A Sad Day in Husker Nation

Husker Nation, you astonish me – and not a in good way.  I’ve been a Husker fan for as long as I can remember.  I was a 1^st grader in 1985 when Tom Osborne lost to Barry Switzer and Oklahoma; it happened again in ’86.  I cried when UCLA beat us in 1988.  I still have nightmares of the 62-36 debacle in Boulder in 2001.  I also remember the trouncing we took at the hands of Georgia Tech in 1990 and people calling for Tom Osborne’s job.  General sentiment was that he couldn’t win the “big one” and the program would never reach the heights it had seen under Bob Devaney.  I, like many of you, have both celebrated and mourned with the program.  I am, once again, in mourning.  This is not because the team is currently 2-4 and has lost 4 games in the most heartbreaking fashion possible (though it does hurt), but because we are so divided that we can’t get on board to support the team we all love. 

Bo Pelini is gone.  He’s not coming back.  Neither is Tom Osborne, Tommy Frazier, Turner Gill or Mike Rozier.  Ahman Green is not going to run out of the tunnel and carry us to victory, and Grant Wistrom isn’t going to chase anyone down in the backfield.  Those days are gone.  Own it, Nebraska.  Living with ghosts almost drove Osborne to Colorado and that same issue now is crushing our young men with the red “N” on their helmets.  Instead of building our team up, we are tearing them down. 

There’s no beating around the bush on this one, so I’ll just jump right into it: calling for the firing of Mike Riley six games into his first year is absolutely asinine.  In our microwave society, where we can send a Tweet to order a pizza, or click a button to have a laptop delivered to our doorstep, we have become the Veruca Salt of college football.  “I want an Oompa Loompa!  I want you to get me an Oompa Loompa right away!”  It sounds ridiculous.

Creating a culture takes time, but changing an established culture takes even longer.  Anyone who has played football knows that it is more than just X’s and O’s.  The game is undoubtedly more mental than physical.  Changing a mindset can take some time and a lot of work.  It doesn’t happen overnight. 

I can hear the retorts now, “Jim Harbaugh, Urban Meyer, Jimbo Fisher…they all turned it around in their first year.” 

Well I see your Harbaugh and I raise you Nick Saban, Bill Belichick and the legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant.  It took these coaches time to instill a culture before it started producing results, but we now view all of these coaches as amongst the best in their profession.  On top of that, every situation is different.  Harbaugh and Meyer came into “prodigal son” circumstances where they returned home as the conquering hero.    Let’s also admit that there are only a handful elite level coaches in all of college football, and expecting Riley to perform like those coaches right out of the gate, or maybe ever, is completely unrealistic.  We can hope for that, but expecting it is as absurd as expecting Tommy Armstrong to be Tom Brady and Terrell Newby to be Barry Sanders.  Not all coaches, players or teams are created equally. 

We need to be honest to ourselves about something else too: a 2-4 record doesn’t cut it at Nebraska.  I know it, you know it, and you can bet for damn sure the players and the coaches know it.  But we also need to be realistic about numbers not telling the whole story.  This team is still learning how to win.  Realize that we are literally one knocked down hail mary, one completed pass in overtime, one run call, and a field goal being about 4 inches more to the right from being undefeated.  Obviously, we are not because we didn’t make the necessary plays and even if we had, that would not change the deficiencies we have as a team, but let’s keep some level of perspective on the season. 

This is the team we would have seen last year if it weren’t for Ameer Abdullah donning a Superman cape time after time, and De’Mornay Pierson-El pulling our fat out of the fire in a number of games.  It is 2015, and we don’t have an abundance of NFL-caliber playmakers on the field.  We have players that were recruited by a different staff and for a different system, being asked to buy-in on following coaches that didn’t recruit them and are asking them to play roles differently than the ones they came to the program to play.  To top it all off, we have had more injuries than I can remember in recent history. 

The point of it all is this: Mike Riley is here.  At this juncture, there is nothing that is going to change that fact.  He may or may not be the man to get this program back to national prominence, the fact-of-the-matter is we don’t know, but to act like he is undoubtedly the wrong guy six games into his Cornhusker coaching career is ludicrous.  The constant complaining and hand-wringing by some of our fanbase is mind-boggling.  “Good things come to those who wait” is the old saying, not, “good things come to the impatient.”  But go ahead and keep whining because you want it right now, Veruca, and you’ll find yourself down the garbage shoot.