Tommi Hill’s back at corner, and Nebraska’s Tony White likes what he sees

White saw the personalities of his top safeties and rovers — Myles Farmer, Isaac Gifford, Corey Collier, Omar Brown, DeShon Singleton — start to show in spring camp. Farmer and Gifford are battling to see who starts at rover, White said, and each day a different guy took the lead. They split reps 50/50 for what might be the most important role in the 3-3-5 scheme.

“It was an incredible back-and-forth,” White said. NU’s secondary could be — should be — among the top half of the Big Ten. Maybe even top five. In a league full of great defensive backs, the Huskers could be that good.

NU has 18 scholarship players — 13 of whom are least sophomores — at corner and safety. Outgoing secondary coach Travis Fisher built and left a strong culture, and Evan Cooper is a culture guy, too. Among newcomers, freshman corner Dwight Bootle “really started to come on” late in spring camp, White said. Given the early maturity of Dicaprio Bootle — Dwight’s older brother — that’s hardly a surprise.

This nugget might be: The light’s back on for Tommi Hill, too. Shining bright at corner. White mentions Quinton Newsome and Malcolm Hartzog first — “it’s real easy to forget those guys because they’re such good players” — while adding that Hill isn’t far behind.

“I don’t call Tommi a third corner,” White said. “I call all three of them 1A, 1B and 1C.”

Heck of a rally from Hill, who in 2022 got benched as a starting corner, then moved to wide receiver six games into the season.

The move paved the way for Hartzog, who made a splash and now ranks among the Big Ten’s best young corners, and Brandon Moore, a one-year Central Florida transfer who had a key interception in the Rutgers game. But Hill never did have a catch on offense. He served as the team’s kickoff returner.

White sensed “frustration” — from Hill, from former coaches — over Hill’s inconsistency last season. Though he had four pass deflections, Hill’s body language — especially in the Georgia Southern loss — left something to be desired. Upon arrival, head coach Matt Rhule and White wanted to define the position where Hill would be “all in.”

It’s at corner. Hill was familiar to White from his coaching days at Arizona State, where Hill began his career. White believes Hill can be an NFL defensive back.

“I can only imagine the kind of environment, pressure, everybody was under,” White said of last season. “But he’s got the skills to do it. In terms of us, he’s been maturing like crazy to be a guy I can trust to go back in there and start or put packages in for him.”

Hartzog gets some credit for versatility. Nebraska experimented with putting him at safety this spring and liked the look. There may not be a defensive package that doesn’t include Hartzog. In scenarios where a third corner is required, Hill, coming out of spring, is that guy.

Nebraska needed him to be, too. The Huskers are short on strong corners. Braxton Clark left. Brown is now at safety, and Hill’s ahead of Javier Morton, who has the long, lean frame but hasn’t played much. NU would love Bootle to continue emerging along with, perhaps, one more of the three true freshman corners — Syncere Safeeullah, Ethan Nation and D’Andre Barnes — on the roster.

For now, the 1C is Hill. White likes 1A and 1B a lot, too.

“I never want to forget Malcolm and Q,” White said. “When you’re doing things right, they’re not tested as much. But I don’t think there was enough talk about Malcolm and Q being back there.”

On with the rare mid-week Rewind:

* Dr. Brett Haskell, Nebraska’s director of sport psychology, suggested one thing that can take NU’s athletic performance “through the roof.”

“High-quality sleep,” Haskell said on NU’s in-house podcast. “It is the foundation for all things physical health and all things mental health. It is where our brain recharges and restores. Kind of like plugging your phone in at night. If you don’t charge your phone, then it’s not going to work very well the next day. Sleep is the same thing for your brain, and your brain is what’s controlling all of those other physiological processes that allow someone to get strong and get fast.”

Haskell said Rhule is an “advanced level student” with sports psychology — accepting and proactive. Rhule said on the podcast, he’d previously hired private companies when schools lacked the resources for their own sports psychologists.

Rhule added that he meets with Haskell once a week and, for the sake of the players, tries to model her advice to him.

“The best thing I can do as a coach is make sure I’m firing on all cylinders and I’m optimizing on what I have,” Rhule said. “I’m still working on sleep.”

* One of the pratfalls of the Big Ten’s Saturday night football partnership with NBC — at least in 2023 — is the network controls zero inventory with any other power conference. Thus, on Sept. 9, a Charlotte-at-Maryland game reportedly becomes a national, over-the-air broadcast event.

How? The five best games in the league that weekend all feature Big Ten West teams on the road: Nebraska at Colorado, Iowa at Iowa State, Illinois at Kansas, Purdue at Virginia Tech and Wisconsin at Washington State. NBC can’t air any of those games. The Big Ten East games are summarily awful — Delaware at Penn State, UNLV at Michigan and Youngstown State at Ohio State among them — and it’s possible one or more of those games heads to Big Ten Network, which, you might recall, actually owns the TV inventory.

The Big Ten needs to schedule at least one conference game each week in September just in case NBC needs a product it can sell to viewers.

* It’s a testament to the power of the College World Series that anyone notes or complains about the inevitable southern makeup of the field. The Big Ten has won 16 straight NCAA wrestling titles — with five teams in the 2023 top ten — and you hear no particular call to help out the ACC or Pac-12 in that sport. Hockey is wildly popular in some southern NHL markets — Predators, anyone? — but the SEC isn’t itching to enter the fray.

Baseball is a truly national collegiate sport, though, and the CWS has a much media higher profile than the Frozen Four or NCAA wrestling event. Plus, the CWS is always in the same place, the best place, Omaha.

But the ACC and SEC also do baseball right. (Softball, too.) Big stadiums, big money, big investments. Wake Forest created a pitching lab to get over the hump; it worked.

The Big Ten, in allowing Wisconsin to not even field a team — and simultaneously allowing Notre Dame to caucus with the ACC in all sports but hockey — regards baseball as more of a spring hobby. So the league typically gets hobby results. UCLA and USC’s entry into Big Ten play won’t change that much.