Nebraska firing Bo Pelini is a mistake

Poor old Bo Pelini! The guy has done nothing but rack up nine or ten-win seasons (with winning conference records, too) and a 67-27 overall record in his seven-year tenure at Nebraska, split between the Big XII and the Big Ten conferences.

However, that’s apparently not enough to keep his job in Lincoln, and I firmly believe that being fired off the back of a fairly-impressive 9-3 season isn’t just a strange move, but also, I think, a bad move by the powers-that-be overseeing the Cornhuskers program.

I’m going to put it out there and say that Nebraska fans, who certainly pushed hard for Pelini to be ousted, are living in the past. They’re stuck in the late 1990s/early 2000s when the Cornhuskers were legitimate National Title contenders.

I don’t think that’s the case anymore, and it’ll be many years – if at all – before Nebraska returns to those giddy heights. It’s okay to want to have a coach come in and rack up wins and titles like they’re Vince Lombardi, but you’ve also gotta be a realist.

The knock on Pelini in Lincoln was that despite his impressive record, he didn’t win a conference championship. Oh, he came close. Remember the 13-12 loss to Texas in the Big XII title game a few years back?

The Huskers were one strange play away from recording a memorable 12-10 win over a red-hot Texas squad that had weapons everywhere, starting with Colt McCoy at quarterback and Jordan Shipley as his star receiver.

Then there was the Big Ten championship game of 2011, in which Nebraska were favoured to win over a five-loss Wisconsin team who limped their way into the conference title game pretty much because everyone else in the division shot themselves in the foot again and again.

But the Badgers made the Huskers look horrible, gashing them in a 70-31 blow-out that no one saw coming.

Similar in tone was this year’s Nebraska versus Wisconsin contest, where Badger running back Melvin Gordon embarrassed a school where solid, shut-down defence is a badge of honour, rushing for a then-NCAA single game record of 408 yards. The score line wasn’t quite as brutal, but the yardage given up hurt more.

It’s hard to explain away such results, and those twin failures are obviously fresh in the minds of Nebraska fans and the school’s athletic department.

They’re losses that’re made more shocking because of Pelini’s pedigree. Here was a guy who came in with the reputation of being a defensive mastermind. He was part of Urban Meyer’s championship-winning squad with Florida, and their D was lights out.

Coaching defence was part of what secured Pelini the Nebraska job in the first place.

Too often, the Huskers have been embarrassed like that.

The proud Blackshirt tradition of defensive excellence on the field at Memorial Stadium, sold out for more than 300 consecutive games, was being tarnished, and the school obviously decided they wouldn’t stand for it.

The other contributing factor had to be that Pelini, in seven seasons, didn’t deliver his school a conference championship or a major Bowl win.

Sure, he was better than the disastrous Bill Callahan, but fans in Lincoln are still clamouring for a return to the days of Osborne and Bob Devaney, and they’re not happy with seasons that don’t end with major hardware.

Of course that’s understandable, but the times have changed. The fact that Pelini delivered as many wins as he has in a state that doesn’t produce much in the way of A-grade prospects should be applauded.

Look at traditional college powers – USC, Alabama, Texas, Florida and others – and you see that they come from states where football talent pretty is pretty much in the water. Nebraska doesn’t have that same sort of ready-and-waiting talent to scoop up and put on the football field. So they’ll always be at a disadvantage.

Despite what folks in the state of Nebraska will tell you, the Cornhuskers job isn’t an elite one at the moment, which means that it won’t attract the very cream of the coaching crop.

Yes, the school had a good run for a while, but competing against the Ohio State’s and Michigan State’s of the world, as they are in the Big Ten, is a different kettle of fish.

Those two schools have outgrown Nebraska. And most of the rest of the conference, too. The divide between the have’s and the have not’s in the Big Ten has never been bigger. Nebraska? Well, they’re somewhere in between.

Let’s face it, Nebraska will, for the foreseeable future, be a middle-of-the-conference program in the Big Ten and might occasionally be elevated with the recruitment of one of those players who is a once-in-a-generation type.

The Nebraska fans won’t be happy to hear that, but it’s the truth. The landscape has shifted under their feet.

Pelini’s firing smacks of a fan-led revolt. They didn’t like that he wasn’t winning National Championships like Osborne and Devaney, so they did their best to tip him out of his seat, and succeeded.

Sure, Pelini was prickly, irascible and controversial at times, but the fact remains that he was also a damned good football coach.

Nebraska will be lucky to find someone just as good to replace him, and whoever does will always have one eye on newspaper, television and social media. Hard to coach football with one eye on the outside world, right?

Let’s hope that a rabid fan-base with their eye on glory days of the past haven’t doomed their school to more seasons of mediocrity. As for Pelini, he’ll walk into another defensive gig and might end up having the last laugh, too.