Bo to LSU?

teachercd said:
I really am surprised that Bo is still looked at as anything other than a pretty good coach while at NU.

Especially considering what we have seen the last 5 years.
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Enhance said:
I think anybody that believes Pelini was anything less than a good to pretty good coach (depending on how one qualifies those terms) is being intentionally obtuse and/or vindictive. Fortunately, I don't come across a lot of folks like that.
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I agree he did well with what he was given, and was a solid coach. The point being raised that I think is hard to overlook, is things were moving in the wrong direction.  He would have done better than Riley, but I still think we would have ended up flirting with .500 had he stuck around for 4 more years and been responsible for recruiting. Would we have gone 4-8? Probably not but I don't know if people would have been happy when he started slipped from 9-4 to 7-5 etc.

 
runningblind said:
I agree he did well with what he was given, and was a solid coach. The point being raised that I think is hard to overlook, is things were moving in the wrong direction.  He would have done better than Riley, but I still think we would have ended up flirting with .500 had he stuck around for 4 more years and been responsible for recruiting. Would we have gone 4-8? Probably not but I don't know if people would have been happy when he started slipped from 9-4 to 7-5 etc.
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100% agree. And there were times in those latter years where I thought the team was closer to being 7-5 than something like 11-2, and that's a difficult position to be in when you're in year five, six or seven of a regime.

 
Enhance said:
I think anybody that believes Pelini was anything less than a good to pretty good coach (depending on how one qualifies those terms) is being intentionally obtuse and/or vindictive. Fortunately, I don't come across a lot of folks like that.
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I think watching Wisconsin run the same set of plays over and over, year after year without Bo seeming to even try anything different calls into question how good of an X's and O's coach Bo really was. Combined with his disdain for recruiting, difficulty recruiting/developing players, and terrible handling of the press, I'm not sure if I'd call Bo "good" at coaching. Although we certainly saw much worse with Riley.

 
Bo is the most fascinating coach in the Osborne - Frost era.

Decades from now nobody's really going to talk much about Solich, Callahan or Riley. But we'll be talking about Bo. So much to chew over.

 
RedDenver said:
I think watching Wisconsin run the same set of plays over and over, year after year without Bo seeming to even try anything different calls into question how good of an X's and O's coach Bo really was. Combined with his disdain for recruiting, difficulty recruiting/developing players, and terrible handling of the press, I'm not sure if I'd call Bo "good" at coaching. Although we certainly saw much worse with Riley.
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My opinion is he was an excellent X's and O's coach, but the disdain for recruiting and questionable development took him down. We were always in the 40-60 range defensively once we moved to the big ten, and like you said never tried anything drastically different. If we had  LSU talent, I think his defense would've been great. But a technically sound scheme that your players can't execute is not actually sound, and eventually "we just didn't execute" stops being the players fault and starts being the coaches. If they can't do it, coaches either need to recruit/develop players who can or adjust the scheme to something the players can actually do.

 
RedDenver said:
I think watching Wisconsin run the same set of plays over and over, year after year without Bo seeming to even try anything different calls into question how good of an X's and O's coach Bo really was. Combined with his disdain for recruiting, difficulty recruiting/developing players, and terrible handling of the press, I'm not sure if I'd call Bo "good" at coaching. Although we certainly saw much worse with Riley.
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I think the toughest part is how each of us individually qualifies adjectives like "good."

I also tend to align with the notion that 'you are what your record says you are.' Outliers will exist and it's not a blanket evaluation I always stand my ground on, but if I see a 9-win Power 5 college team then I will generally consider them 'good' or at the very least above average. If I see a three or four win team, I'll generally consider them not good or below average. So, from that perspective, I think it's hard to say BP was anything other than a 'good' coach.

Adjective rating scales are tough, though. Perhaps out of a 10 point scale, I'd probably rank BP around a 5 or 6. I could move that up or down a little bit depending on my current mood. :lol:

 
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The games when Wisconsin really embarrassed us in the Bo era were so painful...and there were so many. The ones that obviously stand out were:

-Russell Wilson's senior transfer season

-The conference championship game

-The one in Madison when Melvin Gordon rushed for 1,786 yards or whatever and it was snowing in the fourth quarter

I remember in those latter two Bo not being able to get his corners and OLBs to maintain discipline. But he generally didn't struggle with his team not being physical enough.

It's almost hard to pinpoint why we couldn't win those games but then we'd beat a Top 10-ranked Michigan State, etc.

Random thoughts.    :)

 
While I miss being able to beat a bunch of patsies pretty handily most of the time like Bo did (minus some games like McNeese state), he also had A LOT of blowout losses and if we're being honest, not the toughest schedule most of the time.  Like @Enhancesaid, I'd put him about a 5 or 6 as a head coach.  Pretty damn average.

 
knapplc said:
Bo is the most fascinating coach in the Osborne - Frost era.

Decades from now nobody's really going to talk much about Solich, Callahan or Riley. But we'll be talking about Bo. So much to chew over.
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What's interesting about that is that in terms of performance on the field, Solich is just as debatable. Should he have been fired after the 7-7 year? Were things trending upward enough with the new coordinators (one being Bo, of course)? Could he at least get things back to being a fairly consistent top ten team, or would it have been a more Bo-esque always good but never great? Or was he really a 7-7 kind of coach who was merely the beneficiary of Osborne's work in his early years? I was never quite convinced in either direction. I think the only thing we all agreed on was "f#&% Steve Pederson".

 
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knapplc said:
Bo is the most fascinating coach in the Osborne - Frost era.

Decades from now nobody's really going to talk much about Solich, Callahan or Riley. But we'll be talking about Bo. So much to chew over.
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Callahan will still mystify a few.  If he would have punted Cosgrove and hired someone better as a DC, how long would he have coached?  He recruited well, his offense scored points, he called Oklahoma effing hillbillies, he is generally regarded as a fantastic OL coach in the NFL (Pipeline?), they just couldn't stop anyone.  

 
Bo struggled with Mike Leach in the Big XII.  Only team that put up any fight against the '09 defense was Texas Tech.  It's fitting that his first game in the SEC is against the Pirate.

 
Toe said:
What's interesting about that is that in terms of performance on the field, Solich is just as debatable. Should he have been fired after the 7-7 year? Were things trending upward enough with the new coordinators (one being Bo, of course)? Could he at least get things back to being a fairly consistent top ten team, or would it have been a more Bo-esque always good but never great? Or was he really a 7-7 kind of coach who was merely the beneficiary of Osborne's work in his early years? I was never quite convinced in either direction. I think the only thing we all agreed on was "f#&% Steve Pederson".
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Good thoughts.

We possibly take for granted 23 seasons later how Solich was going to really be hampered by directly following the greatest run in Husker football history under Osbore no matter what. I remember being really disappointed by the 7-7 season in part because it snapped this string of winning seasons that I believe we were about to overtake Notre Dame on with a new record.

And in the subconsciousness of Husker Nation I also wonder now how Frost will probably actually benefit for having come in so far removed from winning actual trophies at a time where if we were to have a 9-3 season it would probably feel amazing. I'll bet someone will swing in and of course say "9-3 isn't amazing at all, WTH are you even talking about?"

But I guess my point is looking at how Solich was probably always going to suffer from directly following Osborne, whether we're conscious about that element or not.

 
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