Tradition can be a double-edged sword in college football. For the programs that rely on it, there is a point when it morphs from calling card to cumbersome. There is perhaps no clearer example of this than Nebraska. Few, if any, programs have a more illustrious trophy cabinet, but they haven’t put anything new in it of significance in the lifetime of today’s recruits. The constant push and pull between innovation and the old ways has been the story of the past two decades for the Huskers.
But there is one significant part of the program’s past that does stand the test of time if only some coach could unlock it amongst all the changes in college athletics: sports science. The future of that forges on, but it’s under new management as the Matt Rhule era begins. There is no better place to marry the past and present of athlete development than right where it began at the altar of strength and conditioning.
There’s one thing Boyd Epley needs to show you before you leave. You’ve come this far to sit with him in his basement, and on this particular spring day he’s O.K. being distracted from lawn work to tell tales of how he contributed to the Nebraska football dynasty. When he was hired in the late 1960s, he is regarded as the first strength coach at a college football program. Next to the TV, he slides two doors open to unveil what can be only described as a mini-museum of Big Red memorabilia and Epley’s own storied career.
There are old magazine covers, championship rings, commemorative plaques, trophies and even a signed picture with a “thank-you” from a former U.S. president. There are pictures of him and his family from bowl games and a set of golf clubs that once belonged to Bob Devaney. Turn a corner, and you’ll find Epley’s personal weight training set where, four days a week, he still gets a lift in. If you need any motivation to get off the couch, he squatted 405 pounds for two reps on his 75th birthday last year.
Photo by Richard Johnson
Next to his in-home machine, there is a shiny logo on the wood-paneled wall. It’s the silhouette of a man with a barbell on his back and a block N on his chest. It signifies his legacy: Husker Power. If you go on campus, you’ll find a much bigger version on the wall of Nebraska’s current weight room.
Epley grew up in Nebraska, but his childhood asthma forced his family to move to Arizona. In 1957, at age 10, while in Arizona, a friend asked him to come over and offered a simple challenge: Pick up a bar with 65 pounds loaded onto it. It was difficult, but Epley did it. A few years later, he got his first book on how to be a weightlifter. When he started high school, his new school at the time had a weight room, which he says was unheard of at the time. He worked his way back to the state of Nebraska after a spell at a junior college where he was a pole vaulter before transferring to the university where he would later begin his life’s work.
Epley injured his back and was told he wouldn’t be able to participate in his senior year “for liability purposes.” He wore a back brace for 10 years and got out of it only after a chance meeting with someone who recommended a device that could strengthen his weakened hamstring, the actual culprit of his bad back. He had been helping out around the weight room and was known to some of the coaches. He planned to become a track coach until a call from future Nebraska coach Tom Osborne changed the trajectory of his life.
At the time, Osborne was the program’s offensive coordinator, still a few years shy of taking over as head coach for the legendary Bob Devaney. It was August 1969, just more than a month before the Huskers were set to open their season. Devaney, who took over in ’62, had immediate success, taking a three-win team to nine in his first year, and then ripping off four-straight top-10 finishes. Nebraska fell from its perch near the top of the sport in ’67 and ’68. That drop-off is attributed in part to an order from Devaney for his players to lose weight and an offseason program that emphasized endurance over building muscle. A humiliating 49–0 loss to Oklahoma in ’68 on national television was the catalyst for change, and Osborne had an idea.
Osborne asked Epley what they needed for a proper weight room. At the time there was only one Olympic bar and five individual dumbbells. Epley drew up a two-page list of equipment but handed Osborne only the first page with the things he thought were the most pressing needs, only after Osborne gave his approval did he say there was a second page, too. Epley used his experience in a facilities class to tell Osborne that they needed more space, too. He thought his work was done.
“[Osborne] says, ‘O.K., now we’re going to go see Bob.’ I go, ‘Bob?’” Epley recalls. “He goes, ‘Yeah. We’re going to go see Bob Devaney to get permission to do what we just did.’”
Devaney was sitting in a big red leather chair behind his desk and was, as Epley put it, the most powerful man in the state of Nebraska at the time. He recalls the meeting going down like this:
Osborne: We should have the entire football team start lifting weights.
