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Lubick vs. Diaco? Sip.

Whether Riley yet realized that he was a lame duck or not--I don't think he did--Diaco certainly did, especially after Moos was hired.
Good post. I agree with all you said about Diaco. I do think Riley knew his tenure at NU would be short-lived though after his first couple losses and he backed out of his new house deal. Remember when he got here and there was a long drama about his family finding the right house because his wife was allergic to certain paints. They finally found a house that his wife was not allergic to and were happy that it was big enough to bring his daughter and grandkid(s) to Lincoln. It was after one of his early losses that his wife suddenly has an allergic reaction in the house so they immediately sell it and go back to renting in the Haymarket area. I could be all wrong and it really never mattered then and certainly doesn't matter now. Riley is a great human being but that doesn't mean he can't act like a cunning fox.
 

Sorry, I don't live within Husker radio range to hear what Sip writes about , but at no time did I feel there was any similarity between the two hires. So tell me Nebraskans if that is true about the complaints.
agree... the comparison is completely from left-field. Strange article.
 
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Good post. I agree with all you said about Diaco. I do think Riley knew his tenure at NU would be short-lived though after his first couple losses and he backed out of his new house deal. Remember when he got here and there was a long drama about his family finding the right house because his wife was allergic to certain paints. They finally found a house that his wife was not allergic to and were happy that it was big enough to bring his daughter and grandkid(s) to Lincoln. It was after one of his early losses that his wife suddenly has an allergic reaction in the house so they immediately sell it and go back to renting in the Haymarket area. I could be all wrong and it really never mattered then and certainly doesn't matter now. Riley is a great human being but that doesn't mean he can't act like a cunning fox.

Did you see his teams? Just kidding....he is a great human and was while at NU, but i've never heard him described as a cunning fox.
 



I have come to the same point in hindsight. I don't think Diaco is any sort of football genius or anything similar, but he's been successful as a DC in environments as diverse as Notre Dame and Louisiana Tech; meanwhile, Nebraska hasn't been consistently good at defense for almost a decade, so ... the problem was likely as much more about where he was than who he was. Once I was willing to admit that, then I could put myself in his situation when he showed up in Lincoln, and then everything made a lot more sense to me.

Diaco played at Iowa but was recruited by Nebraska. I don't think that he would have been good enough to see the field at Nebraska from 92 to '95, which is when he played, and he think that he was smart enough to figure that out, which is why he ended up choosing a mid-90s Iowa team that was less than impressive. I believe him that when he came to Nebraska he was in awe of the program, and I think that the facilities and the fans would have added to that awe when he showed up. In the summer of 2017 Nebraska had only had 3 losing seasons in the past half-century, and those days seemed to be behind us. I think that it would have been natural for him to believe what Eichorst believed, which is that Banker wasn't a B1G-level DC, and that Diaco could help put Nebraska over the top. Unless he was spending a lot of time in the weight room, all that he had to judge the quality of his defense was the Nebraska offense that it was lining up against, and I imagine that it looked better than mediocre. So imagine his surprise when Arkansas State showed up and shoved the ball down our throats. I imagine that he was confused by what he was seeing, and it probably didn't make sense for quite awhile. By the time you get to the famous "can you see the strain" post-game interview at Northwestern, I think that he was in full meltdown, realizing how bad the state of the program was, and realizing that people were expecting him to coach up a bunch of non-NFL level defenders to somehow shore up an offense that was consistently hemorrhaging points to the opposing team via pick-6 TDs, etc., in a way that the defense couldn't even help. Once Eichorst was fired, he had lost the ally in admin that had been the main source of bringing him to the program. Whether Riley yet realized that he was a lame duck or not--I don't think he did--Diaco certainly did, especially after Moos was hired. Being a decent DC in an impossible situation with sub-level talent and Titanic expectations, he didn't know what to do. He tried to hide his frustration and consternation with a William F. Buckley-level of vocabulary, but fans and media didn't need a thesaurus to know the difference between chicken soup and chicken crap. End of Nebraska story.

Now his career is rehabilitated, and he's at Purdue, and his first game at Purdue will be against the same Nebraska team that was probably a greater career failure than his lackluster tenure as UConn's head coach. What do those two things now have in common, besides Diaco? Scott Frost. When UCF beat UConn, Frost famously didn't bother to even pick up Diaco's homemade forced "ConnFLiCT" trophy, and everybody jumps on the bandwagon of loving a winner or mocking a loser, and Diaco became a pathetic figure. Nebraska, which had seemed like his shot at redemption, then followed his time at UConn by taking his career and reputation even lower.

Do you suppose he might be working on a gameplan against Nebraska already?
That’s what has me scared about the Purdue game. His specialty is preventing the big play and we are not exactly a grind it out offense.
 



Did you see his teams? Just kidding....he is a great human and was while at NU, but i've never heard him described as a cunning fox.
He was the karma we deserved. The reference to fox was metaphorically of course. Cunning may be over the top but I would imagine a 'cfo type' may say he had a good year or two.
 
Jesus would throw a Hail Mary on every play and they'd all go for touchdowns.

