Bo Pelini: Winning Coach For Hire

Bo Pelini is one of the winningest college football coaches in recent history. Today, he is unemployed.

I still remember when Bo Pelini was first hired as the head coach at Nebraska. The Huskers were coming off the darkest stretch of football since before the Bob Devaney days back in 1962. The once mighty program had just suffered its second losing season since 1961 and the state was in turmoil.

That’s not hyperbole, either.

In Nebraska, college football is what they do. There are a lot of places around the country that make that claim, but there simply isn’t another state with only one major college team and no professional teams where the fans rally around a college program like Nebraska. The four-year stretch of the Bill Callahan-era had cast a dark cloud over the state, as the thing that gave the people of Nebraska more pride than anything else had suddenly become nothing to be proud of.

Enter Bo Pelini.

Pelini was hired to replace Callahan in 2008, a little over four years after he led the Huskers to a win in the Alamo Bowl over Michigan State as the interim head coach. The players carried him off the field as they and the fans chanted his name. Nebraska had just fired Frank Solich — a coach who led the Huskers to 58 wins in six seasons.  Bo was the people’s choice to replace him, but they’d have to wait.

When Bo finally did get the job, the state celebrated. They had the right guy. They had a guy who knew Nebraska football and had a good feel for the pulse of the fans. Local merchants started selling officially licensed Husker gear with his name on it.

It was a state-wide, Big Red celebration. The Huskers were going to be a winning team again.

Bo Pelini did not disappoint. In his first season, he led the Huskers to a 9-4 mark and a win over Dabo Sweeney’s Clemson Tigers in the Gator Bowl. He followed that season up with a 10-4 season and a blowout win over Arizona in the Holiday Bowl. Nebraska was back on the national scene. Bo Pelini made the claim himself in an on-field interview after the game, and the fans roared.

As the next five seasons wore on, Pelini continued to win nine and ten games a season consistently, keeping his team in the conversation for division and conference titles every year for much of the season. He led the Huskers to two Big 12 Conference championship game appearances and one in the Big Ten. Early on, fans seemed to be uneasy-but-accepting of his fiery sideline demeanor, so long as the team was winning games.

Somewhere along the line, that changed. I live in Nebraska and have watched every game of the Pelini era. I can’t put my finger on the exact moment when it changed. Some say it was the 2010 home loss to Texas that was supposed to be Nebraska’s official comeback party. I thought it might have been during the win over Penn State in 2012, where one of his players snapped back at him on the sidelines.

Nobody seems to know when for sure, but somewhere along the way, half of the Husker fan base fell out of love with Pelini and a state was divided into two groups: Bo-leavers and Bo-lievers.

One side was full of people who grew up in the 1990s and watched Tom Osborne win three national titles in four years. Those people were raised by parents who grew up in the 1970s who watched Bob Devaney bring home two national championships. That was the standard in their minds. Nebraska had done it once, so there was no reason they couldn’t do it again. Any coach who could not get them back to those glory days was not worth keeping around.

Those were the Bo-leavers.

On the other side were people like myself. We recognized the changes in the college football landscape over the past couple of decades. We saw how tough it was to just win games in college football and admired Pelini for being able to win at the rate he did. The fact that he wasn’t winning conference and national titles didn’t bother us. He won four division championships and Nebraska was a winning team again. We remembered how bad it could get.

This past Sunday, the Bo-leavers won out. Just like in 2003, a young up-and-coming athletic director sided with the half of the fan base that thought Nebraska deserved better for no other reason than the fact that it was Nebraska.  Nebraska had decided to gamble the known for the unknown in the name of reclaiming past glory. Bo Pelini was fired.

Since Pelini’s firing, the state has been obsessed with the new coaching search. Rumors of dozens of different coaches being spotted in and around Lincoln and Omaha have surfaced, all quickly debunked on the internet. There wasn’t really any talk or thought about Bo Pelini or where he would end up.

On Tuesday, news broke that Pelini has visited South Carolina to talk about a potential position on Steve Spurrier’s staff. That’s been the only sign of Pelini moving on, even if the state of Nebraska did so just minutes after he was fired.

At the end of the day, a successful and winning football coach is out there, unemployed and waiting to turn another program around. Over the past seven seasons, two coaches in college football have won nine or more games in each of those seasons. One is named Nick Saban. The other is named Bo Pelini.

Pelini’s sins in the eyes of Husker Nation are not winning championships, not beating teams who were favored to beat him and losing in blowout fashion all too often. Personally, I feel like it was the blowouts that got him fired at Nebraska. That was the disconnect. In Pelini’s eyes, a loss was a loss. In Nebraska’s eyes, they wanted to at least make sure they looked good in a pair of jeans while they fell on their faces.

Bo Pelini is a winning football coach and he is available.

Are you a fan of a school who has struggled to win football games as of late? Are you willing to take on a coach with a larger than life personality who spits fire and wears his emotions on his sleeve? Are you willing to accept that college football has changed and 128 teams now battle on equal ground for the same title?

If you answered yes to all of those questions, then your school — regardless of the conference they play in — just might be a good fit for Bo Pelini.

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