Wow. I can probably find 10 high school coaches just here in the metroplex that could coach NU to a 7-5 record with their schedule this year. How many years are the true fans going to keep saying "if things don't get better next year" before they realize it's never going to happen?
I doubt you can find 10 Dallas-area high school coaches that would win even two games. If that were true, those coaches wouldn't be coaching high school football. Winning football games at the FBS level is not as easy as people seem to think it is. The absolutely great coaches (like Osborne) make it look easy, but that's what makes them great. If winning 7, 8, 9, 10 games were as easy as you (and some others) seem to think, a lot more coaches would be able to do it. But they're not. Because it's hard. It requires a crapload of work, day in and day out. It requires managing 100+ players, plus assistant coaches, plus the media, plus support staff, etc. And none of those things I just mention involve actually coaching the game of football. That's an entirely separate beast to conquer. Thousands have coached college football at the highest level. Many have been successful, but only a handful have really stood out over the 60 years.
Why would you want to keep Bo with a 7-5 record? Last time I checked 7 wins is not progress over 9 wins. And the 5 wins we have right now aren't impressive at all. Our opponents have a combined record of 13-25. The only team we've beat with a winning record is S Dakota St. And they're not even FBS! Had we played Wisky and Ohio St instead of Illinois and Purdue, we might be sitting here at 3-4. Bo's lucky the schedule is easy (supposed to be anyway) or 2013 would be his last at Nebraska.
Again, it's not easy. This schedule is not as difficult as last year's, but winning football games takes a lot of work. I'd probably keep Bo at 7-5 because I'm not someone that thinks the way forward necessarily involves burning something to the ground and starting over from scratch.
Listen very carefully to what I'm going to say here. Even the very best coaches in the history of football (and I'm not saying Bo is at that level, so don't try to twist this) have had down seasons. Saying that 7 wins is not progress over 9 wins is overly simplistic. Let's take Bobby Bowden, for example. You think he's a pretty good coach, right? Won a lot of football games, right? He came to FSU and went 5-6 in his first season. Then he kicked it up a notch, going 10-2, 8-3, 11-1, and 10-2 in his next four seasons. He had things rolling in Tallahassee, playing in consecutive Orange Bowls in 1979 and 1980. But then something happened, and for the next six seasons he won 9 games only twice. During that stretch, he never matched the success he had in his first few seasons. Are records like 6-5, 7-5, or 7-4-1 "progress" over the 11-1 team he had in 1979?
I'm sure you'll tell me that Florida State wasn't very good prior to his arrival. That's true, to a certain extent. The three seasons prior to his arrival, they were terrible. But before that, Florida State was actually a decent team. In a time when teams were playing only 10 regular season games plus an occasional bowl game, FSU was winning 6, 7, 8 games per year. They weren't great, but they weren't the worst team in the country.
By the logic used by many of the people here, Bobby Bowden should have been fired. He took another coach's recruits and fielded some good teams, but by the time he had a team full of nothing but his own recruits, he fell off big time. After going 39-8 over a four year stretch, he went 6-5 and couldn't reach double digit wins for the next SIX seasons. Talk about gravitating towards mediocrity.
What Nebraska fans need to understand is we are not entitled to national championships, conference championships, division championships, bowl games, or even a single win. We are entitled to NOTHING. Just like every other team out there, we have to earn our wins. The fact that Tom Osborne and Bob Devaney won a crapload of games has very little bearing on what we are doing in 2013. This is not to say that expectations should be lowered. No one should be HAPPY with 7-5 at Nebraska, just based on the simple fact that we ARE one of the big spenders, one of the heavyweights in the game. It just means that we need to be realistic and understand that just because there is a short term slip, it doesn't necessarily mean there are long term problems.
When a guy wins over 70% of his games throughout his first 5 seasons (especially after taking over for a complete train wreck), you'd think he could suffer through a 7 or 8 win season.
It happened to Bobby Bowden (as explained in this post).
It happened to Urban Meyer at Florida (8-5).
It appears to be happening to Chris Petersen this year (5-3).
It happened to Gary Patterson several times (6-6, 5-6, 8-5, 7-6, currently 3-5)
It happened to Nick Saban (8-4, 8-5, 9-3 in 5 of his seasons at LSU, and that doesn't include his poor record at MSU)
Pretty much any coach that you can find has had a disappointing season in which they only won 5, 6, or 7 games (or worse). Barry Switzer had three straight years where he won fewer than 9 games. Joe Paterno had a number of years like that as well. Bo Schembechler. Woody Hayes. Even Bud Wilkinson.
In fact, the only one in the past 50 years that DIDN'T ever have a season like that is Tom Osborne.
It's unrealistic, and unfair, to hold any coach to that standard.
