As youth basketball noises carried on in the background, new DC Aurich blew away Rhule in their talk

The tape spoke to Matt Rhule.

He pressed play and watched Rob Aurich’s defenses. Nebraska’s head coach fell in love with what he saw.

“The biggest thing with Rob, it was purely the tape,” Rhule said. “When I watched the tape it’s the play style that I want. You just see people flying around. You see people playing at a really high level.”

And then there was the way Rob Aurich was able to speak to him even as the noise of three youth basketball games played out in the background.

A non-traditional interview while Aurich was in town on Saturday? For sure.

Aurich sat down with Husker associate head coach Phil Snow for an hour and met with him. OK, that was normal enough. Then the coach toured the building before going over with Rhule and his son to Firethorn where they looked at the neighborhood and had lunch. Not that unusual.

“And then he watched three youth basketball games with me. No PowerPoint, no chalkboard, he had to just talk football with me with the chaos of a basketball gym and all that,” Rhule said.

Rhule’s daughters were playing hoops in the background. The coaches kept talking ball no matter what background shouts were in the gym. Perhaps it was the perfect venue for an interview, honestly.

“To me that’s a lot of what this job is like. Anybody can prepare, anybody can present, but who can think fast?” Rhule said. “I was just honestly blown away.”

Rhule canceled a couple interviews he had remaining.

And on Sunday afternoon news broke about a Husker defensive coordinator hire not a lot saw coming. Unless maybe you were one of the parents in a Lincoln gym on Saturday.

Certainly there were other candidates, though not all the names are clear. Nebraska was believed to be one of the programs who took a look at Toledo’s Vince Kehres. A source told Husker247 a face-to-face interview with him happened early in the week.

Makes sense. Both Aurich and Kehres had defenses among the best in the country statistically in 2025.

After Aurich’s visit Saturday, Rhule seemed to pretty well know the direction he wanted to go. He checked with a few more references and they backed up what he was thinking.

Rhule talked with Jason Eck at New Mexico, Matt Entz at Fresno State and Sean Lewis at San Diego State. All confirmed he had the goods.

“The most respected people I know said, ‘You absolutely need to hire this guy,'” Rhule said. “I think it was his personality but as much as anything else it was the tape.”

Tape that showed defenses taking big leaps in their first year under Aurich’s guidance too.

That’s what happened in 2025, as San Diego State took a fast elevator ride up the defensive rankings after the coach was hired to lead that unit in December of last year.

At the podium on Tuesday, Nebraska’s head coach ran through some of the accomplishments of the Aztecs: SDSU led the nation in shutouts with three and held teams to 10 or less points eight times. The unit was top 10 in ten different categories, including scoring defense, total defense and pass defense.

Now Aurich begins his first job as a power conference defensive coordinator. Snow will coach the Husker defense in the bowl game but the new leader of the Blackshirts will be around to get to know the players as preparation occurs this December.

One of those players is cornerback Andrew Marshall, who was a freshman at Idaho when Aurich was coaching there. You bet Rhule ran the coach’s name by the respected defensive back too.

“He said to hire him,” Rhule said. “I said, ‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘Coach, I think he’d be a great fit…’ To me, when a player says something good about a coach, it’s like, ‘Alright the guy must be a really good coach.”‘