Everything Matt Rhule said in pre-Illinois presser: Lenhardt, Doss are back

Nebraska football coach Matt Rhule met with the media on Wednesday for his weekly lightning round press conference, which was pushed up by a day due to the short week.

Rhule spoke for a little more than nine minutes, giving his final updates ahead of the Huskers' Week 6 matchup at Illinois on Friday night.

Here's everything Rhule said with full press conference video included at the bottom and on the Inside Nebraska YouTube channel.

Not a member of Inside Nebraska? Subscribe today at less than $10 for a monthly subscription to unlock all of our premium articles and message boards ON OUR SIGNUP PAGE

"It’s kind of weird doing this because it’s only Wednesday, we haven’t even practiced yet, some things injury-wise I don’t have great answers for you, but I’ll do my best.”

“Cam Lenhardt will play.”

“(Practices) have been great. We’ve really practiced, they’ve shown up and they’ve been energized and ready to go. We practice tonight, we walked on Monday and I thought that was very focused. We practiced yesterday, thought it was probably one of our better practices. So we’ll see how the night goes and tomorrow morning, but they’ve responded so far.”

“I know Susan (Elza) talked to (Illinois’ administrators) last night, and they said it’s not as big of a deal as it sounded like. I was hoping we could play here. But I’m glad everything’s OK there.”

“Princewill is an excellent football player. His growth right now has been really good. In the midst of, when you look at it from 500 feet you’re like ‘Oh, man. We don’t really have the results we want.’ But when you look at it on a more granular, micro level you have guys like Princewill that are really developing and getting better. Riley Van Poppel played in that game last week (against Michigan) and wasn’t knocked back, wasn’t in any way outclassed. I think we have some young players that are gonna be really, really good players, and Princewill’s one of them. He’s versatile, he’s explosive, he’ll continue to find roles for us.”

Freshmen wide receivers:

“Our young receivers are gonna be good. I know everyone’s like, ‘Well how come you can’t get them to play right now?’ It’s tough. But they’re really talented, they’re gonna be really good, and I think they’re gonna start to help. I expect Jaidyn (Doss) to play this week, finally."

Freshmen defensive linemen:

"Our young D-line, Ty Robinson was in there with me yesterday. We were talking, and he was talking about our process, the way we do things, practicing on Sunday, practicing on Wednesday. And he was just saying how good he thought our young D-line would be (after) going through this for two or three years, as hard as it is, with this type of schedule and standards and how talented those guys are. Those guys are talented. We haven’t seen all of them yet. You’ve seen Riley, you’ve seen Sua a little bit, Vincent Carroll-Jackson will probably travel for us this week. There are a lot of guys in those rooms that I think are outstanding prospects.”

“Coach Andy Reid, when I was at Temple he was in Philadelphia. I know his family really well and Coach would always say to his team, which would then matriculate to me, all great teams do three things: They eliminate distractions, they create their own energy, they fear nothing and attack everything. Creating our own energy, that’s what we try to do at practice. We simulate that. Even going out against La Tech in the rain delay, you’re trying to create your own energy. When you’re having a tough ball game like last week, you have to try to create your own energy. Some guys did, some guys didn’t (against Michigan). We created a lot of energy on Sunday night when no one was watching. We created a lot of energy yesterday morning. We’ll have to do that Friday night. It’ll be great to be on the road. I haven’t been to Illinois since I was a player, I’m sure they’ll have an excellent atmosphere. But on the road, together, it’s all of us just kind of huddled on the sideline."

"That’s one of the growth (areas) for our team in terms of that winning mindset of, let’s say, they take the opening kickoff back for a touchdown? What happens then? What happens if you’re down by 14? Where’s your energy at then? To me, some guys are really starting to step up and say ‘Hey, I can be that guy.’ Right now, it’s the coaches. I’m not equipped to do that. So can it be Tommi Hill? Can it be Isaac Gifford? Can it be Ty Robinson? Can it be Ethan Piper? Can it be Heinrich, Jeff or Billy Kemp? Who are gonna be those guys for us? That’s part of this process, so this’ll be a real challenge for us Friday night in all those areas.”

“He’s an excellent, excellent, excellent football player. (Future) high draft pick, powerful, two-gap, makes plays down the line, can torque you in the pass-rush game. He’s an excellent football player, so he’s one of those guys you have to game plan around. You have to do things that account for him while also understanding, at the same time, they have other guys that can hurt you."

“Their scheme, because they play with five-down linemen basically 90 percent of the time, creates five one-on-ones, so you have to win five blocks and they have to just win one pass rush or one run block to have a successful play. So it’s a real challenge.”

“I'll wait to talk more about that next week. ... We’ll get some recruiting done next week. In terms of what exactly the schedule is, they have a general idea, but I’ve also let them know ‘Hey, let’s to play, let’s worry about Friday night first.’ They’ll get some time next week to go be with their families, we’ll recruit, but we have to get better as a team regardless of what the result is (against Illinois). We’ll continue to get better, there’s a lot of football left. This team’s development has probably been hurt, in some ways, by not going to a bowl game because bowl games are so vital. Well, bye weeks are vital, so you can’t waste bye weeks and you can’t waste bowl games because it’s extra practice for all those young players. So we’ll get a lot of work done next week.”

“If it’s true, they’d probably be scared to say that to me. When I was at the University of Buffalo, I was 24 years old and I was the youngest Division One full-time defensive coach in the country. We got fired with three games left. I remember my dad saying, ‘How you coach these next three weeks is who you are as a coach. If you coach less, you’re no good. And if you coach harder now because you wanna win and you wanna keep your job, then you weren’t coaching hard enough to begin with."

“We’re just trying to get these guys to be the same guy every day. I think coming off of last week’s game, the challenge and the opportunity on Friday night and the way we’ve worked this week, guys are hopefully just locked in on tonight’s practice, tomorrow morning and then getting up there and playing a good game.”

“It’s partially a class schedule thing to give them some opportunities. There’s different majors and different classes. Like, we had guys this morning in accounting, engineering and construction engineering, so part of it’s the class schedule. Part of it is because, since we’re a Friday practice team, there’s 36 hours between Tuesday and Wednesday’s practices and Friday. So we can practice hard on Tuesday, then practice hard on Wednesday, and we can lift."

"All the guys came in and lifted this morning, so they practiced Tuesday, meet Tuesday night to close up what happened on Tuesday, a lot of guys if they’re good players and they’re good at the process, they do some film study. They come in Wednesday to lift, a lot of guys do some extra stuff, but they still have a little more time to recover so we can work really hard on Wednesday but they’re not still beat up from Tuesday. It’s a little bit of that, a little bit because of class, and then we come in Thursday morning. So they turn right around after Wednesday night and do a walk-through Thursday morning, and usually we practice on Fridays. This week, obviously we can’t.”