Devaney: Why would we want to do that? My friend Duffy Daugherty’s the head coach at Michigan State. They don’t lift weights. In fact, I don’t know of any college that lifts weights.
[They both look at Epley, who says he was so nervous he didn’t know what exactly to say but recognized the opportunity in front of him.]
Devaney: All right, we’re going to give this a try because Tom thinks it’s important, but if anybody gets slower, you’re fired.
And just like that, Epley was hired at $2 an hour. Lifting weights during the season was virtually unheard of in college football, and the beginnings were spartan. Epley collected metal from a construction site and enlisted a welder to help him build squat racks and weight benches from scratch. To make sure he could honor Devaney’s threat, he went to the P.E. department at Nebraska and borrowed some stopwatches to test players in the 40-yard dash (because hand-timing anything less proved difficult).
“When I started, there was bodybuilding, there was weight lifting and there was powerlifting; and then in the P.E. department, there was weight training [what we think of now as strength training],” Epley says. “What I created, or attempted to create, is called strength training. People get it all mixed up, and in 1969, when I got this opportunity, I didn’t know as much as I would a few years later. So, I tried to do all of those things. I was teaching weight training for the P.E. department. I took three years and competed in bodybuilding, powerlifting and Olympic lifting to learn all that and I had success in all three; and I learned that bodybuilding was giving us nothing that would relate to football.”
Epley eventually focused on developing strength and power to develop football players. He started with basics like the squat (for power) and clean (for explosiveness). He combined it with agility training and added conditioning work to develop the now ubiquitous discipline of strength and conditioning. His breakthrough came with an undersized offensive lineman named Mike Beran, who weighed about 180 pounds, when he entered the program in 1968. Epley helped him through lifting weights to add 50 pounds over the course of his career and improve his 40-time from 5.5 to 4.9. Beran ended up starting in ’72.
Epley says it was early proof that what he was doing could produce results. Various fine-tuning had to be done along the way. Initially, Epley was testing 40 times too much, and players were tweaking hamstrings more frequently. There was also the removal of bench-press testing from the program as the years went by that he calls “the most overrated lift there is for football,” because while short-armed offensive linemen can perform it well, they won’t help you win games, as arm length is one of the most important things about a lineman’s physical profile.
“You don’t recruit kids that have short little arms that can bench-press a lot. If you do, you’re not going to win,” Epley says.
By the late 1970s, Nebraska was about to build the largest weight room in college athletics and had built the foundation for two national champions and a program that was a mainstay in the top 10. Attitudes on lifting weights across the country changed quickly, and Epley had multiple assistants getting poached by the likes of Woody Hayes, Jackie Sherrill, and Barry Switzer.
The weight room expansion was a direct result of Nebraska’s strength program’s becoming a brand in its own right. As Epley lost assistants, he needed money to retain them, and he’d taken on other responsibilities training other sports on campus in addition to his teaching duties. After some cajoling of Devaney (who at this point was athletic director), Epley was able to raise $2 million over the years by soliciting season-ticket holders to donate to the strength program directly. Epley called it the Husker Power club. The branding came from a drawing of offensive lineman Bruce Lingenfelter’s performing a squat. Epley hired an artist, and the rendition was adopted once Epley made one small tweak. The original drawing depicted the lift being done incorrectly with the head cocked backward. Epley cut the head off, tilted it forward, and a brand was born. He and Nebraska’s recruiting coordinator created a poster with the logo on it and sent it to high schools across the country. This was how Nebraska’s player development became the program’s calling card.
Photo by Richard Johnson
Once Epley got his weight room, the innovations continued. Epley had a special platform built placed prominently in the middle of the room. To lift on it, you had to either win a major award like the Heisman or the Outland or score enough points in a special fitness test. On game days, Nebraska would bring recruits through the facility and have a redshirting player work out for demonstrative purposes.
