Take THAT...Bo!

[Guy Chamberlin]

One last time, kids.

Frank Solich had a drinking problem. He also had a young lady problem. Both were threatening to create a Nebraska football problem. Something in the Steve Sarkasian/Carl Pelini realm.

Lies propagated directly by Pedey's minions to lay cover for the botched firing.

Not lies.

Yes, lies. I know this is the internet and everybody knows anybody can say what they want. But I know you won't post ANY type of info to back up these lies (since it doesn't exist). I will say, I know Frank, not real well. I know some of his family members. And I know his attorney while he was here in Lincoln. He was going to sue the AD for slander. His attorney talked him out of it because A) it would be too hard to prove, B) it would just draw more attention to the lies. So he dropped it and moved on.

Those are the facts. Sad that the Pedey propaganda machine is still chugging.

So Frank getting a DUI in Ohio was a lie also?

I think that one actually happened. But wasn't he supposedly roofied or something?

Why yes, by Pedey's Mininons. Who are everywhere, with unlimited resources and an agenda dating back to the Knights' Templar.

That's funny. A sarcastic comment is your one comment in this thread most likely to be right!

The people who actually partied with Frank Solich, and I know a couple, might have a different perspective on his infidelity and sobriety than Frank's family, dontcha think?

Steve Sarkasian insisted he accidentally mixed a couple drinks with pain medication. Roger Clemens said he had no idea he was ingesting steroids. It's what you do.

Everybody agrees Frank Solich was a great guy.

The bigger question is whether a pre-emptive firing was in order. Drinking and infidelity have embarrassed other programs, but a lot of the coaches have stuck around. Rick Pitino wins so much at Kentucky, he might skate on hiring hookers to entertain his recruits.

Also, as much as we like to blame the Pederson's and Eichorsts, they don't take these final steps without the input and tacit approval of big donors and alums. Hard as it is to imagine in our current trough, but Frank's 7-7 season did not go down well, and the pervasive undercurrent was that Frank's recruiting drop-off was about to doom the Huskers to mediocrity.

Frank's '04 class was ranked #14 by Rivals the day he was canned. He also would've likely ended up offering Danny Woodhead before signing day.

And apparently Pedey made the decision without any input from Tom Osborne, who famously said, "I think we could've solved this with 45 mintues together in a conference room."

Again, I'm gonna have to remind you that Pedey most definitely had input from major donors and alums who felt we were already on the downhill slide under Solich and that Tom Osborne might be blinded by loyalty. Frank's personal life was a sideline to the football story, but not entirely irrelevant to the decision.

The Solich firing is a mistake in hindsight, but the same impatient Husker fans we have now were generally open to the change back in the day. Colorado 2001 and the 7-7 2002 season were bandied about as evidence the way Callahan/Pelini/Riley debacles are today.

And there are others who make a convincing case that Solich actually DID let the recruiting pipleline slide from our NC standards in a course we have yet to reverse.

 

[Guy Chamberlin]

I've got a Craig Bohl story, too.

 

[cm husker]

I disagree. Based on the message boards, the guys who argued we should have fired a conference championship winning Nebraska legend who had a .700+ record and had just revamped his staff with some excellent young talent are those who are now arguing that we shouldn't fire Riley (or push for staff changes). It's odd, but true. Personally, I think it goes back to what they philosophically want to see at NU (i.e., the "outmoded offense" versus "fancy, pro style moder offense" debate).

Re: Solich, of course the "recruiting pipeline" slid after the championship years. As far as I know, the state of Nebraska hasn't produced that kind of talent since that decade. Something was in the water in the early to mid 70s, and I'm not sure what it was. And yes, NU had lost some ground in national recruiting due to an aging staff who, for example, couldn't get out of a cart to coach, let alone recruit. But again, see the young excellent talent hired in '03 who was bringing new life to the program before Pederson blew it up.

Look, we all want the mid 90s again, but that is just not a realistic benchmark. It simply isn't.

 

[GBRedneck]

One last time, kids.

Frank Solich had a drinking problem. He also had a young lady problem. Both were threatening to create a Nebraska football problem. Something in the Steve Sarkasian/Carl Pelini realm.

Lies propagated directly by Pedey's minions to lay cover for the botched firing.

Not lies.

