College football coaches have long, long memories. Every play, good or bad, is burned into their brain. The bad plays, and losses, are burned into their souls.
Nebraska coach Matt Rhule has a memory probably longer than most. He has good reason to. He also doesn’t want history to repeat itself Saturday night at Memorial Stadium.
His first team at Temple in 2013 was 0-2 but facing an opponent in FCS Fordham that looked like it would be an easy and much-needed victory. Rhule’s Owls lost that game, 30-29 — in a most painful way.
Fordham threw a 29-yard Hail Mary with four seconds to play to defeat Temple. The Fordham coach? Joe Moorhead, the current coach of Akron, Nebraska’s opponent on Saturday.
“I told the team, ‘I’m uptight this week,’ ” Rhule said at a news conference Thursday. “This guy [Moorhead, whom Rhule earlier in the week said he considered a friend] beat me the last time I faced him head-to-head.
“That was one of the worst moments of my coaching career … he beat me in a monumental upset.”
Monumental might be underplaying the upset’s significance. It was Fordham’s first victory over what’s now known as an FBS team since the Rams opened the 1954 season with a 13-7 win over Rutgers.
Yep, Rhule remembers.
Nebraska is 34.5-point favorite over Akron at most sportsbooks in the Huskers’ home opener. The joint will be jumping after Nebraska returned home with a 20-17 victory over Cincinnati at Kansas City.
Rhule’s Owls often were underdogs during his first two seasons. He knows the feeling of trying to pull off the monumental upset. In that first season, he lost to No. 14 Notre Dame, No. 7 Louisville and No. 17 Central Florida. The Owls finished 2-10.
Akron currently is ranked 133rd (down one spot) in The Athletic’s weekly ranking of all 136 teams. The Huskers are ranked 37th, up two spots from last week. But the Zips played an inspired opening game, losing at home, 10-0, to Wyoming.
An Akron win at Nebraska on Saturday would make its season … and then some.
“I think when you go into these types of games, you [the underdog] really have nothing in the world to lose and everything in the world to gain,” Rhule said.
“You have a bunch of players on your team who believe they should be playing at the highest level and know that they are good players.
“When you play an FCS team you see a bunch of bounce-back players. Now, when you play any Group of 5 team, they’re going to have a lot of players who played. One [Akron] linebacker played at Illinois. They’ve played a lot of football.
“Guys who know what this level’s like and they know that they can play at this level. I think the message from me always was, ‘Hey we’re competitors and we’re going in to compete, let’s go compete. Let’s take our shots and we have nothing to lose.’ ”
Nebraska is a 34-point favorite for many reasons, but it’s mostly because the Huskers have a skilled, Big Ten roster. Rhule painted the Zips as a talented team and, who knows what can happen. Sure, that’s what coaches say before such games. He wants to keep the Huskers focused on the job right in front of them.
“On this end, we don’t ever want to play the brand, we want to play the man,” Rhule said. “That’s kinda always our message. That’s whether we’re playing Ohio State or whether we’re playing Kent State.
“We want to play the guy lined up in front of us. And play to a standard and we’re trying to attack that man.
“That was something we were not great at last year. We played Ohio State to one level, we played other games to a different level. We lost to Illinois last year and I think that started in the UNI [Northern Iowa] game, the standard we played in the UNI game [a 34-3 Huskers win].”
Rhule almost was on the winning side of a monumental upset in 2015. Notre Dame was a 10-point favorite over Rhule’s Temple team. But rather than the point spread, the impact of a Temple victory would have been knocking off one of the country’s elite and cherished programs.
“My third year at Temple, we played Notre Dame,” Rhule said. “Not many people gave us a chance. We were underdogs. There was ‘College GameDay’ [in Philadelphia] and we darn near won the game.”
The Owls lost to Notre Dame, 24-20, on a 17-yard touchdown pass with 2:09 to play.
Rhule hasn’t forgotten that game, either. Some memories do last forever.
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