I'll counter your unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence with unsubstantiated anecdotal evidence of my own -- living on the coasts for years and being fairly tapped into the major metropolitan college football scenes, I can tell you that I heard random people lambast and ridicule Bo constantly. Especially the last 4 years of Bo's tenure, that was almost exclusively what non-Nebraska fans would bring up when they found out I was a Nebraska fan. Conversations almost always began with 1) "Man, you guys really collapsed like house of cards agains XXX team! I can't believe you gave up that many points/yards!" and then immediately moved on to 2) "And your coach is a freaking maniac. I've seen more civility from roid-raging neanderthal!" and eventually they'd come around to, 3) "He does seem to be pretty good at defense, though!" Number 3 happened less frequently the last two or three years of his tenure.People on bbs's whine about this, but while traveling the country, I never heard that. What I mostly heard is "I went to a game there once; it was awesome" or "do you all have anything other than football out there?"if nothing else I can go to a bar in a Husker shirt and not have to talk about our crazy a$$ coach with some random person who wants to laugh at Nebraska football...that was getting old.Very true. As much as I've questioned some of the things he's done, I really hope that he and Eichorst did it right in hiring Riley.The final chapter of Perlman's legacy is yet to be written in regards to football.
Bo didn't even rank among the craziest in CFB let alone when stacked against all coaches across all sports.
Perlman wasn't a bad chancellor, but he was a bad football chancellor. That's because he didn't care about sports beyond what was required for his position. He even implied as much when he spoke at a non-football Husker event I attended in NYC. His focus was improving the academic prestige of DONU, which he did. Unfortunately, the sports side of it suffered.
And to be clear, I don't believe the two (sports and academics) have to be mutually exclusive. He could have put more effort into restoring our athletic glory without compromising on the academic side of it.