Yes, lies. I know this is the internet and everybody knows anybody can say what they want. But I know you won't post ANY type of info to back up these lies (since it doesn't exist). I will say, I know Frank, not real well. I know some of his family members. And I know his attorney while he was here in Lincoln. He was going to sue the AD for slander. His attorney talked him out of it because A) it would be too hard to prove, B) it would just draw more attention to the lies. So he dropped it and moved on.

Those are the facts. Sad that the Pedey propaganda machine is still chugging.

So Frank getting a DUI in Ohio was a lie also?

I think that one actually happened. But wasn't he supposedly roofied or something?

Why yes, by Pedey's Mininons. Who are everywhere, with unlimited resources and an agenda dating back to the Knights' Templar.

That's funny. A sarcastic comment is your one comment in this thread most likely to be right!

The people who actually partied with Frank Solich, and I know a couple, might have a different perspective on his infidelity and sobriety than Frank's family, dontcha think?

Steve Sarkasian insisted he accidentally mixed a couple drinks with pain medication. Roger Clemens said he had no idea he was ingesting steroids. It's what you do.

Everybody agrees Frank Solich was a great guy.

The bigger question is whether a pre-emptive firing was in order. Drinking and infidelity have embarrassed other programs, but a lot of the coaches have stuck around. Rick Pitino wins so much at Kentucky, he might skate on hiring hookers to entertain his recruits.

Also, as much as we like to blame the Pederson's and Eichorsts, they don't take these final steps without the input and tacit approval of big donors and alums. Hard as it is to imagine in our current trough, but Frank's 7-7 season did not go down well, and the pervasive undercurrent was that Frank's recruiting drop-off was about to doom the Huskers to mediocrity.

Frank's '04 class was ranked #14 by Rivals the day he was canned. He also would've likely ended up offering Danny Woodhead before signing day.

And apparently Pedey made the decision without any input from Tom Osborne, who famously said, "I think we could've solved this with 45 mintues together in a conference room."

Again, I'm gonna have to remind you that Pedey most definitely had input from major donors and alums who felt we were already on the downhill slide under Solich and that Tom Osborne might be blinded by loyalty. Frank's personal life was a sideline to the football story, but not entirely irrelevant to the decision.

The Solich firing is a mistake in hindsight, but the same impatient Husker fans we have now were generally open to the change back in the day. Colorado 2001 and the 7-7 2002 season were bandied about as evidence the way Callahan/Pelini/Riley debacles are today.

And there are others who make a convincing case that Solich actually DID let the recruiting pipleline slide from our NC standards in a course we have yet to reverse.

Solich had higher ranked recruiting classes than Callahan, and he had twice as many of his recruits drafted with only two years additional time as HC (and with Callahan's poor development/coaching reducing draftability of a lot of Solich recruits AND Pelini's much improved development/coaching enhancing draftability of many of Callahan's recruits.)

I think you could make a stronger case that firing 9 win coaches caused recruiting to slide.

As to the Alums/Donors backing Pedey, many of them were drawn in by Pedey's propaganda. Pedey always hated Frank and he wanted to fire him immediately, but it took him a year to recruit the necessary political capital to pull the trigger. And he did it all behind TO's back.

 

[Enhance]

You don't have to talk to the recent players this year to realize Bo was bad for the team.

It fits the narrative so people will push that agenda.

Tom Osborne was around Pelini a lot. He had an opportunity to hire Gill and he had an opportunity to fire Pelini. Instead, he doubled down on him and also endorsed him for subsequent jobs.

Why do some Husker fans insist believing they know more about Nebraska football success than Tom Osborne? What sort of arrogance does that require?

I don't think you'll find many people that will claim this; however, pretending, assuming or suggesting TO didn't make mistakes is arrogant, too. I'm not saying you specifically are doing this, cm husker, but I have seen people on here in the past get angry any time it's even remotely hinted to TO having made a bad decision.

Frank Solich and Bo Pelini were both his choices and both of them are no longer the head coach at Nebraska. You can blame the new AD's that came in and cleaned house, and that's fair. But, the truth remains that both of his hand-picked selections didn't last here for a variety of reasons.

Is it really so blasphemous to suggest that TO made hiring mistakes? I look at it the same way I look at players becoming coaches. Having played the game doesn't mean you'll be a great coach (Tommy Frazier) and having not played in the NFL doesn't mean you'll be a bad NFL coach (Bill Belichick.)

