’ Obviously we are always going to be relevant here but I am really grateful for our winter sports and how relevant they are making us across the country. Because when I fly to Miami to recruit everyone is not only just talking about Nebraska, they are talking about Alabama and Georgia and Texas A&M and Texas and Miami and so when you have your men’s team doing what they did and you got your women’s team doing what they’re doing and you have our wrestling team doing what they’re doing, it makes us relevant and it makes us apart of the conversation. On a personal note, the relationship I have with Mark Manning and the trust to work together with Nash Hutmacher has been unbelievable. As a proud girl dad of two daughters 11 and eight, how many games we’ve been able to go watch and I’m out there in our driveway and I’m throwing them the ball and I’m saying, ‘Jaz Shelley’ as Leona shoots and ‘Markowski backs them down’ as Vivienne takes them downs and backs me up. For them to have role models like that, like our volleyball team and the women’s tennis team. Just amazing. Not just the winning, but the amazing experiences. Watching us go toe to toe with Iowa at home and watching Jaz Shelley get up and make four free throws with the game on the line and being able to talk to my daughters about that afterwards. Just amazing moments that are awesome to be a part of but also relevant nationally. And to watch our men’s team. To think about how much joy Keisei Tominaga has brought just my family in the last year. To think about how hard Josiah Allick plays. To think about the pain and passion on Juwan Gary’s face the other night. To think about Sam Hoiberg out there diving for balls. I just think it’s an amazing time. I want to spend today talking about, obviously I know you all are going to ask me about Trev and the future of that, but there is so much right. And there is so much that’s good. I’ve gotten kind of frustrated the last couple of days as national people have called me and ‘hey, what is your contract situation like?’ I am here. I am all in. Julie is all in. Yeah I loved Ted Carter and I loved Trev and I came because of them, but I came to be at the University of Nebraska and I’ve loved the people that I’ve met. We aren’t going anywhere unless you guys kick us out. I just want to make sure that I spend my time talking about everything that is right and the last part of that is our team. This team has come so far in these eight weeks. The problems that existed last year aren’t the problems now. The team is adjusting to me because I am becoming a different Coach Rhule and we are getting a different Tony White now because we are going to give our players the gift of high expectations. We snuck up on people maybe this year like ‘Oh the Huskers,’ but they are going to be ready for us next year. They are going to be ready for the three-three-five. They are going to be ready for the players that we have. We are pushing them and driving them and what I love is that they are accepting it and they are sprinting and they are running and they are working and this is going to be an unbelievably competitive spring ball if we’ve done one thing well, we’ve put a lot of talent on the roster. I am really proud of them and I don’t tell them that often. I am not a fuzzy, feely type of a coach so it’s important that they hear it. I’m proud of them. The thing that separates the good from the great in I believe today’s generation, is their ability to handle frustration. Think about when we were young and there was nothing to do and parents wouldn’t let us watch TV, we would go do something. Our kids are on an iPad nowadays. They are on their phone. They are doing something. There’s just not a lot of frustration in their everyday lives so ‘Can we handle frustration? Can we handle it when our Coach is getting on our nerves? Can we handle it when the stakes are high? Can we handle it when we have to do something we really don’t want to do?’ The team keeps answering that ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ So we are going to push them like crazy in spring ball and see where we end up. That was long. Forgive me but hopefully there is something good there.”

On what kind of leader he likes to work with
“I really want somebody who has unbelievable urgency. We spend a lot of time talking about the transfer portal and NIL, this is like one of the most pivotal times in college athletics. We just need doers. We need people who just figure it out and work so I love the fact in Trev that I had an athletic director that was here at 7:00, 7:30 every morning in a suit and tie. He was a worker. Pat Kraft who I worked with at Temple, now at Penn State, he was a worker. They were right there with you. I think what we need is someone who is going to come in and just get things done. They have to be really mentally strong because when you come to a place that has as big of a brand as Nebraska, that people are so passionate about and care about, when you do something, a lot of people are going to like it and some people aren’t going to like it and if you’re listening to the outside noise, you have no chance. I’m just hoping that it’s a worker, a doer, I also want someone, Sam, that’s going to go fight in the committees, in the NCAA, that’s going to go fight in the Big Ten. I can say it because I’m the football coach, I’m mad we’re playing Texas A&M both games because now the games are about the AD leaving. It’s not about our players. Our players deserve the games to be about us. Having somebody that’s not going to go quietly into the night that’s a doer, that’s a worker. I think that’s what we need to really take what we have and get it on overdrive.”