“Everything’s a competition here, so only special people got to have their name on the platform, and only special people got to work out on the platform,” says Nebraska AD Trev Alberts, who played football at Nebraska in the ’90s. “Imagine a whole bunch of really competitive young football players. You think that didn’t motivate you? It was also a way in recruiting of just showing just how committed Nebraska was to development, how committed they were to strength and conditioning. And again, there wasn’t anybody anywhere else in the country that you were going to go to that had made the investment into those areas that Nebraska had, but the platform was just a part of it.”
The strength program was not without its controversies throughout the years, however. In 1987, former three-year starter Dean Steinkuhler told Sports Illustrated he used steroids throughout his career from ’79 to ’83. In ’88, former offensive lineman Bill Lewis (’82–86) told the Los Angeles Times that some of his teammates were steroid users. Steinkuhler alleged Osborne knew what was going on and said there were between four and six players using steroids. Osborne told SI at the time he was sure “some guys” had taken steroids. Following veiled comments from UCLA coach Terry Donahue before a ’88 game against the Huskers, Epley spoke out about the reputation that followed the program despite its success.
“I have said on TV that if any of my staff ever recommends steroid use to any of our players, I will resign immediately. As far as we know, with our best efforts, we don’t have players on steroids. We still hear all the rumors and it eats away at you. People recruit against us by saying to kids, ‘You go to Nebraska and they’ll put you on steroids.’ It takes away from the hard work of our players.”
“I can remember one player coming up to me and asking my opinion on it,” Epley says now. “I told him some of the issues that could develop if you took steroids, and he reached in his pocket, took out a bottle of steroids and threw them in the trash. So, I know there were people that were flirting with it.”
At a speech he gave to the Nebraska coaches association in the early 1980s, Epley admitted there were players within the program that he suspected at the time of steroid use, but he lamented being unable to prove it. The word got back to Osborne, who chided Epley for making assumptions, and the work began to develop a testing program. Nebraska’s medical staff began drug testing players in ’83 (the NCAA would not begin doing so until ’86).
The Osborne Athletic Complex was built in 2006. It was state of the art then, yet obsolete by comparison now, a microcosm of Nebraska’s football program overall.
Everything about Nebraska’s identity is built upon its history of being on the cutting edge of player development and using edgewise advantages to build a behemoth. It can be found in the inventive ways the program used its freshman team and walk-on program that swelled rosters throughout the decades.
Osborne’s last roster in 1997 was almost 180 players, a key cog in development as was the liberal use of redshirts. It’s difficult to replicate the strategy largely due to costs, although former head coach Scott Frost did try. Nebraska was one of the first schools to popularize the concept of a training table feeding players year-round all they could eat at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The program took chances on partial academic qualifiers for years. But over time, and certainly when Epley first retired in 2006, its first mover advantages had fully eroded. Every school has strength and conditioning programs and training tables. Walk-ons are expensive, so their use has been scaled back over the years. The Big 12 ceased to allow partial qualifiers by the mid-’90s.
New coach Rhule was drawn to Nebraska due to Alberts’s drilling in on player development. The same foundation that built him into the fifth pick in the 1994 NFL draft. Rhule had conversations with other programs that were perhaps too focused on recruiting, which he says is important but not the be-all and end-all. It will continue to be difficult for Nebraska to compete with conference peers like Ohio State, Penn State or Michigan, programs at the top of the recruiting rankings year in and year out. Recruiting rankings are not cyclical, and the Huskers are squarely a fringe top-20 recruiting program, but that can be good enough to compete at a high level in the coming 12-team Playoff structure if player development is done correctly, which is of course easier said than done.
“We’ve always recruited to traits because when you’re at Temple, you’re not going to out-recruit Penn State, but you’re going to play them, and you want to try to beat them,” Rhule says. “I remember being at Temple being like I don’t know if we can out-recruit Central Florida, but we have to try to beat them. So it became, Hey, let’s find these characteristics and traits and let’s hire a coaching staff that can build them. Then we went to Baylor. We’re not going to be able to out-recruit Oklahoma and Texas, yet my third year there, we beat Texas. My first year we couldn’t get across the 50 against Texas. My third year, we beat them.”
Nebraska will soon move into a new facility putting it on par with peers around the country in the facilities arms race. When you walk into the current Osborne complex, down a long hallway, there is a corner dedicated to the history of Husker Power that includes a plaque honoring Epley’s contributions to the program. There’s a picture of the first strength machine and four of the five dumbbells that were part of the original set Epley told Osborne were woefully inadequate back in 1969 (someone stole one of them, according to Epley).
