Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule knows that this season didn’t go the way his team hoped it would.
However, he picked a heck of a metaphor to explain how tough it is that his first-year Cornhuskers had to be the transition team for the program.
Speaking with reporters after Nebraska’s Black Friday loss to Iowa, Rhule compared his first Nebraska team to, we’re not kidding, the soldiers who first stormed the beach at Normandy on World War II’s D-Day landings.
For context, those are the soldiers who took the most casualties in the first wave of the military attack to clear the way for the others behind them.
“Sometimes, the first people to do things don’t get to see the results,” Rhule explained. “The first people to storm the beach at Normandy, you know, the first explorers, like, you don’t always get to see the end result.”
"Sometimes the first people to do things don't get to see the results…"
Matt Rhule speaks on his first season leading the #Huskers and the crushing end to year 1. (@1011_News, @kevinsjuts) pic.twitter.com/2oxQ3ON7NO
— Chase Matteson (@ChaseMatteson) November 24, 2023
It’s a bit odd to deflect this season as an unfortunate casualty in a bridge year when you look at where Nebraska was with just four games to go on the schedule.
Nebraska was 5-3 with Michigan State, Maryland, Wisconsin and Iowa remaining on its schedule.
Lost all four by a combined 16 points and now the Huskers will go another season without a bowl trip. That's seven straight.
— Yahoo Sports College Football (@YahooSportsCFB) November 24, 2023
This is the kind of questionable logic that doesn’t take into account that this easily could’ve been a bowl season for the Cornhuskers if they’d literally won one of their last four games.
Rhule might want to reconsider his words next time when trying to explain away a disappointing season as just a fluke in the grand scheme of things. This team absolutely should not have been thrown on the pyre of transition, and that’s on this coaching staff.