TO certainly has better experience and understanding than most, but so far, he's 0-2 on coaches following up his success.

TO may have made mistakes, but you give him the benefit of the doubt when his hires are .700+, especially the one he actually hired and whose biggest knocks were "can't win games that matter" (proven to be an idiotic metric) and "has a mean face." TO cares about the NU image as much as anyone, and he understood and repeatedly stated that Bo was a great representative of NU athletics, even if he had a mean face and used bad language.

I agree that you give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think that benefit should turn into blind ignorance.

A quality of hindsight is selective memory, be it good or bad. We should not pretend for even a moment that Bo Pelini simply 'had a mean face' and 'used bad language.' His rant against the fans, his petulant sideline behavior, the audio recording from the player's meeting and the fractious climate he created between the fans and players all played into his firing.

And that's before you even get to the fact that he routinely got embarrassed in big games.

The Riley hire and current state of the program are fair game for questioning, but BP was not a great representative of this program. Is this really even a debate still among the fans, or, are some people just wishing we were #9winning it up again?

 

[Guy Chamberlin]

One problem is people believing there are individual villains to this story.

 

[cm husker]

You don't have to talk to the recent players this year to realize Bo was bad for the team.

It fits the narrative so people will push that agenda.

Tom Osborne was around Pelini a lot. He had an opportunity to hire Gill and he had an opportunity to fire Pelini. Instead, he doubled down on him and also endorsed him for subsequent jobs.

Why do some Husker fans insist believing they know more about Nebraska football success than Tom Osborne? What sort of arrogance does that require?

I don't think you'll find many people that will claim this; however, pretending, assuming or suggesting TO didn't make mistakes is arrogant, too. I'm not saying you specifically are doing this, cm husker, but I have seen people on here in the past get angry any time it's even remotely hinted to TO having made a bad decision.

Frank Solich and Bo Pelini were both his choices and both of them are no longer the head coach at Nebraska. You can blame the new AD's that came in and cleaned house, and that's fair. But, the truth remains that both of his hand-picked selections didn't last here for a variety of reasons.

Is it really so blasphemous to suggest that TO made hiring mistakes? I look at it the same way I look at players becoming coaches. Having played the game doesn't mean you'll be a great coach (Tommy Frazier) and having not played in the NFL doesn't mean you'll be a bad NFL coach (Bill Belichick.)

TO certainly has better experience and understanding than most, but so far, he's 0-2 on coaches following up his success.

TO may have made mistakes, but you give him the benefit of the doubt when his hires are .700+, especially the one he actually hired and whose biggest knocks were "can't win games that matter" (proven to be an idiotic metric) and "has a mean face." TO cares about the NU image as much as anyone, and he understood and repeatedly stated that Bo was a great representative of NU athletics, even if he had a mean face and used bad language.

I agree that you give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think that benefit should turn into blind ignorance.

A quality of hindsight is selective memory, be it good or bad. We should not pretend for even a moment that Bo Pelini simply 'had a mean face' and 'used bad language.' His rant against the fans, his petulant sideline behavior, the audio recording from the player's meeting and the fractious climate he created between the fans and players all played into his firing.

And that's before you even get to the fact that he routinely got embarrassed in big games.

The Riley hire and current state of the program are fair game for questioning, but BP was not a great representative of this program. Is this really even a debate still among the fans, or, are some people just wishing we were #9winning it up again?

I debate it.

Pelini's sideline behavior was clean in '13 and '14 (and really had improved greatly before that and since ATM). Please point to examples where it wasn't.

I also disagree that people thought poorly because of NU based on Pelini. I never had people express that to me, and I travel extensively for work. Most thought he ranged from "old school" to "short/hot tempered." But you know what? Several of the best coaches are.

As far as "routine embarrassment," I agree there were bad losses 1 time per year (and often close games with good opponents). But I wouldn't consider that routine and I'd take that over 3-6 and future seasons of up and down .500 results.

I'd love to know how his players meeting recording played into his firing, though... that logic should be interesting.

Personally, I never really liked Bo's style, going back to his time as DC. However, I recognize that he's a very good (potentially great) coach who had to coach within his own personality. And these relatively minor personality "shortcomings" aren't really material to me as long as your heart is in the right place.