Inside is the current weight room and offices for the people who are trying to find the new way to get Nebraska back at the forefront of athlete development. Nebraska’s head strength and conditioning coach now is Corey Campbell, who was on staff with Rhule at Baylor and with the Carolina Panthers as an assistant strength coach. Campbell walked on at Georgia and worked himself into being a special teams captain as a senior. He earned a degree in biological science from UGA in 2013 and a master’s in kinesiology from Georgia College in ’16. He ended up training some of his own former teammates in his first job back at UGA.
“I gave myself the opportunity to play and I saw the importance in that, not only from the physical development but also from the mental development side of things as well,” Campbell says. “Just the belief my strength coaches had in me to stand up for me in meetings with the coaches and say, ‘Hey, this guy can be a contributor. He can help us win football games.’ From those experiences it was like, O.K., that’s a career path that I want to take.”
Campbell is one of those guys. He wakes up every day around 3:15 a.m. and is often the first person in the building. As he sits in his seat, he lifts an arm up and leans to the opposite side to stretch a nagging stitch in his side. You’d be forgiven if you thought he could put a helmet on and give the Huskers a few snaps at practice. Campbell still gets in a workout almost every day, and often his workouts are done with his players in mind. He’ll tinker with a lift here or there to make sure movements are optimal for the players and test the flow of a specific workout. It’s another way he can connect with them.
“This is where college strength conditioning started, and I don’t take that lightly, and a lot of people would say it’s pressure, but I look at that as a privilege,” Campbell says. “I say that because I’m in this position because not only do people believe in me, but I worked hard to get here and I don’t take it lightly. Now that I’m in this seat, I got to work that much harder to keep it but to also elevate it—elevate this football program, elevate this university.”
What Campbell presides over certainly looks different from what Epley started. It’s much more collaborative than just a couple of strength coaches instructing lifts. Strength and conditioning works together with the athletic medicine department, nutrition, sports science and sport psychologists to care for the players in a case-management-style approach. There is no one-size-fits-all here. What good is it if the players have recovered well, but Campbell structures a program that blows through a limit and causes injury? Maybe a player has something going on at home that’s affecting his mood and therefore his performance. Maybe some parts of the organization don’t know there’s a pulled muscle. Everyone has to work together.
Rhule didn’t have anything like these tools when he was at Temple. The focus on recovery work began by bringing in a chiropractor and embracing sports massage. That continues today, as a handful of Nebraska athletes are getting worked on right outside Campbell’s office. Once he got to Baylor, he was introduced to much of the high-tech tools they use today by director of applied performance Andrew Althoff, who he brought with him when he coached with the Panthers. Rhule was impressed with how cutting edge Baylor’s program was when he arrived.
Campbell points to a hierarchy of development as the model for how Nebraska builds athletes now, invented by Al Vermeil, the strength and conditioning coach for the San Francisco 49ers in the 1980s and Chicago Bulls in the ’90s. The original model starts with evaluation and testing to see what an athlete can do, then moves to work capacity to figure out how much an athlete can do to improve upon it. The progression then moves from strength, to power, and finally at the top, speed. Whether you’re a grad transfer coming in or a freshman showing up to college for the first time, there’s an initial evaluation step, and that’s where other parts of the program come together.
This is where Mitch Cholewinski, Nebraska’s coordinator of football sports science, comes in. Cholewinski got a bachelor’s in chemical engineering at Pitt and went to Baylor to earn a Ph.D. in exercise science and nutrition. His initial goal was to become a chemical engineer and make a bunch of money, before he realized he was much more fulfilled engineering athletes. So the doctorate will have to wait because Cholewinski served a role in data collection, reporting and quality control for Rhule, and later Dave Aranda’s Bears, before working at Texas as associate director of applied sports science and then linking back up with Rhule in Lincoln.
