Callahan in ProfootballWeekly

[treeeman]

Nebraska football finds itself in a precarious situation

By Jerry Magee

Oct. 24, 2007

 

 

 

 

 

Nebraskans aren’t perceived as cool. Clods. Sod busters. Country folk in overalls with two straps extending over the shoulders, carrying straw suitcases.

 

I would know. I once was one of them. I grew up in that state and attended the state university. The football team wasn’t much then, either, because Bob Devaney wouldn’t be along for a time, to be succeeded by Tom Osborne, who would turn matters over to Frank Solich, with Solich yielding to Bill Callahan. The end — the end of Nebraska’s run as a leading factor in college football.

 

The last time I looked, Callahan was still afloat in Lincoln, which is my subject for today. They may not be the most sophisticated of persons, but the people in Lincoln, specifically NU chancellor Harvey Perlman, have hit upon a manner of proceeding that I suspect could have a trickle-down effect in the NFL. Rather than dismiss Callahan with the football program in disrepair, Perlman bounced the fellow who hired Callahan, athletic director Steve Pederson.

 

Would NFL teams operate along these lines? In the NFL, general managers are akin to athletic directors, but how often do general managers get bounced? Not often. Let them take some falls, I say. The general manager is the strong man in any NFL organization. The head coach once occupied this position, but his status was reduced when the league embraced free agency and the salary cap. No one is more responsible for a professional franchise’s well-being, or lack of it, than the general manager.

 

Callahan’s plight underscores one other point to me. It is that coaches making the transition from colleges to the NFL are considerably better-placed than coaches who have been schooled in the NFL who show up in the colleges. Football, as it is played for money, is more precise, more technical, than what is done on campuses. Coaches coming out of the NFL tend to complicate the game to a degree that collegians cannot absorb.

 

About Callahan. He interested me from the first time I saw him. Here was this fellow with a $50 haircut of whom hardly anybody was aware of, who had become head coach of the Raiders after Al Davis traded away Jon Gruden.

 

A man has to have a lot of confidence to wear his hair as fashionably as Callahan wore his. I took to him immediately, just as his team took to him.

 

Callahan’s first team in the East Bay in 2002 began blisteringly fast. Callahan wasn’t willing to call his team a “juggernaut,” but he had a hell of a team and he took it to Super Bowl XXXVII. On that afternoon, Gruden was the more powerfully motivated coach, and he had a vastly superior game plan. His Tampa Bay Bucs took it to the Raiders, 48-21.

 

For a number of reasons, I would continue to be mindful of where Callahan was in his coaching career. After the 2003 season, his second in the East Bay, he would cease being coach of the Raiders and would turn up at Nebraska. Learning of this, my first thought was, “How is he going to get a $50 haircut in Lincoln?” My second thought was that Nebraska had made a great hire. As I was saying, I liked Callahan, who as a quarterback had come out of Illinois Benedictine in the Chicago suburb of Lisle and made himself a student of Mike White, an offensive guru who would precede him as a coach of the Raiders. In Callahan, Nebraska was getting a guy who had coached in a Super Bowl. I was gladdened. Never mind that his tenure with the Raiders was a brief one; those people haven’t had a coach who had any longevity since Tom Flores’ run from 1979-87.

 

While I was not born in Nebraska, I lived there as a youth and attended NU. As a boy, I would go out and sit in my grandmother’s car, where the radio had stronger reception than the radio in our house, and hang on the accounts of Nebraska games. Football was important to me. It is to most Nebraskans.

 

It is easy to say this considering how the Huskers have disintegrated, but in my thinking, the cerebral, artsy sort of football that Callahan espouses never is going to be accepted in the cornlands. Nebraska was founded by Bohemians, sturdy folk who ­didn’t mind doing a day’s work. Muscle has to be at the source of the university’s football program. Think of the option, with the quarterback sliding down the line and either keeping or giving the football to a back with some size. None of that sissy stuff.

 

Callahan, I suspect, is going to have some further successes, but they won’t be in Lincoln. His football, stressing the pass, is all wrong for where he is. Pederson, meantime, had an impressive portfolio, having been associated with the programs at Tennessee, Ohio State and Pittsburgh before he took the Nebraska position, but according to reports he had become more dictatorial in Lincoln than the citizens preferred.

 

After Pederson was cashiered, an Omaha radio station was playing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead.”

 

Pederson’s interim replacement is Osborne, an almost sainted figure in Nebraska. The state gave Osborne three terms in Congress. He must either retain Callahan (not likely) or choose his successor, with the names of former Huskers Turner Gill and Barry Alvarez being batted around.

 

Osborne also has a third option, which would be to appoint himself. Osborne is 70, but that does not mean he can’t be effective — George Halas and Paul Brown are two examples who were both sharp football minds at an advanced age.

 

Know this: Osborne’s presence on the sideline at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln would be welcomed. T-shirts are for sale there (for $16) bearing the words, “Got Tom!” I may order one.

 

Callahan, finally, is a dead man walking. He is a pleasant guy, but for him and his approach to football, Nebraska was the wrong place.

 

 

 

Jerry Magee has covered pro football for the San Diego Union-Tribune since 1961 and for PFW since its inception in 1967.

[Washusker]

This has nothing to do with the fact that he runs a pass-first offense. Nothing at all. He's just not a good Head Coach.

[captain obvious]

Yeah, I don't think there is some sort of fundamental conflict between Nebraskans and passing. I wish people would stop harping on that. Callahan's system seems too complicated for college football, in general.

 

Surely Mr. Magee remembers Ferragamo and Tagge?

[LAHusker]

Cali could coach at USC and still manage to lose.

[raw1]

Yeah, I don't think there is some sort of fundamental conflict between Nebraskans and passing. I wish people would stop harping on that. Callahan's system seems too complicated for college football, in general.

 

Surely Mr. Magee remembers Ferragamo and Tagge?

This was a very poorly written article. I am surprised that this guy calls himself a football writer since he had a hard time putting multple sentences together to form a paragraph. I am still not sure what the heck he was trying to say. That was weird. There are plenty of writers in that less sophisticated place called Lincoln who make this guy look like a fourth grader. This sentence alone... ". Here was this fellow with a $50 haircut of whom hardly anybody was aware of". Too funny. Geez pal. learn to write.

[HookedOnRed]

An article full of absurd assumptions. It demonstrates why I give very little credence to pieces written by the national media. These guys always want to act like they know the REAL story, but they are viewing the situation from a prohibitive distance.

 

Case in point, the idea that Callahan isn't liked here simply because his offense is too "cerebral" for us folks in the "cornlands" is balderdash. Most of his players AREN'T from here but even THEY can't seem to figure out how it's supposed to work. And SP being fired because his style was "more dictatorial in Lincoln than the citizens preferred??" Is he telling me that there are people somewhere in America who LIKE working under a dictatorial management style? Enough said.

[kjstrouble]

The article was totally rediculas from start to finish. The idea that a $50 hair cut was a determining factor in some one's style or sophistication sounds like a line from "Everybody Loves Raymond". And the idea that it is not Callahan's coaching but the players or state not being able to understand it - this idiot has obviously not really followed Nebraska football the last 4 years.

 

Can we skip these kinds of articles from now on?