For example, I'm also not a big fan of Saban's demeanor, but I don't hold it against him or Harbaugh or the other examples we could name. ON the toher hand, I hate how he treats his recruits/players and I would not accept at NU regardless of championships. Nonetheless I recognize that he's a great coach and I really don't care if he has mean face on the sideline or calls out fair weather fans (another thing Saban has blatantly done in press conferences, where he also attacks the press) if he's treating his players the right way.

 

[cm husker]

One problem is people believing there are individual villains to this story.

Either due to ill-intent or incompetence, Perlman, Pederson and Eichorst are clearly villains in the decline of Nebraska football. The question I guess is if they are connivers or simply clowns.

 

[huskerfan92]

You don't have to talk to the recent players this year to realize Bo was bad for the team.

It fits the narrative so people will push that agenda.

Tom Osborne was around Pelini a lot. He had an opportunity to hire Gill and he had an opportunity to fire Pelini. Instead, he doubled down on him and also endorsed him for subsequent jobs.

Why do some Husker fans insist believing they know more about Nebraska football success than Tom Osborne? What sort of arrogance does that require?

I don't think you'll find many people that will claim this; however, pretending, assuming or suggesting TO didn't make mistakes is arrogant, too. I'm not saying you specifically are doing this, cm husker, but I have seen people on here in the past get angry any time it's even remotely hinted to TO having made a bad decision.

Frank Solich and Bo Pelini were both his choices and both of them are no longer the head coach at Nebraska. You can blame the new AD's that came in and cleaned house, and that's fair. But, the truth remains that both of his hand-picked selections didn't last here for a variety of reasons.

Is it really so blasphemous to suggest that TO made hiring mistakes? I look at it the same way I look at players becoming coaches. Having played the game doesn't mean you'll be a great coach (Tommy Frazier) and having not played in the NFL doesn't mean you'll be a bad NFL coach (Bill Belichick.)

TO certainly has better experience and understanding than most, but so far, he's 0-2 on coaches following up his success.

TO may have made mistakes, but you give him the benefit of the doubt when his hires are .700+, especially the one he actually hired and whose biggest knocks were "can't win games that matter" (proven to be an idiotic metric) and "has a mean face." TO cares about the NU image as much as anyone, and he understood and repeatedly stated that Bo was a great representative of NU athletics, even if he had a mean face and used bad language.

I agree that you give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don't think that benefit should turn into blind ignorance.

A quality of hindsight is selective memory, be it good or bad. We should not pretend for even a moment that Bo Pelini simply 'had a mean face' and 'used bad language.' His rant against the fans, his petulant sideline behavior, the audio recording from the player's meeting and the fractious climate he created between the fans and players all played into his firing.

And that's before you even get to the fact that he routinely got embarrassed in big games.

The Riley hire and current state of the program are fair game for questioning, but BP was not a great representative of this program. Is this really even a debate still among the fans, or, are some people just wishing we were #9winning it up again?

I debate it.

Pelini's sideline behavior was clean in '13 and '14 (and really had improved greatly before that and since ATM). Please point to examples where it wasn't.

I also disagree that people thought poorly because of NU based on Pelini. I never had people express that to me, and I travel extensively for work. Most thought he ranged from "old school" to "short/hot tempered." But you know what? Several of the best coaches are.

As far as "routine embarrassment," I agree there were bad losses 1 time per year (and often close games with good opponents). But I wouldn't consider that routine and I'd take that over 3-6 and future seasons of up and down .500 results.

I'd love to know how his players meeting recording played into his firing, though... that logic should be interesting.

Personally, I never really liked Bo's style, going back to his time as DC. However, I recognize that he's a very good (potentially great) coach who had to coach within his own personality. And these relatively minor personality "shortcomings" aren't really material to me as long as your heart is in the right place.

For example, I'm also not a big fan of Saban's demeanor, but I don't hold it against him or Harbaugh or the other examples we could name. ON the toher hand, I hate how he treats his recruits/players and I would not accept at NU regardless of championships. Nonetheless I recognize that he's a great coach and I really don't care if he has mean face on the sideline or calls out fair weather fans (another thing Saban has blatantly done in press conferences, where he also attacks the press) if he's treating his players the right way.

 

[Undone]

The Riley hire and current state of the program are fair game for questioning, but BP was not a great representative of this program. Is this really even a debate still among the fans, or, are some people just wishing we were #9winning it up again?

