Matt Rhule's new general manager, Pat Stewart, met with the media for the first time since his hire became official March 11.

Stewart comes to Nebraska after spending 18 years in the NFL, most of which came in the New England Patriots organization, where he was a part of two Super Bowl Championship teams. Stewart most recently held the role of New England's director of pro personnel in 2023 and 2024.

As college football gets closer to the revenue sharing era, GMs are becoming more common on staffs as the sport moves to more of an NFL model.

Stewart's role at Nebraska will be to lead the program's roster management and player acquisition, including high school and transfer portal recruiting, evaluation and retention.

Here's a rundown of Stewart's time at the podium.

On Wednesday, federal judge Claudia Wilken said she would deny the $2.8 billion NCAA vs. House settlement if roster limits are not adjusted. The judge suggested a phasing-in period for the cuts in order to protect athletes currently on rosters.

But college programs have already cut players and been operating as if they would need to trim their rosters to 105 by the start of the regular season. Wilken gave the NCAA's lawyers 14 days to make a change to the roster limit issue.

With the settlement now up in the air, Stewart will alter his plans as more information comes out.

"The strategy will be to adjust and do business as it's being done," Stewart said. "Decisions will be made whenever those rulings come down, and whenever they're set to go, they'll be set to go. So, really not too much to add beyond that."

Stewart has only been at Nebraska for month, and he's diving into college football at a unique and difficult time in the sport. At this point, with everything that's happened, nothing comes as much of a surprise anymore.

"It seems to change every day, and like I said, we'll kind of adjust as we keep going," Stewart said. "Whenever rules are final, we'll be ready to go."

When Stewart was Mat Rhule's director of player personnel and vice president of player personnel at Carolina from 2020-22, they had to adjust on the fly during the Covid pandemic. That meant constantly shifting plans to fit an ever-changing NFL rule book. That experience has helped during this current time of uncertainty.

Stewart was last in college football in 2006 when he was the assistant director of football operations on the same Temple staff as Rhule, who was then head coach Al Golden's defensive line coach. In 2005, Stewart was a graduate assistant coach at Western Carolina while Rhule was the assistant head coach as well as linebackers coach and special teams coordinator.

Stewart doesn't think that not being in college football for 18 years puts him at a disadvantage. Not in this new world of college athletics.

"It's one of those things where I don't have a lot of experience in college football right now, but I could have been in the business for 15 years and I'd probably be on the same plane that everybody else is," Stewart said. "Because everything's changing and everything's adjusting to the point of, how have I adjusted to it? Everybody's adjusting to the same things. So it's really not a advantage or a disadvantage at this point."

It will be an ongoing adjustment for Stewart to identify and evaluate high school players after spending so much time and energy doing it through the lens of finding professionals to add to an NFL roster.

To help Stewart with the high school recruiting, Rhule has tabbed current staffers Keith Williams, Troy Vincent, Avery Gossett, Devon Hike and Taylor Richards to lead the charge for now.

"I've been surprised at how good and how developed those guys are at such a young age," Stewart said of the high school talent on Nebraska's high school recruiting board. "A lot of guys on defense playing with their hands at levels I wouldn't expect. Quarterbacks who know how to go through progressions. Receivers who know how to run routes. I've been surprised more on the positive side of things than trying to adjust my eyes to watching a different type of football."

Stewart plans to use what he's learned in his career and work to translate it to the college game, though that will be hard to do until there are set rules from the NCAA.

"We use some different mechanisms that we've used that at those places at this level, and try to correlate to how this structure works," Stewart said. "We worked with a salary cap in the NFL. A salary cap here isn't really the same thing because there's different mechanisms you can use for moving money forward, incentivizing contracts. You really can't do that under this setup, so that'll be a change that I'll have to get used to."

The way Stewart sees it, if someone like him, who's been in the NFL for 18 years, wants to take the next step in their career, there are only 32 of those jobs in the NFL.

But now that the college football landscape has changed to more of an NFL model, complete with front offices, it changed things. Now there are more opportunities for front-office types like Stewart. So when he was presented the opportunity to work for Rhule, an old friend, he couldn't turn it down.

"We see things a lot of the same way, as far as football, what it's about, what kind of players we want, the type of people we want to build the team around," Stewart said.

Stewart said he had talks with different programs in the offseason about a potential move to be a college football GM. He wanted to ask around about what it would be like.

"When I decided that it's going to be something I wanted to do, I decided it's only gonna be with somebody that I know, just because there needs to be that alignment," Stewart said. "Because none of this works at any level if there's not alignment between what the head coach wants and what we give him."