Now he’s a key conduit between strength and conditioning, athletic medicine and Nebraska’s coaching staff. He also works with Nebraska’s athletic performance laboratory (NAPL), which Epley says was underutilized by the last coaching staff, housed in the east side of Memorial Stadium. NAPL was established in 2013, and has many bells and whistles like 3-D motion capture capability and force plate technology, which can measure ground reaction on, for instance, a vertical jump, to help determine a baseline for performance of that particular muscle group. Nebraska has a device called a NordBoard to help measure hamstring strength and imbalances (which side is weaker than the other). A tensiomyography machine helps show how soft tissues are contracting. Through wearable technology supplied by Catapult, football players are tracked by GPS when on the field by sports vests they wear under their pads. Cholewinski gets data on how fast players moved and how much they ran in a given practice, and from there creates rolling averages to see whether players are trending up or down from an output perspective on the field. It’s all in service of creating baselines to judge players off of. They can’t predict injuries, but they can use this data to try to spot red flags.
“I see these kids for at most five hours a day, and there’s 19 others, and I can’t measure everything, nor do I want to measure everything,” Cholewinski says. “But I want to try to cut up as much of that pie as I can. For me, it’s just all about quantifying risk. If I see that they had a high workload on the field, if I come in, they say that their hamstrings are weaker than they typically are and then we’re doing a lift on the platform and—say we’re doing Olympic movement—and it’s not as powerful as it usually goes. That’s like three check marks in a warning box.”
It is not all just cold hard numbers. They’re working with real human beings who have good days and bad days. Some athletes will say they feel tired on a given day, and then PR on a lift in the weight room because of the human body’s resilience. Talking to the players one-on-one also helps build a relationship. One of his insistences from a recovery standpoint is insistence on sleep for the athletes. Could they track every athlete’s sleep with a wearable device? Sure. But at what cost to the one-to-one relationship with the player? He’s found that when you build trust with players, they’ll be forthcoming on their daily wellness questionnaires even if they missed the mark, and then it becomes a teachable moment and a relationship builder in the best-case scenario.
“That case-management approach of integrating all those people, that to me is where the sauce is,” Rhule says. “You can give me a GPS number, but if I don’t do anything with it, who cares, right? ‘Hey, this is your rest day; we’re going to recover today. I need you to not go home and take a nap, but instead come in and get a massage.’ Sometimes you might not want to do it, might want to go play Call of Duty, but if you take control of it, say, ‘I’m going to come in, I’m going to get that extra work, I’m going to float, I’m going to do pool workouts,’ we have all of these things available to you, but at the end of the day, it’s the student-athlete who actually gets in and does them in their extra time that allows them to be healthy. So, having everyone on the same page and then working with the student-athlete to serve them, to me is the model that works.”
When a player does get injured, that’s where the uniqueness of the department can be a strength by utilizing Campbell’s assistant director of strength and conditioning, Matt Hobbs. Hobbs is in his and Cholewinski’s estimations—one of the few if not the only—designated strength coaches at a major college football program with a doctorate in physical therapy. PT school is high level, you can leave and practice in any discipline, but Hobbs wanted to find a way to work with football teams, which he did while an undergrad at South Carolina as a strength intern. He went on to PT school and did a residency at Miami and a fellowship at Northwestern, all along the way trying to find ways to marry his background in strength and conditioning as well as physical therapy.
“I know what activities [in the weight room] are going to exacerbate their symptoms, but I also know what’s not,” Hobbs says. “So it’s training them as high as I can based off their entry, like from a capacity standpoint. So making sure that they aren’t falling way behind the wayside just because they’re hurt. And so I think it adds a significant amount of value. But again, I’m a little bit biased.”
When Campbell isn’t the first one in the office, it’s because Hobbs beat him.
“I don’t know if he’s racing me in here, but I’m damn sure racing him in here,” Hobbs says with a smile. His biggest contribution is in helping athletes return to play, and in the spring especially that specifically means return to practice.
“Practice is the most important thing in our program,” Rhule has said (and those who work with him have repeated verbatim). “Not recruiting, not weightlifting, not the offseason, not travel, nothing.”
