From Division III to 'Late Night': Nebraska GM Sean Padden is Matt Rhule's troubleshooter (2024)

LINCOLN — Sean Padden needed a speaker for a football event. So he asked an old buddy still in the business.

To call it a banquet would be far too formal — this was a fish fry in an elementary school gym for 5- and 6-year-olds and their parents. Padden, in the corporate world during this stretch in the late 2000s, helped volunteer coach with the West Philadelphia Tarheels youth organization as the season wrapped up with a celebration.

Who better to say a few words than someone coaching actual college football in the city? Padden knew a guy, a Temple assistant named Matt Rhule.

What happened next changed Padden’s outlook on how special Rhule could be in the industry.

“He burned the room to the ground,” said Padden, now the general manager of Nebraska football. “I couldn’t believe it. He was just my friend — he was a good football coach — and he got up there and he took control of the room like I’ve never seen. My jaw dropped.”

Rhule has been a head coach for 11 seasons. Nine of them included Padden, never an on-field assistant but frequently a sort of I.T. football pro tasked with troubleshooting whatever issues may arise in either the granular or big picture.

If there’s one thing a general manager does, Padden said, it’s adapt. He’s the main liaison between the Huskers and their central name-image-likeness collective, the 1890 Initiative, communicating daily about player contracts and other topics. He works with Rhule during the season about in-game decisions, identifying what the “book” says the best statistical decision is for a given situation.

Rules on the field and in recruiting continue to change. As a fan of chaos theory — it teaches that small changes in initial conditions will lead to drastic and unpredictable changes in results — Padden likes the challenges. Rhule likes Padden around to metaphorically tackle them.

“In the end I feel like I just filled the gap,” Padden said. “No matter what we’ve done over the years, no matter what program we’ve been to, whenever there’s something new he kind of throws me at it and says, ‘Alright, hey, figure this out.’”

Padden and Rhule met in 1998 while on the same coaching staff at Albright College, an NCAA Division III program in southeast Pennsylvania. Padden had been a multiyear D-III scout-team player at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.; Rhule was coming off a walk-on career at Penn State.

Padden (defensive line) and Rhule (linebackers) quickly learned they had a similar worldview oriented around teaching. They said what they meant and debated passionately in the office about issues without letting emotions linger. Good thing — they lived in what Padden describes as an “abandoned dorm” as the only two room occupants on a floor.

“When you work as hard as people work in this industry, you have to share the same values,” Padden said. “You don’t want to be in a program that doesn’t share the same values.”

While Rhule rose through the ranks at Temple and joined the NFL’s New York Giants in 2012, Padden spent eight years out of football with a software development company and in pharmaceuticals.

The pair reunited when Rhule took the head job at Temple in 2013 and made Padden an assistant athletic director and his chief of staff. They stayed together at Baylor and to the Carolina Panthers before Padden went to a software company to do performance and injury analytics work remotely for teams in the NFL and Premier League.

When Rhule came to Nebraska, Padden planned to be a temporary consultant. But he was “charmed” by the city of Lincoln and “supercharged” by the 1890 collective and its setup that funnels every dollar to student-athletes. Wives of multiple NU coaches — Rhule, offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield, special teams coordinator Ed Foley — recruited him hard too.

“Sean, he’s my hero,” said Susan Elza, Husker football’s chief of staff. “I think he’s incredibly intelligent as well. He’s one of the strongest visionaries on our staff.”

Padden became a brief national sensation in August 2017 when a video of him racing a robotic tackling dummy after a Baylor practice went viral. He got a head start and beat the dummy as doubting players erupted. The kicker came when Padden stopped to celebrate — and the padded robotic kept going, comically knocking the human to the turf.

The moment earned Padden a cameo on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” who had Padden race another robot in front of a crowd in New York City. Padden won again, this time with a twist as Fallon had an anvil fall on a stuffed version of the man afterward. Padden sat up and gave a thumbs up before the robot careened into him again.

“I did it for humanity,” Padden said jokingly at the time about the first race. “That’s a warning out there, because the machines aren’t going to fight fair.”

Padden is fighting for the Huskers now. He runs the team’s spring league and works with NU’s scout team — the Lancaster County Raiders, as he calls them. Rules with transfers, NIL and roster sizes remain fluid and on his mind.

How Nebraska approaches the uneven landscape will play out with feedback from the guy who once made a great decision about finding a free public speaker.

“The conditions keep changing,” Padden said. “That’s the challenge. But I’m excited about it — that’s why I’m here.”