I have long argued that (as a few of you have pointed out) as soon as Osborne retired, that was the beginning of the decline.
Reasons:
1.) Tom Osborne is one of the all-time best college football coaches, and his offensive scheme was brilliant. I agree that he would have continued to evolve it based on how the game was changing, and it would have gotten towards what we are going to be doing now (or what Urban did, etc).
2.) The entire Nebraska program was built around Tom Osborne; he ran it, he had his coaches, everyone was on the same page, he adopted really great tactics to cover up the inherent weaknesses of coaching at Nebraska, and players wanted to play for him. Once that went away, and without finding a similarly awesome coach to replace him, the entire program began to collapse.
That is not a knock on Solich; I think he is a good coach. But he's not all-time best material and it showed.
What Peterson then did kind of made sense, from this perspective ("Oh, I need to go find the best coach I can with a new style to try to induce an Osborne situation again!"), he just picked a terrible coach and was a stupid, stubborn jackass. Instead of helping, his choices turbo-charged the slide into oblivion.
Pellini was a step in the right direction, he just wound up not being major-program coaching material from a personality standpoint and, sadly, from a coaching standpoint.
Riley was an absolutely dumbass hire. There is almost no excuse for it, other than the thought that must have been rattling around in Eichorst's empty head, which was "Durrrr I must find the least Pellini-like coach I can find!" Riley is a very nice guy and smoothed over some serious problems that were cropping up, but he's an average coach and old. That was absolutely not the right way to go.
Now, we have Frost. Frost is the first Osborne-esque guy we've had here since Osborne.
GBR!
