Athletic Directors
- Thread starter regoratsginrom
- Start date
I suppose it depends on your metrics. Devaney is the last good AD as far as hiring football coaches. Byrne did bring in John Cook for volleyball. Moos hired Hoiberg and Bolt. Osborne got us out of the Big 12 into a far more financially stable conference.
Then, based off your list, Moos, Osborne, or Byrne. Osborne hired Pelini. Byrne hired Solich and Cook. Moos hired Hoiberg. Only one coach is still here and succeeding.
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Byrne actually didn’t hire Solich, TO appointed him the job after the 1997 seasons.
Byrne didn’t hire Solich
Not sure Byrne really hired Cook, either. But he did sign off on Terry Pettit's succession plan, so he deserves credit for that.
Byrne's best hire was Dave Van Horn, whom he hired after John Sanders threw a tantrum at the notion that the baseball program needed to step up its game to be competitive in the Big 12. Van Horn was truly a home run hire (pun intended).
Byrne was probably the most qualified and capable of the list. It’s pretty easy to hate on ADs. Devaney kept all the money for football. Byrne used football revenue to support the other sports. The rest of those guys? The level of hate varies.
The real question is who hired Bob. That’s the best AD.
Bryne didn’t hire Frank or Cook they were handpicked by TO and TP .
Very arguable as to whether that was actually a good thing in the bigger picture, though. All that "financial stability" came at the cost of torpedoing the football program. Bad cultural fit, no history with any teams, worse geography, yada, yada, yada. It's been discussed to death. But no way is that an automatic check mark in the pro column.
The Bob Father!
Bob Devaney - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Certainly a number of thing to dislike about the Big 10, but the administration at NU should get most of the credit for torpedoing the football program not the conference. Oregon is a much bigger cultural/geographic odd duck (pun intended) than NU in the BG10, and if anything, they have upped their game since joining the conference.
Not sure I agree with that at all. In case you hadn't noticed, the B1G was pretty left leaning before all the left coast schools from the Pac joined. But either way, you can't really look at a school like Oregon, due to Phil Knight, as anything but a complete and total outlier. NU in the B1G was always and continues to be a square peg in a round hole. But hey, money money money (which has benefited our football program exactly zero) right?
Most college towns are left left leaning, including Lincoln. My point, is our problems on the field didn't begin when we joined the Big 10 conference. We hadn't won a conference title 11 years running when we left the Big 12 and had become a fringe Top 25 program by the time Pelini was fired. Better than today, sure, but a far cry from the perennial top 10 program it had been for 30+ years. The guys our administration have hired since Pelini have all proven to be 500 (or worse) coaches across their careers - that seems like an us problem, not a conference affiliation problem.
We had a more natural extended recruiting base in Texas when we were in the Big12. I do think the move made recruiting a little more difficult. Other than that, it’s an us problem.
Well, you might be right to a small slight little extent. But if our problems were starting to smolder when we were in the Big 12, there is no question that moving to the B1G poured gasoline on them with a blowtorch. Just look at the spiral after year one in this sh*t league.
Lets refresh on the facts - NU won 9-10 games under Pelini its first 4 years in the Big 10. Pelini won 9-10 games each year whether his team was in the Big 12 or Big 10. The spiral began in year 5 in the Big 10 - after Pelini was fired and Riley was hired. The administration (Eichorst/Perlman) decided that 9-10 wins while putting up with Bo's surly demeanor and other issues wasn't going to cut it, so we hired a guy who was a 500 coach across many years at a lower tier P5 school, sandwiched between 3 seasons in the NFL where he had a record of 14-34. The two guys hired since Riley have career head coaching records of 117-134 (47% win percentage). The Big 10 conference isn't picking our head coaches.
It irritates me when we conveniently forget as a fanbase how badly we get killed by teams that are better than us while under Pelini. We got 9 cheap wins with ****** losses.
Rhule isn't gonna cut it here, and I'm sure many people would rather get a coach that has a reputable track record of success that can translate well/decently into D1 football. Nebraska seems to have money, and the university would rather pick character coaches instead of coaches that can succeed and put their players in a good spot.
It's tiring.
Eh, not entirely accurate. First of all, we were averaging 10 wins per year our last 2 years in the Big 12. That number fell to 9 when we move to the B1G. Not a huge fall I know, but it began the spiral. Next, we finished with an average rating of 16.5 our last two years in the Big 12. That number falls 7 placings in the B1G. Bo won or tied to win the division all 3 years he was in the Big 12. He won it once in 4 years in the B1G. If you don't think we were more competitive in the Big 12 than we were in the B1G, I don't know what to tell you.
I'm not claiming NU wasn't more successful in the Big 12 than the Big 10, and I can understand your dislike of the Big 10. I simply don't agree with your premise our football program got "torpedoed" as you stated by the move to the Big 10 conference. I think that Osborne made the best decision to leave the Big 12 based on the information he had at the time given the instability of the Big 12 back then. I think our football program got torpedoed primarily by the decisions of the athletic administrators and coaches they chose to lead the football program after Pelini was fired. The BB program just had its best season in its history, the men's and women's baseball and softball teams are currently #2 and #1 in the conference, and the VB team won the Big 10 and remains a national power. I can't see how the conference is only dragging down the football program.
Agree to disagree on the definition of torpedoed then, I guess. We've won less and I personally have enjoyed it a whole lot less, as have most other fans. And quite frankly, I could care less about those other sports when most fans' main interest, football, is in the crapper.
Sorry, you are wrong. Byrne hired both of them. It may have been on recommendations, but he was still the one that had to pull the trigger and produce the contract.
I think there’s a little more that goes into those trends that you’re mentioning here as well… when Bo came in he was working with some really good players that were left behind by Callahan. People also forget that Bo didn’t like to recruit. I mention that to say after about two to three years of being the HC you’re starting to get your own players mixed in with the previous staffs, and probably around 3 to 4 years you’re starting to work primarily with your own recruits.
with that said you can’t point at one thing and say that is the sole reason for the downfall. I’d say yes moving to the BIG 10 has us face better competition on a regular basis, which I don’t know why anyone would be upset with that. Once you start playing with the big boys in any sport you have a few options, you can shut up, get to work and get better, or you can make excuses and blame others instead of looking at the reality…
to me the reality is our administration started to worry more about the bottom dollar and public image over worrying about creating sustainable success… funny enough the route the chose will start to lose them money as our most loyal supporters age out.. we’re what like 29 years since our last championship? Let that sink in… even if you were born on that same day, you’re now 29 years old, and don’t even remember it. The kids that are starting to sign now have only heard about our success from their parents that witnessed it… the kids themselves, who are picking where they want to go, only see a program that has failed to develop and produce NFL talent for years now. As a parent of a child that is in that age range of choosing schools (he’s baseball, not football) but if it was football even as an avid husker fan, I’d have to question how much I’d want him to go to a program that can’t develop him further.
He was absolutely forced to hire Frank.after Tom announced his retirement Bill was after Mack Brown or Likely Bob Stoops ( Florida DC) at the time. You are one of these Naive people that think ADs have absolute power at these universities.
TO was Assistant Athletic Director at time he named Frank. Had been for some years at that point. Solich was and had been Assistant HC for several years as well. This was not some Palace Coup here, was a planned succesion that many were aware of.
At that time TO did have pretty much complete control without a doubt.
Um. Tom announced that Frank was succeeding him while Byrne was at a meeting out of town. Byrne wanted to do a search but there was no way he could buck Tom’s public announcement. Neither hire was a “recommendation”. He was told what was going to happen. Cook had his blessing. Frank did not and that’s one of the reasons Byrne left.
