The Weekly Rundown: Matt Rhule and Nebraska made a quick pivot and Kevin Warren left the Big Ten in a bind
Matt Rhule and Nebraska made a quick pivot this week with their 2024 quarterback recruiting.
We hit on that and more as we start your Monday with The Weekly Rundown Column.
Sure bets
You have to feel good about these things right now:
Nebraska’s quick 2024 QB pivot: When Dylan Raiola announced his commitment to Georgia on Monday, Nebraska’s window to find an adequate quarterback for the class of 2024 was small.
Give Matt Rhule and his coaching staff a lot of credit. The second Raiola went public with his commitment to UGA offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield and special teams coordinator Ed Foley were in the parking lot of Bellevue West to see Daniel Kaelin.
Missouri has every right to be upset with how it all played out, but you can’t be mad at a kid for following his dream. Kaelin wanted to be a Husker for most of his life. That opportunity did not become available until this past week. He only picked Mizzou over the Huskers because he didn’t have a committable offer until things played out with Raiola.
Rhule was very honest with Kaelin and Thunderbird head coach Mike Huffman. He said the second things freed up with Raiola, they would be on him. Rhule stayed true to his word and quickly won over Kaelin. Rhule was in a tough position with Raiola, as they had to let things play out. If the No. 1 quarterback in the country has an interest in Nebraska, you can’t close the door because his timeline took too long. It was a huge role of the dice to wait out Raiola, but ultimately it worked out in the end.
Kevin Warren’s time will not be remembered in a positive light: It’s well documented the issues that happened in the Big Ten during COVID-19 under Kevin Warren’s watch. Warren released schedules to play in September, only to pull the plug on the 2020 season a week later and said the decision would “not be revisited.” When the league soon realized every other major conference was playing football in 2020, Warren and the Big Ten scrambled to put together a choppy nine-week season that played into late December – what ended up being the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The oringal 10-game schedule would’ve been played over one of the quieter times of the initial COVID outbreak in September and October with plenty of flexibility to make games up.
It was a time in our life most of us want to forget. The league even instituted some of the strictest COVID testing guidelines in the world, forcing players to test daily and sticking the school with seven-figure bills to pay for it out of their league payouts. Say what you want. 2020 was a disaster for Warren the Big Ten. If not for schools like Ohio State and Nebraska being so vocal against the league, who knows where things might have ended up?
On Sunday, we learned more about Warren. ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported Warren may have left the league’s billion-dollar multimedia deal in disarray. Key things were agreed to by Warren and the Big Ten to NBC that went against FOX’s contract. He also went against a long-standing league agreement of not playing November night games past the first weekend to sign on NBC. The problem is none of the teams NBC wants like Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State for those night games, knew anything about the new agreement.
Warren was even given a bonus for his time at the Big Ten, and Thamel reported that it’s now being looked into if it should’ve been paid out. Warren’s mistakes could cost the league $70 million, or $5 million per school.
The other interesting thing Thamel uncovered talking to other Big Ten coaches is the lack of communication on future decisions. This aligns with what multiple Nebraska football program sources said during 2020. Often the football staff got their information at the same time the media did. That is not a good look leaving your top football and basketball coaches in the dark about decisions that directly impact them and their programs.
Daniel Kaelin gives the 2024 recruiting class a leader to build with: Nebraska has a big name to build things around with Kaelin now officially a part of the class.
Kaelin is widely known in the seven-on-seven circles around the country and can be one of the leaders of Rhule’s first full recruiting class. This was missing in the 2024 class until this week.
Omaha Westside and Bellevue West collision course: When Bellevue West takes on Omaha Westside on Sept. 8, you can argue there will be possibly 10 or more future Power Five players on the field for the classes of 2024, 2025 and 2026.
There’s no question these will be the two top-ranked teams heading into the season, with the Warriors getting the nod at No. 1 as the defending state champions. You’ll be hard-pressed to find many other high school football games in Nebraska with his much Division I talent on the field at once.
Kaelin will also enter the season as the first in-state high school QB committed to Nebraska since Heinrich Haarberg in 2021. Before that, Papillion La Vista’s Allan Evridge was committed to the Huskers in 2003, eventually de-committing and switching to Kansas State for the class of 2004. Millard North’s Mike McGlaughlin signed with the Big Red in 2001, and he never played quarterback for NU.
Surprises
These were my surprises of the week:
Jaylen Llyod running a time of 10.47: Did Omaha Westside’s Jaylen Lloyd’s state track meet performance do enough to lock up the state high school athlete of the year awards from Nebraska’s two major newspapers?
Lloyd captured both the Warriors’ long jump and triple jump titles and ran 10.47 seconds out of lane eight to finish second in the 100-meter dash. His previous PR this year in the 100 was 10.76 seconds. That tells you how careful Lloyd was with his recovery. He did not turn it up until it mattered.
