In Phil Snow, Matt Rhule has trusted overseer for his defense and program

During his professional coaching career that now spans 26 years, Matt Rhule has met and connected with an uncountable number of coaches across the country — young, old and everything in between.

One of them, “a hall of fame coach” as Rhule said during a press conference last Thursday inside the Hawks Championship Center, said it’s always helpful to have someone on staff who can be depended on and leaned on in an “elder statesman role.”

That’s exactly what Phil Snow is being brought in to be for Rhule as he ends his second season at Nebraska and prepares for a critical third in 2025.

Today, Snow’s hire became official.

While Rhule was not allowed to detail Snow’s hire because at the time it was not official, Rhule did speak about why Snow would make sense to join his staff.

Snow would be a helper in a college football landscape that’s becoming more stressful for head coaches. Someone who can act as a guardrail of sorts, keeping ideas in line with the overall philosophy and way of doing things defensively.

Adding someone like Snow is not solely a move to help new Nebraska defensive coordinator and longtime DBs coach John Butler, whose last DC gig came in 2013 at Penn State.

“John’s been a coordinator before, John needs no help, I don’t believe that,” Rhule said.

But in today’s college football, head coaches are being pulled in different directions more than ever. Dealing with agents and NIL, recruiting high school recruits and transfer candidates, re-recruiting the current players on his own roster.

“This job, as a head coach, is a juggernaut,” Rhule said. “There’s way more to do here than I had to do in the NFL.”

That’s why adding a trusted friend and knower of defense, Snow, was so critical.

Rhule is a defensive coach at heart, it’s the side of the ball he got his start on. So when Rhule is off being the CEO of the program — doing the non-football things he must do to be successful — he knows the defense is in good hands.

With Snow on board, Rhule is confident the details will stay a priority. Rhule thought a couple of those details started to slip under former DC Tony White’s leadership in 2024.

“Having someone over there on defense, seeing the big picture, whether it’s portal evaluations or evaluating your own guys, or making sure at the end of the day we’re still doing the old-school fundamentals of running to the ball and tackling,” Rhule said. “I thought our tackling has fallen off this year. I don’t think we played as hard this year running to the ball as maybe we had the year before in some areas.”

And the almost 69-year-old Snow is old school. He leaned on teaching and upholding fundamentals at Temple, Baylor and Carolina.

After a debut season at Carolina in 2020 where the Panthers allowed 360.1 total yards per game to rank 18th in the NFL — the COVID seasons are always hard to judge — Snow was able to make marked improvement in that category in 2021. His defense shot up to second in the NFL allowing 305.9 total yards allowed.

To Rhule, Snow will be an overseer of the defense.

“I have no doubt about John Butler’s ability to game plan and to put us in the best position possible, but it’s kind of those developmental, fundamental principles and building blocks that I want to make sure, as I have a whole new staff on defense, that there’s someone there who believes what I believe,” Rhule said.

With three veteran coaches acting as head coaches for their specific unit — Dana Holgorsen on offense, Butler and Snow on defense — it’ll help take some things off Rhule’s loaded plate.

“I think it frees me up to be as involved as I want to be, or as I can be,” Rhule said. “Because there are some days that I don’t do any football, and I’d say there’s probably more days than not that I don’t do any football.”

Rhule has talked with head coaches from other programs who have offered and are pursuing a Husker player who’s in the portal. Rhule’s been juggling those moments during bowl practices.

Those moments have shown Rhule something about himself.

“When I talk to them about the guy on our team, they haven’t even watched him yet. They’re letting the personnel department do it,” Rhule said. “I don’t ever want to get in that mix. I don’t ever want to not be involved with who’s coming and joining our team.”

In Snow, Rhule has a trusted friend helping him make that third-year jump he made before at Temple and Baylor, the same jump that’s expected at Nebraska.