A new day has dawned. Today the embarrassment stings a little less. Reality is beginning to set in. Nebraska football is in for a rough few years. Yes, it’s been a little rough here and there dating back to 2001, but it’s going to get rougher.
There are some lessons to be learned here. Number one, there is no guarantee that, when you make changes to try to improve something, it doesn’t make it worse. My daughter has ADD, and so we’ve embarked on a journey to improve that through medication. But so far, we’ve traded one problem for two or three others (side effects). Only time will tell if we are just making a bad situation worse.
So it goes when you make organizational changes in an effort to improve. I would rate Nebraska as an above average program under Pelini most of the time. But he got fired because he couldn’t figure out who the boss was. He publicly dared the A.D. to fire him several times, and who knows how many other such dares were in a more private setting. You just can’t do that and stay employed.
So a change was made. And the A.D., almost from the start, had his eye on a single candidate. A genuinely nice candidate who had very mediocre success most of his career, dotted with an occasional good season. The idea was, here is a guy with limited talent, but with very good talent, might possibly turn out to be a good coach. That was Eichorst’s gamble.
And five games in, it appears that Eichorst’s gamble with ultimately cost him his own job. Eichorst underestimated the gamble, looking only at the fact that here was a guy having some reasonably good seasons here and there at a university living in big brother’s shadow (i.e. Oregon). Eichorst forgot to examine the preferred offensive scheme of Riley, a West Coast variety offense that is predicated on the passing game.
Or more likely, Eichorst gambled that the coach wouldn’t necessarily employ such a scheme in a physical, run-first conference, or at least that the scheme would be sufficiently modified to make it work. As it turns out, it is Callahan all over, except for the fact that Riley isn’t as publicly obstinate about it. But Langsdorf revealed their hand when he was quoted as saying (paraphrase) that “we didn’t want to run the ball first and get into a passing situation on second-and-long.”
And there you have it in a nutshell: We ARE in fact trying to convert to a pass-first scheme, player personnel and final score be damned. For those of you who were here in 2004, is this starting to look familiar?
Now, we all know full well that pass-first schemes will not work in the Big 10. It’s been tried before and failed miserably. See Rich Rodriguez at Michigan for a recent example. That said, there is always a chance that Riley & Co. will realize all of this after this season and go back to the drawing board. There is a chance they chuck the West Coast playbook and return NU to a power run game, which is in the end the only scheme that will win in the conference. But I don’t see that happening. We hired a West Coast Offense guy, and he surrounded himself with other West Coast Offense guys.
So now we will endure the next three years for all of this to come to another disappointing end, and hopefully pick up the pieces and resume the program on our next hire, and by 2020 we are playing some ball again. But another bad hire, it could be 2025, 2030, who knows. Nebraska will rise again. The only question is, will I live to see it?
Go Big Red.
There are some lessons to be learned here. Number one, there is no guarantee that, when you make changes to try to improve something, it doesn’t make it worse. My daughter has ADD, and so we’ve embarked on a journey to improve that through medication. But so far, we’ve traded one problem for two or three others (side effects). Only time will tell if we are just making a bad situation worse.
So it goes when you make organizational changes in an effort to improve. I would rate Nebraska as an above average program under Pelini most of the time. But he got fired because he couldn’t figure out who the boss was. He publicly dared the A.D. to fire him several times, and who knows how many other such dares were in a more private setting. You just can’t do that and stay employed.
So a change was made. And the A.D., almost from the start, had his eye on a single candidate. A genuinely nice candidate who had very mediocre success most of his career, dotted with an occasional good season. The idea was, here is a guy with limited talent, but with very good talent, might possibly turn out to be a good coach. That was Eichorst’s gamble.
And five games in, it appears that Eichorst’s gamble with ultimately cost him his own job. Eichorst underestimated the gamble, looking only at the fact that here was a guy having some reasonably good seasons here and there at a university living in big brother’s shadow (i.e. Oregon). Eichorst forgot to examine the preferred offensive scheme of Riley, a West Coast variety offense that is predicated on the passing game.
Or more likely, Eichorst gambled that the coach wouldn’t necessarily employ such a scheme in a physical, run-first conference, or at least that the scheme would be sufficiently modified to make it work. As it turns out, it is Callahan all over, except for the fact that Riley isn’t as publicly obstinate about it. But Langsdorf revealed their hand when he was quoted as saying (paraphrase) that “we didn’t want to run the ball first and get into a passing situation on second-and-long.”
And there you have it in a nutshell: We ARE in fact trying to convert to a pass-first scheme, player personnel and final score be damned. For those of you who were here in 2004, is this starting to look familiar?
Now, we all know full well that pass-first schemes will not work in the Big 10. It’s been tried before and failed miserably. See Rich Rodriguez at Michigan for a recent example. That said, there is always a chance that Riley & Co. will realize all of this after this season and go back to the drawing board. There is a chance they chuck the West Coast playbook and return NU to a power run game, which is in the end the only scheme that will win in the conference. But I don’t see that happening. We hired a West Coast Offense guy, and he surrounded himself with other West Coast Offense guys.
So now we will endure the next three years for all of this to come to another disappointing end, and hopefully pick up the pieces and resume the program on our next hire, and by 2020 we are playing some ball again. But another bad hire, it could be 2025, 2030, who knows. Nebraska will rise again. The only question is, will I live to see it?
Go Big Red.
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