Stephon Wynn to Ole Miss: I’m not necessarily surprised defensive lineman Stephon Wynn Jr. ended up at Ole Miss, but it again tells you the value of players like this in the portal.
Wynn Jr., by all metrics last season, was a snap body in Nebraska’s defense, and he was paid handsomely to do that. When the Huskers lost Casey Rogers and Jordon Riley to the transfer portal, they scrambled quickly to get Wynn Jr. and Devin Drew a year ago.
Ole Miss looks to be in a similar spot. Many teams need a guy that can give you 15 to 25 snaps a game on the defensive line, and that will make their value in the May portal very high on the NIL market.
The jury is still out
Questions still surround these things:
Big Ten schedules: We could find out the future formatting of the Big Ten schedules as early as this week. The early word is no divisions with a flex model for protected rivalries. If that’s the case, Iowa might be Nebraska’s only true protected game. Whereas Iowa might have protected games with NU, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
TE Carter Nelson’s timeline: What will Ainsworth tight end Carter Nelson’s recruiting timeline be? On Friday, he confirmed to HuskerOnline that he’d visit Nebraska on June 23. He’ll be at Georgia on June 2 and Notre Dame on June 9.
The question is, how much deeper will Nelson go past that? He is not an early enrollee, so he doesn’t necessarily have to get things figured out in a hurry. Nelson also just accepted an invitation to the All-American Bowl in San Antonio.
If you are Nebraska, the ideal timeline is getting him locked up after the June 23 weekend. If he takes things deeper into the summer, you know the Huskers are in for a fight, and their odds probably go down.
Nebraska crowds at the Big Ten baseball tournament: What will the crowds be like this weekend in Omaha for the Big Ten Baseball tournament?
This is Nebraska’s first time in the event since 2019. It sounds worse than it is. In 2020 and 2021, there was no Big Ten tournament. However, NU failed to qualify in both 2018 and 2022. A lot of the crowds will be dictated on winning. If the Huskers win the first game on Wednesday, big crowds should come out, especially if NU can make it to Saturday.
This has my attention
Moving forward, this has my attention:
WRs Dae’vonn Hall and Isaiah McMorris: Nebraska got the first piece of the puzzle at Bellevue West, landing a commitment from Kaelin.
He confirmed that he plans to take his NU official visit on the June 23 weekend with his teammates’ wide receivers Dae’vonn Hall and Isaiah McMorris.
What we don’t know is can the Huskers take commits from both. What are their wide receiver numbers in the class of 2024, and where do Hall and McMorris stack up on their board to the other players they are in on? We know Burley (Idaho) wide receiver Gatlin Bair is the top name they are on, but he won’t play college football until the 2026 season after he completes his LDS Mission.
QB Dylan Raiola: Nebraska’s 2024 quarterback recruiting has been about Kaelin and Raiola since the summer of 2021. Both players were at NU on the same day. Kaelin already had his offer, and then Raiola showed up, wowed everyone, and quickly earned his offer. He was the JV quarterback a year before at Burleson HS in Texas.
From then on, Kaelin was slotted behind the eventual five-star Raiola by the previous NU staff. It will be interesting to see how things play out with Raiola in his career at Georgia. The Elite 11 Camp in California will be the first time seeing him at a big showcase like that with all the other top QBs in the country.
I’ll be curious to watch how Raiola’s relationship with some of the recruits he met in Lincoln will play out in the coming months.
Penn State at Michigan State on Black Friday: Another thing Thamel uncovered in his report is that Penn State will play at Michigan State on Black Friday. It appears this will be a night game on NBC. That means Iowa vs. Nebraska will be on CBS, FOX, FS1, or BTN in the afternoon.
We are still waiting on the early kick times to be released for the Huskers. This is usually the time of year when we find out. Last year we learned about seven of the Huskers’ kickoffs on May 26.
Putting a wrap on spring recruiting: This will be the final full week for Nebraska’s staff on the road, by all accounts. Rhue and his staff have maximized their 168 days out, around 17 per full-time assistant coach.
The next recruiting phase will be getting a jump on 2025 and 2026 by getting top names to Lincoln for camps. The beginning portion of June will focus on camps, whereas in the back end, you will see a bigger focus on official visits.
Sean Callahan can be reached at sean@huskeronline.com and can be heard daily at 6:45 am and 5:05 pm on Big Red Radio 1110 KFAB in Omaha during the football season. He can also be seen on KETV Channel 7 in Omaha during the fall and each week appears on Nebraska Public Media’s Big Red Wrap-Up Tuesdays at 7 pm.
The post The Weekly Rundown: Matt Rhule and Nebraska made a quick pivot and Kevin Warren left the Big Ten in a bind appeared first on On3.
