After an eight‑year, $87 million extension, 2026 is pressure time for Matt Rhule in Lincoln. The Huskers showed promise last fall, but cross‑country Big Ten trips wore the roster down and turned close games into bad losses. Now Rhule is copying a fix he learned from a trusted friend, Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire: moving core practices to the afternoon.

Big Ten travel stretches farther than what Rhule faced in the Big 12. With campuses from the East Coast to the West Coast, some road trips top 2,000 miles and cross multiple time zones. Those long hops, plus back-to-back conference games, drain energy and squeeze recovery in a way shorter regional trips usually do not.

“No team that practices in the morning won a national championship,” said Rhule during his May 13 interview on Next Up with Adam Breneman. “This past year, talking to my good friend Joey McGuire, they had made the change to afternoon practices. You know, just the travel in this league.”

Practices in the morning in low temperatures are quite hard for players and can even hurt their performance. In contrast, practice in the afternoon suits their health and helps them perform with fresh energy. Last year, Texas Tech benefited from that change, as they not only won the conference title but also made their first-ever appearance in the CFP. But Nebraska wasn’t aware of that change and faced a huge hurdle.

“We went to Maryland and played a 3:30 game. You know, got back at whatever time and played the following Friday at Minnesota and got whooped. Went to Penn State and played a night game. Came back and played the following Friday morning and got whooped. And it was like, there’s a lot to this league. There’s a lot more travel than we realized,” added the Nebraska head coach.

“So how do we do a better job of being fresher at the end of the year while still also being good? Do we have to practice differently? Do we have to monitor things differently? So we moved afternoon practices. November, it can be 10 degrees in the morning. It can be 35 in the afternoon, and we’re going to go outside.”

Sports science work on time-of-day training shows performance in speed and power tasks tends to be lower in early morning and higher in the afternoon as body temperature and hormone levels rise. For a team dealing with late returns from road games, later practice windows can help players train closer to their daily peak instead of fighting an early-morning dip.

This season, the Huskers will face programs like Maryland, Indiana, Oregon, Illinois, Washington, and so on. In Year 4, Rhule needs consistent wins and a healthier finish to the season to meet expectations in Lincoln. If the Big 12 team strategy works for Matt Rhule’s Big Ten team, it will be a major fix for the Huskers’ problem to keep players healthy and show full potential on the field.

If the afternoon plan does not show up in late-season results, pressure in Lincoln will grow. But by moving practice time, Nebraska is betting it can stay fresher when Big Ten trips hit hardest.