On his ‘God made a farmer’ poem posted on Twitter
“That poem, when we were trying to make the decision of whether to come here or not, that was the poem that kept surfacing. The actual video for it, there’s several versions of it like with a Ram truck and (Marcus) Satterfield was the OC at South Carolina at the time and they were getting ready to play Tennessee and Clemson and he would just keep sending me that and ‘God made a farmer’ and ‘this is who we are.’ I might have been born in New York City, don’t get me wrong but like this is the ethos, this is the type of football we like to play, who we are. That poem, that resonated with us and it’s one of the reasons why we came here. When that moment came out, sometimes when you’re at a loss for words, I texted JLitt and said ‘put some Husker stuff on this please’ and I love the clips that he used and I put it out and it’s basically to say that I came here for a purpose. I didn’t just come here for people. I’ve met amazing people but I’m here for that reason and I’m looking for players that are here for that reason, that want to build something, that want to leave something. I just want to somebody be able to, like Coach Osborne, walk back into the building and have people be happy to see me. Sometimes we go out to eat, with my family and we’ll sit down and I’m like ‘man I hope we have a good season next year’ but I just believe so much in the fans and the people in the state of Nebraska that even if they’re disappointed when we lose a game or excited when we win a game, they’ve always treated myself and my family with such great dignity and respect. That was maybe just me saying ‘Hey we’re all in. My team’s all in. My coaches are all in and we’re all doing it in a way that responds to this state.’”

On how freshmen quarterbacks have fit in so far
“They’ve done a great job. You can see a fire and a competitiveness in Dylan (Raiola). He wants to be at the top. He’s chomping at the bit. He’s in there at 6 o’clock in the morning throwing balls before, he lifts at 10:30 but he’s in there at 6 throwing. You can see it with Danny (Kaelin), he comes in and he’s working on football. They’re both winners. They’re both competitive guys. You can see it with Heinrich (Haarberg) as an older player. We talked a little bit about his elbow getting up and working on that and taking time over spring break to work on that. I’ve been really pleased with their effort. Now they have to get to the football. Again, I talked back to being frustrated. It’s that game you’re playing quarterback in where just nothing seems to be going right, where you just keep getting hit and they’re fooling you with the coverage. Which quarterback gets kind of pissed off and attacks? I remember as a young coach with the Giants, Eli Manning, he might have thrown five picks against the Buccaneers in the first half, four or five, I can’t remember what it was. He came back and threw for 500 yards and we won. It was like you saw the competitive greatness in Eli. So I think that’s the next step for them but I’ve been really pleased and I see a lot of that fire coming out of them.”

Wide Receiver Jahmal Banks
On where he has gained the most with the transition to Nebraska
“The weightroom, I’ve hit some PR’s in there. I’d say the playbook, learning the plays, and just building relationships, I’ve gotten to know a lot of players. Just pushing myself, being who I am and being where my feet are.”

On what he’s learned about the program
“I’ve learned more and more about the atmosphere, just the aura of this place. The history is rich, it’s deep, and it’s going to continue to be that way. The school, some genuine people out here, nice, kind-hearted, and that’s just who they are. We went to an event at some school, and just how they treated us and how they wanted to know about us showed how much they cared about us not just as athletes but as people as well.”

On what about Nebraska appealed to him
“NFL coaching staff was huge, weightroom, coordinators, head coach, just knowing what it takes to get to that next level. Their vision for me as a receiver in the system, in the offense. The school, spending time with the players, I learned a lot about them, why they chose Nebraska as well. I met some like-minded individuals who are purpose and process driven as well.”

Defensive Lineman Jimari Butler
On the defense overall
“It’s really just capitalizing on last year. Yeah we played good last year but that will never be good enough. We can fix a couple of things on defense and at the same time get our young guys ready to play.”

On what they can improve on from last year 
“It’s just little stuff like coverage and doing the wrong blitz. Small things.” 

On what he wants to improve personally  
“I want to become more explosive and gain more weight. Just try to finish what I started. It’s not possible without my team.”

Defensive End Marques Buford Jr.
On what winter and going into spring has been like
“It’s been exciting, it’s been a grind, it’s been a lot of words. It’s been a pleasure working out with the guys that we have here. Coming in every morning even when we know no one wants to be here every morning and still giving everything we got, it’s special to see and it’s special to be around. I would say a lot of confidence has been gained this winter and leading up to this spring. A lot of guys have gotten way faster, way stronger, including myself, and I couldn’t be more ready to start getting into actual football.”

On the possibility of Coach White moving on, and the importance of him coming back
“I know Coach White on a personal level, so honestly when I saw it I wasn’t really as worried about it. I didn’t have to ask any questions because I know what type of guy Coach White is. He’s loyal, he actually cares about every player that he ever speaks to in this building. When I saw the rumors, I don’t even use Twitter as much really, but everything comes across your phone at some point. I didn’t really have any scared reaction to it or anything because I wasn’t honestly worried about him going anywhere. I know what type of guy he is, he works hard and he wants to win. I feel like he knows that the groups of guys he has coming back wants to do the same thing, so he wouldn’t leave us for none of that.”

On the 2.0 version of Tony White’s defense looks like
“It looks like guys who are experienced in playing it. I don’t know how much is really going to change strategically or schematically, but the guys that are on the field playing the defense have now had a full year to play the defense and wipe out all the kinks or missed opps or anything like that. I feel like, schematically, there’s only so much you can do, but the 11 people that are going to go out there on that field and play are the ones that are going to have to make the true difference.”