Eddie George didn’t leave Lincoln sounding bitter after Nebraska rolled Bowling Green on Saturday night. He left sounding inspired.
The Bowling Green coach said Matt Rhule is the kind of program builder he wants to study and eventually emulate, pointing to the Nebraska head coach’s track record of turning teams around with toughness, fundamentals and a trench-first mentality.
“Matt's somebody that I've known for a couple of years, some of the same people,” George told the media during his post-game press conference. “I've watched his teams throughout the years, certainly when I was calling games at Westwood One, when I was doing color commentating.”
George said Rhule’s work at Temple stood out to him in particular.
“At Temple, how he turned that program around through toughness, through building in the trenches... So he comes cut from that cloth of old-school coaching, teaching the fundamentals, teaching toughness and physicality. And that's something that I aspire for my teams to look like one day - to look like that.”
The praise didn’t stop there. George said he wants to compare notes with Rhule and dig into how Nebraska is being built.
"I'm going to call him tomorrow and say, 'Hey, what did you see? How can we get better?
What do you do? How do you do this?'"
That kind of respect doesn’t usually come from a coach whose team just absorbed a 49-point loss. But George’s comments say plenty about where he sees Bowling Green going and what he understands about the job in front of him.
This is a coach in only his second season in the MAC, and he didn’t come up the traditional way. George was hired straight into the head job without serving as an assistant first. Before Bowling Green, he spent four years at Tennessee State at the FCS level, where he helped lift the program from back-to-back losing seasons to 6-5 in 2023 and then 9-4 with a playoff appearance in 2024.
Bowling Green brought him in in 2025. His first season ended 4-8, and the Falcons are 0-2 in his second.
Still, George appears to understand the grind. He knows building a program takes time, and he knows the kind of coach he’s looking at in Rhule. Nebraska hired Rhule for exactly that reason, and even if Year 3 in Lincoln didn’t match what he did at Baylor or Temple, George clearly sees a blueprint worth borrowing.
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