Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule met with members of the media after practice on Wednesday. He talked about adapting to in-game decisions and how to maintain his energy for Friday night’s game.

“One thing we want to teach the players is to prepare through the event,” he said. “It’s an old saying from Al Golden when I worked for him: the hay is in the barn. We don’t believe in that. When you get into the game, you see how they play and try to adjust. We still have a lot of work to do, but so far the guys have worked hard. We’ll keep trying to get going before the game on Friday night.”

Rhule said he was able to involve many players in the offense.

“We’ve been playing a lot of drop backs,” he said. “So when you’re playing drop backs, it’s progression one, two, three. You can touch guys by calling screens and stuff like that, which we do some of. Let’s get the ball to this guy, let’s get the ball to that guy. Last game, we had a lot of tempo drop backs. Dylan’s pretty good at that. When you’re playing drop back passes, the ball finds the open receiver. They pressured us and he threw the hot swing route. They blitzed us, he threw the look to Isaiah (Neyor). It’s a good challenge, there’s only one ball. It’s hard to get everybody involved, I’m sure a lot of guys want to touch the ball more. I thought the wideouts played really well last week. They were free, the ball came to them. Dylan isn’t afraid to work through all the progressions. He hit the fifth progression a couple times, which is great to see.”

He also discussed the number of runs he thinks each running back should have.

“Every game is different,” he said. “The last game, I didn’t see the need to give Dante (Dowdell) a lot of runs because we had a short week coming up, or our team didn’t see it that way, and that’s pretty high-minded thinking from those guys. This game is different. Like I said, I’d like to have a guy in the low 20s, a guy around 15. We don’t run the quarterback, so we run some other guys, and obviously we have to get the receivers involved in the run game a little bit. As the game goes on, we’re going to face a team that has an elite run defense. They also have an elite pass defense. They’re just an elite defense. Every game is a little different, we’ll see what we have to do in each game to win.”

NU will face the Illinois Fighting Illini at Memorial Stadium on Friday, September 20th at 7 p.m. CT. The game will be televised on FOX, with radio coverage provided by the Huskers Radio Network.