Nebraska
Report: Matt Rhule reuniting with longtime assistant coach Phil Snow
Report: Matt Rhule reuniting with longtime assistant coach Phil Snow
Phil Snow is back in the fold and will reunite with Nebraska football coach Matt Rhule on a full-time basis, per a report from Pete Thamel.
Snow will be reportedly joining Rhule’s staff as the Huskers’ associate head coach. It will be a reunion of two longtime coaching partners who are very familiar with each other.
Snow has been a full-time assistant on Rhule’s coaching staffs for 10 of the 12 years he has been a coach. Snow was the defensive coordinator for all 10 seasons of Rhule’s tenures as the coach of Temple (four seasons, 2013-16), Baylor (three seasons, 2017-19) and in the NFL with the Carolina Panthers (three seasons, 2020-22). He also served as Temple’s safeties coach all four of those years and Baylor’s safeties coach for one season (2019).
Snow was one of five finalists in 2019 for the Broyles Award, given annually to the top assistant in college football. He was also a semifinalist for the Broyles Award in 2014 and 2015 as Temple DC and safeties coach.
Sources told Inside Nebraska at the time that Rhule attempted to hire Snow as his defensive coordinator once again when he took the Nebraska head coaching job in November 2022. Snow, though, declined and elected to retire from coaching – or, at least, retire from any full-time on-field coaching role.
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Rhule, however, was able to add Snow as a defensive consultant for the Huskers during the 2024 season. The news of Snow’s addition in a consultant role trickled out in early November, and Rhule revealed one week later that Snow was performing those duties off-site away from the Huskers’ facilities.
“Phil doesn’t even come up here,” Rhule said on Nov. 11. “Phil does everything virtually for us. He watches tape, we have a couple guys that do things like that for us. When we were playing Colorado, he’d watch Colorado’s defense, dissect the defense for us, watch the offense, dissect the offense for us. Frank Verducci does the same thing for us, though he does come up on game days.
“We have a couple guys that help us, like in the NFL as advanced scouts, just sort of their take to give to the coordinator on Sundays. So when you walk in on Sunday, you already have someone who studied them for a week who knows your way of seeing things and the other team’s strengths and weaknesses.”
The addition of Snow in an off-the-field role as a defensive consultant was similar to his addition of Dana Holgorsen on the other side of the ball. Rhule initially hired Holgorsen as an offensive consultant and, ultimately, as the full-time offensive coordinator.
“Last week (the week after Nebraska’s loss to UCLA), I woke up Sunday morning, went through Sunday, and then got home and called both those guys and said, ‘Can you get up here at some point,’ then waited to see if they showed up on Monday or not,” Rhule said during that same Nov. 11 press conference. “… (Holgorsen) got done last year (as Houston head coach) and probably needed some time. And I called him (after the loss to UCLA) and said, ‘Hey, can you come in and help?’ So he and Phil came in and kind of looked through everything.
“… Just being out on the field, it looks like it’s flowing really well and moving really smoothly (the change from Marcus Satterfield to Holgorsen as OC). That was the take from Phil. He came in and said – and I trust Phil with my life – that I have a really good group of kids, you have a good defensive staff. It’s just some of these games, it’s a play here, a play there. You’re knocking the quarterback out of bounds on 3rd-and-8 when you need to come around and sack-fumble the ball. It’s just little edges here and there that we’re fighting for.”
Matt Rhule offseason staff changes
It is unclear how much Snow will be involved in Rhule’s defense this time around, but his background and impending hire both suggest he will be involved in some capacity. No matter the role, the pair will be reunited in a full-time capacity for 11 of 13 seasons during Rhule’s tenure as a head coach and at all four of Rhule’s head-coaching stops.
Though Snow’s hiring has not been officially announced by Rhule or Nebraska, the news is imminent as Rhule continues to give a significant facelift to his coaching staff entering Year 3.
The Nebraska head man is doing so amid a pair of significant departures (former defensive coordinator Tony White and former DL coach Terrance Knighton both leaving for those same positions at Florida State), another full-time assistant heading elsewhere (former WR coach Garret McGuire not being retained and heading to Texas Tech to join his father’s staff, Joey McGuire, as an offensive analyst and assistant RBs coach) and at least one other major demotion (former offensive coordinator/TEs coach Marcus Satterfield remaining with the Huskers to coach the tight ends but losing his OC job and his duties as a playcaller).
Rhule already brought in Holgorsen as a “corporate fixer” of sorts, hiring Holgorsen first as an offensive consultant during the Huskers’ second bye week after a 5-1 start and subsequent three-game losing streak left them at 5-4. Then, he announced the official change during USC Week that Holgorsen was replacing Satterfield.
This offseason, Holgorsen coaxed longtime assistant Daikiel Shorts, Holgorsen’s former three-year leading receiver as West Virginia head coach, to leave his one-year post as Kentucky’s WRs coach to take the same position at Nebraska.
Also, in addition to the Tuesday news of Snow’s impending hire, two more staff hires were revealed.
First, Nebraska secondary coach and pass game coordinator John Butler was elevated to full-time defensive coordinator to replace White.