I agree Lubick has some earmarks of not being a longterm hire, but maybe that's ok here. Frost gets a year or several of a second set of high caliber offensive eyes plus some good reciever coaching and recruitng and then hires somebody new. Since Frost is already a big dog on O and will ensure continuity there regardless, it doesn't have to be bad. Osborne's way of keeping coaches a long time had a lot to recommend it, but it's not the only way. Some pretty good coaches deal with lots of turnover.
 
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I agree Lubick has some earmarks of not being a longterm hire, but maybe that's ok here. Frost gets a year or several of a second set of high caliber offensive eyes plus some good reciever coaching and recruitng and then hires somebody new.

I agree and that's why I made these 2 posts earlier;

Wow. I wonder if someone should let Coach Frost know that Lubick isn't totally bought in.

:Popcorn:
Wow. I wonder if someone should let Coach Frost know that Lubick still has his house in Colorado.

:Popcorn:

I was being somewhat sarcastic but, if we're talking about it, I think Scott probably has a handle on it. I wouldn't doubt they discussed this before coming to an agreement. :nod:
 
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I wouldn't doubt they discussed this before coming to an agreement.
It's probably impossible to estimate how transparent Frost and his staff are with one another, especially when it comes to their career choices. I think that a lot of fans assume that the hiring/firing process for Frost's staff looks something like what you'd expect at your place of work, but they don't operate that way. When they were at UCF, and he started getting job offers, when they had staff meetings he would wait until the end of the meeting then lay out whatever offers or inquiries he was receiving, and they would then discuss as an entire staff the pros and cons of each potential hire. It was ALWAYS assumed by Frost that he would ONLY take a job if he could bring his whole staff, but it's also understood by all parties that each coach needs to make whatever decisions are best for him. They even discussed the dynamics of how hiring certain coaches would affect their families because the coaches' wives are each other's support network, so they want to make sure that the wives click with one another also. They don't have to be best friends, but if a top-notch coach has a reputation as a ladies' man, or if his wife likes to bring the drama, Frost isn't hiring that coach. The long-term effects aren't worth it for the short-term tradeoff.

Before Frost was ever hired at Oregon he had had discussions with Mike Bellotti (who was actually the head coach of Oregon at the time of the hiring process) and Chip Kelly about what his career aspirations were, what he'd like the timeline to look like, etc. He was actually a defensive coach at UNI at the time, but the Oregon coaches told him that he'd be able to climb higher more quickly at Oregon on the offensive side, which was why they encouraged him to make the change. He had no special association with being a WRs coach, but they could recognize that he had a brilliant mind, that he was hard-working, and that he could easily connect and build relationships with a wide variety of people,... and he was relatively low maintenance. That's what Bellotti and Kelly wanted, and they said that they'd figure out the best fit for him eventually, but they mostly just wanted to get him on staff. Before he was even hired as a WRs coach, Bellotti was already looking ahead to the move that he was about to make from Head Coach to AD, which meant promoting Kelly from OC to Head Coach, which meant promoting Helfrich to OC, and they already had in mind that Frost would follow Helfrich. Frost thinks the same way. That affects how the whole staff views themselves.

I haven't seen it reported by any media folks, but there were rumors that Greg Austin wasn't very happy in Lincoln this past season. If that's true, he wasn't going to go sulking around and plotting what to do next in private. He would have gone to Frost and plainly told him what was upsetting him. If that was true--and I see lots of reasons to suspect that it was--Frost's promotion of him to running game coordinator was Frost's way of both solving a team problem--Austin could do more to improve the overall running game--and the personnel/staff problem of how to help Austin want to stay in Lincoln. Ditto for Held and his title of "Recruiting Coordinator," which I suspect will help Held as he recruits, and it will probably give him a bit more say (possibly even some veto power) in who they offer and go after. Austin cares passionately about the running game not working properly, and Held cares passionately about recruiting, so Frost made moves to help both out so that they could do more with where the passion was, and where it would be for the good of the team.

How does all of this connect to Lubick and how long to expect him to be at Nebraska? I'm saying that I'd be utterly shocked if there are any secrets about what both sides (Frost/Nebraska and Lubick) want and expect to get out of the arrangement. Assuming that Lubick's family continues to live in Fort Collins, that's a blinking neon light to me that both he and Frost have no expectations for him to be working at Nebraska indefinitely, and both sides are more than fine with that. If Lubick's family is still in Fort Collins, not only will Lubick be making frequent trips back there, but he'll be encouraged to do so by Frost, especially as it appears that Lubick has a bit of an OCD tendency that leads to being a workaholic if there aren't good boundaries. The irony is that a lot of folks here seem to think that a coach like Lubick can't do his job if he's not unhealthily laser-focused SOLELY on his job, but the opposite is true: if a coach's family life isn't healthy, it's impossible to be able to focus on your job enough to do it well.

Lubick is going to be a great coach at Nebraska and a great addition to the program. He also won't be in Lincoln 5 years from now, and that's probably ideal for everyone.
 



^^I kind of think that's what I posted, just not in such detail, at least it's what I meant.^^

:Biggrin:

The irony is that a lot of folks here seem to think that a coach like Lubick can't do his job if he's not unhealthily laser-focused SOLELY on his job, but the opposite is true: if a coach's family life isn't healthy, it's impossible to be able to focus on your job enough to do it well.

I agree.
 
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