My take is that if you're going to fire the "nine wins a year guy," you absolutely *have to* have The Guy sitting there in waiting to come in that gives you full confidence that as far as the W/L columns are concerned, that he can at least do as well as the Nine Wins guy.

Riley didn't and doesn't give me that feeling. At all. His career .500 record seems to be starkly staring us in the face as a guy who is *not likely* to be able to pull in championships. And that's where a lot of people start to straw man the argument - The argument isn't that he's absolutely incapable of being The Guy, the point is that given his resume, he seems much less likely to get it done over a guy that has more of a Jim McElwain type of resume.

But if he was actually the best we could do...then it is what it is, and we're at where we're at.

 

[cm husker]

So, he disputed a call and swung his hat? Would it have been better if he took off his headset and stared at the ground instead?

Some Husker fans have the thinnest of skin. or they are simply looking for excuses to fire a guy because he wasn't winning enough by their standards.

 

[Guy Chamberlin]

You really have to be able to step out of yourself a bit to get the full Bo Pelini effect.

Imagine Bo Pelini as the coach of another Big 10 or Big 12 team. Watch him raging on the sideline, spittle flying, not only at referees and his own confused players, but at his own coaching staff. To the point where players have to intervene. Imagine he's the coach at say....Michigan....when the 2011 tape gets released and is the subject of SportsTalk for a few days. Imagine you have zero stake in the team Bo Pelini is coaching, and you are merely talking about a coach on record as saying "f#*k the fans! I'm so outta here!"

As a college football fan, you watch the team Bo Pelini is coaching work it's way up into a nationally relevant game, where the whole team falls apart at the same time and looks genuinely helpless against ranked competition. Which only make Bo angrier, but not to the point of making significant changes to anything he's doing. A one time defensive whiz, his teams continue to rack up the worst defensive performances in program history. Teams that used to fear....say Michigan....no longer fear Bo Pelini's Michigan.

And, though no fault of his own, Bo Pelini is not a handsome man, and his angry face is easily mocked.

Again, imagine he's the coach of one of Nebraska's rival teams. Do you look at mitigating factors in Bo Pelini's favor?

Or do you actively root against him, because he's made himself into a punch line and it's fun to see him lose?

Because that much more accurately reflects what opposing fan bases thought of Bo Pelini, and in my own travels I can't say I encountered many Bo defenders among neutral college football fans.

"What's the deal with Bo Pelini?" came about the closest.

And the notion that Bo calmed down after the A&M fiasco is an odd myth that requires ignoring tons of evidence.

And how did the players meeting recording play into his firing? Well it came after his firing, so your logic is already off, but most people found it compelling/appalling evidence that Shawn Eichorst had made the right decision for the University of Nebraska.

 

[cm husker]

I don't have to imagine it. I can turn on Michigan or Alabama or a number of other games and see far worse behavior.

I don't like it, but it doesn't offend me, and it certainly didn't embarrass me personally when Bo was on the Husker sideline.

As to the player meeting recording, that was sort of my point to the person who claimed it was part of the reasoning for firing him.

And more and more, we are realizing that while the tone and language was crude, and the timing bad, the content was quite accurate.

 

[olddominionhusker]

What's interesting to me is the thought experiment that Riley gets up to 9/10 wins a season consistently got a period of 5 years. Does NU keep him? Because at least some here argue that if Bo was nicer, he would have been retained. For others, they say that "plateauing" at that level is an unacceptable failure.

9 games into Bo's first season he had two blowouts to the tune of 52-17 and 62-28. Those mostly disappeared the next two years, but then reared their extremely ugly heads all of the next four seasons. Riley's been in every game thus far. Without making a claim about that specifically, I'll say that if Riley can start winning more of the close ones, and gets to the 9/10 win average, while avoiding the 50+ to 30- blowout games, he'll be just fine.

You jinxed him. Regardless of the final score everyone who watched the game knows Purdue blew us out

 

[Undone]

GC - You put it very well. Pelini was a jacka$$, and there was good cause due to all of the above to let him go.

The biggest question to me is, was Riley the best we could do in the calendar year of 2014? If that's really the case, it's depressing. So maybe waiting another year for The Guy might have been wise in the medium term outlook. That's what's on my mind currently. I don't despise Riley, I don't want him fired tomorrow. I just think it's relatively obvious that his resume lacks the luster to make one think that he can bring championship football back to Lincoln.