Then, Kansas City Chiefs eight-year assistant Terry Bradden – who helped the Chiefs win three Super Bowl championships as a defensive assistant (2017), defensive quality control coach (2018-20) and assistant defensive line coach (2021-24) with Kansas City – was hired as the Huskers’ DL coach to replace Knighton.
Matt Rhule’s Year 3 Nebraska coaching staff
Below is a look at Rhule’s coaching staff heading into Year 3 at Nebraska compared to his staff in Years 1-2 during the 2023 and 2024 seasons.
College head coaches are only permitted to have 10 full-time, on-field assistant coaches on their staffs. There are 13 full-time assistants listed on the table. Therefore, the coaching staff listed is not finalized and will not be set in stone, as there will have to be more changes made, whether that be via more departures, consolidation with one assistant absorbing multiple position groups or other moves.
Matt Rhule’s Year 3 Nebraska Coaching Staff*
*as of Dec. 10, 2024 ^new position on Year 3 coaching staff
Emma Bullerman is spending her summer riding around in fields with her dad, and she’s thrilled about it. It’s not just for fun, either — she’s interning for the Prairie Plains Resource Institute and working alongside her father to conserve Nebraska grasslands.
“Prairie Plains has literally been in my life since I was born. I guess you could say I’m a bit of a grasslands nepo baby,” Bullerman said. “My dad is the restoration director, so even as a kid I would be out helping him in the field.”
Today, Emma is taking a more active role in aiding her dad’s work to restore native prairies.
“A lot of my summer will be in the truck with him driving across Nebraska to collect the native grassland seeds that we put into our restoration sites,” she said. “Basically, I’m just learning the ropes of everything that goes into grassland restoration.”
As a teen, Bullerman thought she wanted to do anything but follow her dad’s footsteps. Eventually, a few stalled paths helped her rediscover her love for her hometown.
“In high school and coming into college, I really thought I wanted to leave Nebraska and do something totally different from my dad,” she said. “I tried a few other directions, but pretty quickly could tell that I wasn’t passionate about them. I took a semester off, and then my boss at Prairie Plains reached out about helping with social media.”
It didn’t take long for Bullerman to catch the bug for conservation work and switch her major to fisheries and wildlife, the same degree program her father graduated from in 1995. In fact, she is a fourth-generation Husker with strong ties to ag and food science. Her grandfather is Dr. Lloyd Bullerman, a former a professor of food science, microbiology and food safety at the university, and her aunt studied food science at NU as well.
Getting back to Prairie Plains in her early college years helped Bullerman realize that she, too, had a calling toward this field.
“Being out in the field with my dad one day, I had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been looking for. This is what I want to do.’ Finding my way back has been really, really beautiful.”
Working with her dad, she’s is feeling better than ever about her direction, her hometown and her future in Nebraska.
“Doing this work and studying at UNL has given me a whole new perspective on the state,” she said. “I used to be someone who was like, ‘I want to get out of here after I graduate.’ Restoring prairies and traveling all over Nebraska has helped me see that it’s so beautiful here, I just didn’t take the time to see it before.”
The future of data centers in Nebraska took center stage at a North Omaha town hall Thursday evening.
The event was hosted by State Sens. Terrell McKinney and Ashlei Spivey, who alongside Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh sponsored a bill in the Nebraska Legislature that looked to help regulate data centers.
Parts of their bill were adopted and passed in LB1010, which requires reports on annual power usage, water usage and ownership.
“Having this passed in a package showed a lot of bipartisan work,” Spivey told a crowd of attendees at Nelson Mandela Elementary School.
The proposed regulations were shaped in part by Bold Nebraska, an advocacy group focused on eminent domain and clean energy. Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and founder of Bold Nebraska, said before the bill passed there were “zero laws on the books” to address a boom in data centers.
“If one is coming into the community, we wanted to make sure that there were some basic transparency things in place,” Kleeb said.
Political discussions around data centers heated up in recent months following reporting by the Flatwater Free Press that showed Google is considering a data center in Nebraska that could require more than three times the amount of power the entire city of Lincoln uses at peak demand in the summer.
The Nebraska Legislature recently passed another bill, LB1261, that allows private developers to build and own power plants to serve a large industrial customer, including data centers. That bill was proposed by the governor’s office and celebrated by Gov. Jim Pillen.
“Our state is once again taking a bold and strategic step – one that will create an environment that attracts business and multibillion dollar investment, while legally preserving Nebraska’s unique and consumer-friendly public power model,” Pillen said at the time.
At Thursday’s town hall, McKinney called LB1261 “the bogeyman bill.”
“It’s a bill that the governor pushed through the legislature to allow for data centers to create their own power,” McKinney said. “It’s a bill that I stood on the floor and said this is going to harm our communities.”
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Hundreds of people are without power in southeast Nebraska after a severe storm passed through Thursday morning.
The Lincoln Electric System outage map showed 115 customers without power across the city at 11:36 a.m.
Norris Public Power District’s outage map also shows 45 customers affected by the storm. As of 11:36 a.m., there were nine active outages.
According to the Nebraska Public Power District outage map, 657 customers were affected by the storm. Most of the affected customers were near Plattsmouth in southeast Nebraska. As of 11:37 a.m., 27 customers remain without power.
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