Nebraska head coach Matt Rhule spoke to members of the media after Wednesday’s practice. He talked about adjusting to decisions during the game and maintaining energy for Friday night’s game.

“One thing we try to teach the players is that you prepare during 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 that. When you get to the game, you see how they play and you try to adjust. We still have a lot of work to do, but the guys have been working hard so far. We’re just trying to keep building momentum going into the game on Friday night.”

Rhule said he was able to get a lot of players involved in the attack.

“We’ve been throwing a lot of drop-backs,” he said. “So when you’re throwing drop-backs, it’s progression one, two, three. You can hit players by calling screens and stuff like that, which is what we’re doing. Let’s get the ball to this player, get the ball to that player. Last game we came out, we had a lot of tempo drop-backs. Dylan’s pretty good at that. When you throw 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 to have, 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 got open, the ball came to them. Dylan’s not afraid to work through all the progressions. He’s hit the fifth progression a couple times, which is great to see.”

He also discussed how many times each running back would be allowed to carry the ball.

“Every game is different,” he said. “Last game, I didn’t see the need to give Dante (Dowdell) a bunch of carries with a short week, or our staff didn’t, and that’s pretty high-level thinking by those guys. This game is different. Like I said, I’d like to have one guy in the low 20s, one guy in the 15s. We don’t run the quarterback, so you run with a couple other guys, and obviously you’ve got 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 have an elite pass defense. They just have an elite defense. Every game is a little bit different, we’ll see what we have to do in each game to win.”

NU takes on Illinois Fighting Illini on Friday, September 20 at 7:00 p.m. (CT) at Memorial Stadium. The game will be televised on FOX, with coverage provided by the Huskers Radio Network.