Shatel: Matt Rhule's attention to detail reminiscent of a Robert De Niro movie character (2024)

LINCOLN — It’s all about the blueberries.

That’s a direct message to USC football coach Lincoln Riley from those of us who had to learn the hard way about Big Ten football.

You know all about USC. The Trojans have playoff aspirations. Recruit nationally. Like to throw it around the yard. Defense has been suspect. Their famous fight song is played nonstop during games.

Recently, Riley was asked about USC’s debut this fall in the Conference of Big Shoulders.

His answer wasn’t quite as blunt as Scott Frost in 2018. But his take should have a familiar ring to it.

“I know it’s a big story on the outside, and I get it,” Riley said. “We’re playing some different people, and there’ll be a few different things schematically and all that.

“But sometimes it gets made out in the media that the Big Ten is some wildly different deal. It’s football. So a couple of teams play with one more tight end. Like, big deal.

“For us, it’s more our evolution as a program and I have not shied away from the day I took the job here.

“We came here to win national championships, period. And if you’re gonna win national championships, you have to be able to beat anybody and everybody.

“For us to do that as a program, we have needed to take steps in certain areas that I feel like we would be taking whether the Pac 12 was still in existence…or if something like this (Big Ten) happened.”

In other words, the Big Ten does not require a major adjustment. USC’s got this.

Brings back some memories, doesn’t it, Nebraska?

Speaking from experience — one harsh lesson after another and another and another — Riley is in for a surprise. He better be ready to start counting blueberries.

Blueberries?

Allow me to explain. Last week, we were discussing Matt Rhule’s attention to detail during the World-Herald’s Pick Six podcast.

Sam McKewon, our esteemed sports editor and movie aficionado, cited an example from the 1995 movie “Casino,” starring Robert DeNiro as the head of the Tangiers, a fictional Las Vegas casino.

There’s a scene in the movie where DeNiro’s character, Sam Rothstein, goes into the casino’s large kitchen and approaches one of the bakers about the blueberry muffins.

“From now on, I want you to put an equal amount of blueberries in each muffin,” Rothstein says.

The baker says, “Do you know how long that’s going to take?”

“I don’t care how long it takes,” Rothstein says. “Put an equal amount in each muffin.”

That is Rhule this spring, as he enters his second season as Nebraska head football coach. He’s got an army of assistants and staff people with a program build in progress. And Rhule is the CEO of the operation, walking around making sure every little detail is addressed.

Details. Details. Details. It’s a theme that the coach has constantly hammered since he arrived.

He continued as recently as last Thursday, saying it wasn’t the “highlight” plays that has kept NU from going to a bowl game. It’s the “lowlights.”

Next season, Rhule said, will be dependent on how many times the Huskers beat themselves — and how often they don’t.

It’s a message that Big Ten teams have been beating into Nebraska, ever since NU joined the league in 2011. But Husker coaches have been hard-headed.

How many times did the Huskers lose a game because they couldn’t get out of their own way? I don’t have enough room in this column to list them.

“The Big Ten, there’s just so much parity,” Rhule said on Thursday. “It’s like the NFL. Coach (Bill) Belichick came here and told the team the first rule for his team is don’t beat ourselves. I looked around and said, 'I told you guys.’

“When you have parity, you can’t just win by overwhelming them with talent. Everyone has resources. Now it comes down to execution.”

It comes down to counting blueberries.

The best part here is, Rhule is a movie guy, too. He knows “Casino” well and remembers the kitchen part.

“Eventually someone says, 'I’m in charge of the blueberries',” Rhule said. “The players do that.”

Bingo.

The best teams, the championship teams, are run by the players. The coaches guide them. They call the plays. They make in-game decisions. But the execution is enforced by the peers, the guys in uniform.

At some point, a coach can only do so much. He can take away plays, minutes and put a guy on the bench.

The glare or a chewing out of a respected teammate is much worse.

Ask all the former Huskers. It was that way at Nebraska forever. And they will get a warm spot in their heart to hear it could be coming back.

Therein lies the theme of this 2024 Nebraska spring practice. You’ll read all the interviews, keep track of the phenoms at quarterback, wonder about playmakers at receiver and running back and in the secondary.

But what this spring is really all about is finding team leaders who want to march into the kitchen and make demands.

“We come in and install,” Rhule said. “They learn the process and start demanding it. They see a fumble or see a bad decision or see a guy do something bad off the field, they stop it.”

How long does that take?

“It’s whenever the players start saying something and start holding each other accountable,” Rhule said. “That’s really hard to do.

“It took (until) my third year at Temple and third year at Baylor. The teams were like, hey, enough’s enough.

“Here, I’m hoping guys like Giff (Isaac Gifford) and Ty Robinson and Tommie Hill and those guys recognize that, man, we were 5-7 and if we had eliminated these two plays here and these three plays there, we would have had more chances to win.”

It doesn’t have to take three years. Nebraska has a good group of veterans, like Robinson, who chose to come back rather than enter the portal or move on to the draft. They can lead. They have to lead.

Somewhere, Grant Wistrom and Jason Peter are nodding approvingly.

“I think you see signs of it,” Rhule said. “It’s just how consistent are they going to do it?

“It’s just continual from coach to staff to the players to the culture in the locker room. That’s when you win a lot of games.”

Start counting, lads.