Nebraska's Matt Rhule rants against the state of college football

Nebraska had a bye week this past weekend, and that gave head coach Matt Rhule an opportunity to take in the rest of the college football world.

It was a great weekend of football — with Tennessee and Florida having a tough matchup, Ohio State and Oregon going down to the wire, and Penn State versus USC and LSU versus Ole Miss both going into overtime — but the excitement from those games was not what Rhule took away from his time watching.

Rather than excitement, he seemed to be discouraged about the state of his sport.

“One thing about college football right now...there’s a lot of guys out there and the whole time they’re playing, they’re playing for their personal brand, Rhule said in a recent news conference (h/t On3). "Like, they could do something for the team, they could take a knee, they could step out of bounds, they could end the game. Instead, it’s all — watching college football is really hard now. It’s all trash talk, and really excessive trash talk.”

One gets the sense when listening to Rhule speak that the trash talk, in particular, is a huge sticking point for him. He brought up rivalry games and how there should still be room for respect even though they get heated. At the very least, that's what he's trying to teach his players. There's room for a bit of smack talk, but there also has to be mutual respect for the opponent. 

“You beat a team and you’re waving goodbye at them. Iowa did that to us last year. Sometimes with rivalries, I get it, but I don’t want to see our team do that. I want to see — if you watch me, I shake their hands. The players we game planned for, I shake their hand. I just struggled with that a little bit this weekend watching college football. Every time a guy makes a play, it’s like he has to turn and tell the guy he made a play. Trust me, I’m all for a little trash talk,” Rhule said.

Rhule has been a successful college coach at multiple programs, and he even had a stint as an NFL head coach, so he clearly has a legitimate soap box to stand on when it comes to criticizing the game he's put so much effort and time into. One has to wonder if this change in mindset will be permanent, though, especially in the NIL and transfer portal era where the individual player has seemingly become so much more important than the team.