During a press conference this spring, Rhule said he hired Stewart to work for him in the NFL at Carolina in part because Rhule liked the player evaluation/grading system at New England.

It was known as the Patriot Way, or the Patriot System.

"When I went to the NFL as a head coach, what I found was there was really like two different types of grading systems, maybe three," Rhule said. "One special one is the Patriot system, which kind of puts guys based upon their role on the team. I was always fascinated by it. We hired Pat, we tried to implement some components of it. So it's less about how other people see them and more about how you'll use them."

So, what is the Patriot Way? To Stewart, it simply means finding good football players. And he'll use what he learned from New England and Philadelphia and adjust it to fit Nebraska.

Stewart was a national scout for Philadelphia in 2018 and 2019. He was hired by New England as a scouting assistant in 2007 and went on to serve as both an area scout (2009, 2013-17) and pro scout (2010-12) for New England.

Stewart said he attended one Nebraska game during his time as a scout — a game against Oklahoma State. Stewart was in Memorial Stadium that day to watch Ndamukong Suh and Dez Bryant.

"I was fortunate to work in Philadelphia also with Howie Roseman, who had a great influence on me," Stewart said. "So we're gonna take some things from New England, from Philadelphia, and also what they've done here, because they've had a lot of success recruiting and building a team here. You look out there on the field right now. It's a pretty good roster. It's pretty solid roster."

At the end of the day, put the Patriot Way like this, Stewart said: "Finding tough, smart, dependable players that can consistently compete to win championships and perform in pressure situations. So those are the guys that we're looking for."

When he was in the NFL, Stewart learned there was a calculated reason for every draft pick an organization made. There were plans for every player taken, from the first picks all the way down to the the late-round guys and undrafted free agents — "You need all those players to win," Stewart said.

That line of thinking will be part of Stewart's roster construction plans at Nebraska.

"It's filling roles, identifying what guys do and what they're capable of becoming eventually," Stewart said. "But what can they do for us right now? What will they do in the future? That's kind of what we're looking to do."

Finding players who are comfortable operating in those pressure moments is one of the traits Stewart searches for. That's an area Nebraska's program has failed in quite a bit in recent years.

"That's when games are won and lost. You can look at games around the country every week, college and the NFL, and most of them are decided in like a five-play stretch where a decision has to be made, and you have to perform at high speeds and make decisions at a high level," Stewart said. "So it's finding the guys who have had experience doing that, whether it's in high school or whether it's guys from the portal. You can see it on tape. The different people you talk to, the different touch points that you gather along the way to see if they're capable of doing that."

When you don't have the data to determine what to offer or how much to pay a player, it can be difficult to understand how to go about business, Stewart said. Until rules or guidelines are passed, it'll continue being like this.

"We can sit here and say, Oh, NFL salary cap is this, we have this to work with, let's try to make a direct correlation to it," Stewart said. "But it doesn't always work out that way because the ask is going to be always higher and sometimes exponentially higher than what you're valuing that person at, at their position and role."

So finding the right balance of paying a higher amount for one position and understanding how it impacts other positions and players on the roster is important.

"It's a difficult process, and hopefully it's something we get more guidance on in the future, because that makes everything easier for all parties to understand of what they can expect to get and also what we're what we need to budget out to build a team that we want to build," Stewart said.

With the two transfer portal windows being crucial for programs retooling their rosters, Stewart doesn't think it's similar to NFL free agency. He likened it to the NFL preseason instead, where Stewart remembers keeping tabs on other team's players so he knew who to target when the roster-cut day came, where teams went from a 90-man roster down to 53.

"You have to be ready to pivot to whoever becomes available," Stewart said. "So I think it's probably on us to probably do a better job and a better process of knowing who might be available and just having a baseline on everybody so we can pivot as fast as possible."

Part of Stewart's job as GM includes acquiring the talent, retaining the talent and determining the financials for players.

More manpower is needed to help identify the talent Nebraska will recruit through the portal and at the high school level.

"We posted a couple jobs the other day, just for recruiting coordinator jobs, which will be like scouts, for lack of a better term," Stewart said. "So we want to build that out, just to get the manpower up in order to churn out as much information as we can on the players that could be available in high school and in the portal."

What will those scouts be expected to do in Nebraska's program?

"Evaluating tape, watching tape, identifying strengths weaknesses and applying a grade to what you think that player's role can eventually be for our team," Stewart said.

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