Rarely do we see a head coach with the chutzpah to come out and say, “Hey man, we stink. Pardon our mess.”

Although for whatever reason, coaches who go that route have a tendency to end up at Nebraska. For example:

Matt Rhule joined that club this week when discussing Nebraska’s 0-2 start, though the overall message was a tad more optimistic than that old Bill Callahan tirade.

“This is kind of what you get when you hire me,” Rhule admitted.

Which sounds like a bit of a self-own on the surface. But let him finish.

“It’s not going to be a quick fix; it’s not going to be overnight. We believe it’s gonna be built to last, it’s going to be built on rock, so we take advantage of these painful, painful moments. Our goal is to say in 3 years we did our best coaching these weeks.”

Rhule is correct. That’s exactly how the process has worked out for him in the past.

Temple went 2-10 in Rhule’s first season. The Owls were a 10-win team in Year 3.

He took over a scandal-plagued Baylor program and finished 1-11 in Year 1. The Bears reached the Big 12 championship game and finished 11-3 in his third and final season there.

But there’s a key difference between life at Temple and Baylor and life at Nebraska. There are more combined teeth on the Philadelphia Flyers’ roster than there are fans at a Temple football game. Nobody gives a hoot about the Owls.

Build a winner and they’ll come. But losing is the expectation. The process of building a winner is done in the shadows.

At Baylor, Rhule wasn’t expected to build a winner in 3 years. His rather modest expectation was “please, please, please don’t embarrass us.”

Rhule accomplished the impressive feat of doing both. But again, he had plenty of leeway in crafting a winning team. Baylor fans don’t expect a winner. They’re just looking for a communal place to run out on the field before games and drink Dr Pepper for 3 hours every Saturday.

Nebraska is a much different beast than either of those schools. There is no rebuilding a roster in the shadows. Every move is made in the spotlight.

Now that they’ve seen how ugly the process can be, will Huskers fans have the patience to see it through?

The tough answer: they better, because they don’t really have a choice.

This is the Rhule you live by

Very few, if any, first-year coaches have walked into a worse scheduling arrangement than Rhule at Nebraska.

Here we are, 2 weeks into the season, and he’s coaching a Power 5 team that hasn’t even played a home game yet. But it has played 2 games against Power 5 opponents.

Teams that have played 2 road games at Power 5 opponents in 2023: Middle Tennessee, Kent State and Nebraska. That’s it. And 1 of Kent State’s games was at Central Florida, which just joined the Big 12 this season.

All 3 of those teams are 0-2, as you might expect.

Rhule’s second lousy break?

Colorado was 1 of those opponents, and it is there that Deion Sanders is revolutionizing the concept of how quickly you can flip a roster.

Rhule is like a very successful Blockbuster Video manager who was just promoted to regional manager — the year Netflix started. The game is changing. And after seeing the Buffaloes pound the Huskers, many Nebraska fans probably lost the appetite for a lengthy rebuild.

But this is the way it’s got to be. Colorado is not the norm, nor should another coach feel compelled to replicate that approach with Sanders’ combination of steak and sizzle. This is a very unique scenario.

Furthermore, 2 games tell us nothing about the long-term sustainability of Sanders’ approach. Heck, we don’t even know much about the short-term sustainability yet. Colorado torched what is likely a weak TCU defense and took advantage of Nebraska’s parade of self-inflicted offensive errors.

Coach Prime may run into speed bumps of his own before this season is done. But he appears light years ahead of Rhule at the moment, and that adds to the collective frustration of Nebraska fandom.

The best thing for Huskers fans to do is to keep the focus on what Nebraska is doing rather than make any comparisons. Even if it’s incremental, the Huskers are making progress.

Despite the strength of schedule, the defense is second in the B1G with 16 tackles for loss and second against the run with only 56.5 yards per game allowed on the ground. That’s a pretty good model for survival in the Big Ten West, although that particular trait won’t matter quite as much a year from now.

In theory, the offense can only get better from here. Or at least it can’t get worse, mathematically speaking.

The Huskers are last in the country in turnover margin (minus-6) and tied for last with 8 turnovers. That can’t last forever. Although from the looks of it, there probably isn’t a quick fix either.

The turnovers and schedule have combined to give a warped view of how Nebraska is progressing in Rhule’s first month. Chances are this team is further along than his Temple or Baylor models. It just doesn’t have the results to show for it.

And as difficult as it is to swallow, those results might not come at all this year. Don’t say Rhule didn’t warn you.

Granted, that painstaking process is likely to reveal Rhule’s greatest challenge at Nebraska.

Making the roster whole? He’s done that before. And he may be doing it again.

But making Nebraska fans learn how to trust again? That’ll take wins. And they’ll need to come more quickly than they did at his previous stops.