Steven Branscombe/USA TODAY Sports
Because practice is so important, on the front end of attempts to prevent injury, keeping them out of actual practice reps is often a last resort. They’d much rather ramp down a workout and hold them out of a lifting session or a couple of specific exercises than mess with practice. Everything is tailored so that when it’s time to work, they can get the most out of each day.
“When it’s time to go, it’s time to go, and I need you to strap up the helmets and lace up the cleats and go, or I need you to get under that barbell and move it as fast as you can because that’s what’s going to push those markers of performance,” Campbell says. “If you think about it like a high-performance vehicle, you’re not going to redline that vehicle day after day because what’s going to happen, it’s going to break down on you. That’s just these guys are high-performance athletes, so we can’t rev them high every day without taking the time to take care of them.”
Long gone are the days that athletes simply rubbed some dirt on it and got back onto the field. The goal is not just getting them simply to return to play but to perform. When Campbell called Hobbs for what was a de facto first job interview, Campbell asked for a full timeline of how he treats an injured player from Day 1 when a player goes down to when he returns to the field. For an ACL repair, Hobbs finds that the first three months, research shows that people will load their healthy leg more. But once they get past that point and it evens out between legs, they need to make sure they’re loading force on the healthy leg correctly.
“How are you loading that within your limb? Is it more hip dominant? Is it more knee dominant? More ankle?” Hobbs says. “So that’s what I’m most concerned with as they kind of go through this continuum of care because a lot of people post-op ACL reconstruction, they don’t want to load their knee. That’s where the NAPL’s been extremely helpful because they set up these marker systems, and we can do all these movements. So we can see how they’re loading joint-by-joint. So in an ideal world, maybe we’re loading our knee 60% on a single-leg depth land. If they’re four months out and we’re not seeing that, maybe we’re seeing 30%. Based on that, it kind of changes your exercise prescription a little bit.”
Beyond physical health there is also mental health, an omnipresent issue in society and on college campuses. NCAA research shows rates of mental exhaustion, depression and anxiety have either stayed the same or increased since the fall of 2020 during the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. For that, Nebraska’s athletic programs rely on director of sport psychology Brett Haskell.
“It’s pretty cool what we can do from a sports science standpoint now, but it also adds layers of pressure and expectations,” Haskell says. “Now we can track our sleep and we have all these other metrics to observe what athletes are doing. But that just becomes more things to answer to in some ways. I would say there’s a lot more bosses, those may be human beings and they may not be, than an athlete 20 years ago had. So I think there’s just a lot of pressure and expectations and I think the competitive environment is just heightened even more.”
When someone goes down, a key challenge is figuring out how to reintegrate them to activities that just get them back in the weight room around their teammates for their mental health as much as their physical health. Mental health can be reduced to a buzzword that everyone understands is an issue but can be difficult to tackle in a hands-on fashion. But this is a team after all. When a player gets injured, there can be a profound effect on them just as far as isolation from teammates, disruption of routine and the immediate removal of the main purposes they even came to Nebraska in the first place. The surgeon general recently announced that loneliness in the United States poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day.
“We’ve had a couple of guys that are fully reintegrated to practice, and they were like, ‘Oh, is it like watching your son go out there and play?’ I was like, ‘Not quite,’” Hobbs says. “That’s the best part about this job for me, in all honesty. Seeing them go out to practice, seeing them go out to a game, they catch a touchdown in the end zone, and it is just like you fought for this. I was part of the journey. I certainly wasn’t the whole part, but to see that person shine and do what they came here to do is an incredible experience.”
The hope here for Nebraska is that Huskers leadership has finally got it right. After two decades of a rudderless search for an identity, can Matt Rhule and his staff marry their player development experience with Nebraska’s overall infrastructure to take the Huskers back to the mountaintop?
“When I knew I was leaving the NFL and coming to college, I said to myself, ‘I wanted to have the most integrated, holistic approach from sports psychology and mental health to academics, to nutrition, to the training room, to athletic medicine, to sports science, all the way to recovery and regeneration.’ We built our new building. I wanted to have the best of the best in those areas and then have them all work together.”
The players of today may not know where that Husker Power logo comes from, but they are a part of a continued experiment in how to build something worthy of Epley adding it to that wall in his basement and restoring the Huskers’ power.
