Nebraska fans are delusional. December 5, 2014

In case any reader has missed the news, Nebraska head coach Bo Pelini has been fired…for going 9-3.  Most fan bases would be happy with their team having such a record.  Of the fan bases that would not, most would at least tolerate it if they sensed that the program was still headed in the right direction.  Of the few remaining fan bases that would not tolerate such a record, let us put them through a litmus test.  Test Item A:  are you an upper-tier program in the Southeastern Conference?  Yes or no?  If no, are you Florida State, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, Baylor, TCU or Texas?  No?  Then the problem is not with your coach, it’s with you.

Specifically, it is with “you” in two ways:  first and foremost, it is with your school’s geography.  Second, it is with your unreasonable expectations in this new era.  This includes you, Nebraska, and I shall explain. 

First, let us point out the obvious:  gone are the days of Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne when the Cornhuskers were regularly competing for the national title.  For, you might acknowledge, but why?  The reason is simple.  Thirty years ago, Nebraska was one of the relatively few teams that regularly got on TV.  Therefore, if a prized high school football player was being recruited nationally, that recruit had a vested interest to play for a Notre Dame, Nebraska, Michigan or Penn State if he wanted to get national attention.  All that changed when college football television coverage started to expand, as it did in earnest starting 15 years ago.  All of a sudden, top-ranked recruits with options did not need to go to cold, isolated, academically-rigid schools in order to get on television regularly and earn their fame.  Now, with a much-expanded list of school options, they quickly noticed that schools in the Sunbelt did not have the problems of snow drifts in winter, did not have the academic rigidity of most schools up north, and best of all, the co-eds were much prettier.  You’re an 18-year old kid who can run a 4.3 in the 40-yard dash, and can pick any school you want.  Are you going to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, where it is cold, is isolated, and you have to deal with snowbanks for four months out of the year, or are you going to pick USC or Texas, where it’s 70 degrees in January, and the girls are [mostly] knock-outs?  These days, it’s a no-brainer.

Second, Nebraska is not exactly the kind of state the produces its own in-state talent.  States that do not are at a structural, geographic disadvantage from those that do.  Usually, they have to go several states away to get the players they need, be it California, Texas, or even New Jersey.  Now that Nebraska is out of the Big XII, their recruiting pipelines to Texas have been largely severed.  Moreover, most 17 and 18-year old kids don’t even know who Tom Osborne is/was (heck, they were toddlers when he retired), let alone give a hoot about the tradition of Nebraska’s team, or even Notre Dame’s for that matter.

Given that the key to success in college football is talent acquisition, when you have a host of schools that can offer more to prize recruits than you can offer, that puts you at certain structural disadvantages.  It is not anybody’s fault per se, but it speaks to the fact that the patterns of life in America themselves have changed.  Sorry, but those are the breaks.

But that is not all.  The other issue is finding good coaches themselves.  It used to be, again, in the days of Daveney and Osborne, that being an assistant coach at Nebraska was a relatively plum job, as far as assistant coaching went.  Not anymore.  To be sure, the Cornhuskers do pay their coaches a bit better than more Big Ten schools (their offensive coordinator, Tim Beck, got a raise in January of 2013 from $365K to $700K), but that’s still chickenfeed compared to what most coaches make in the Southeastern Conference or even at, say, Texas.

Again, you’re a coach with options.  You have a pretty wife and good-looking kids.  Are you going to be able to persuade her to move with you to cold, isolated Lincoln, Neb., when you also have the option of taking her to Tucson to coach for the Arizona Wildcats, to Tempe to coach for the Arizona State Sun Devils, or to Austin to coach for the Texas Longhorns?  It’s a surprisingly easy sell to persuade her to let you take an assistant job at TCU, since that plugs you into the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.  If you take a coaching job at Georgia, that puts you within an hour-plus of Atlanta, and in Athens, Georgia, one of the most ‘happening’ college towns in America.  So, wives of assistant coaches, what’s it going to be?  Lincoln, or Tucson?  South Bend, or Austin?  Ames, Iowa, or Atlanta?  State College, Pa., or Los Angeles?  This, my friends, is the “game within the game” that nobody ever mentions, but plays a huge roll inmany a football program’s fortunes, especially in this day and age.

Given all that is working against the Husker Nation’s favor these days, Bo Pelini’s job of going 9-3 is, frankly, miraculous.  This is to say nothing of the job he and his staff have done (remember the aforementioned challenges of putting together a good coaching stuff in the Corn State?) regarding player development, because keep in mind of the other aforementioned challenge of not having the pick of the recruiting litter anymore.

And yet he was fired, for a 9-3 record this year.  Does the deluded fan base of Nebraska think they will be able to do any better than Pelini?  If so, who?  Granted, the man had a rather abrasive personality, and he could thus easily rub lots of people the wrong way.  But behind closed doors, away from the cameras, all coaches can be at least occasionally abrasive.  It goes with the territory.  So I ask again, whom does Nebraska intend to find that will do a better job than Pelini?  The reason I posit this question is, if the Huskers no longer have the first dibs on prize recruits, what makes them think they will be able to attract a prized head coach?