Pelini was fired for not winning championships
It seemed that he had reached his peak
if Bo would have won 8 or 9 games a season with class and handled the press and the fans and the politics with class, perhaps he would still be there. I doubt it.
When a coach isn't winning enough, we look for things we don't like to justify his firing.
Everything becomes questionable, sideline demeanor, recruiting, press relations, everything
Riley is a good coach, just WAY too soft.
no discipline, kids running the program
Ed Zachery
Riley wasn't hired to be the greatest coach for the next 2 decades and take them back to greatness, Riley was hired to win 8 or 9 and be a good guy until the next great coach came along. (Scott Frost)
Eichorst couldn't handle Pelini and made a hasty change.
Eichorst was soft.
Frank Solich went 9-4, 12-1, 10-2, 11-2, 7-7, 9-3, was a gentleman in the class of Tom Osborne, and got fired before the Alamo Bowl in 2003. Overall, he went 56-19, averaging 9.33 wins/year. It seems that he was fired because Nebraska was not beating Oklahoma and Texas with any regularity.
Then Nebraska inexplicably hired Bill Callahan, coming off a 4-12 season as HFC of the Oakland Raiders. He went 5-6, 8-4, 9-5, 5-7. Overall, 27-22, averaging 6.5 wins/year. Bill Callahan is not head coaching material. He's not a flaming jackass like Bo Pelini, but it seems that he can't relate to or gain the consistent support of his players.
Bo Pelini went 1-0 (2003 Alamo Bowl), then, following the disaster that was Bill Callahan, 9-4, 10-4, 10-4, 9-4, 10-4, 9-4, 9-3. He never won a conference title, but his divisional finishes were: Big 12N: T-1st, 1st, T-1st; B1G Legends: 3rd, 1st, T-2nd; B1G West T-2nd. His overall record was 67-27, averaging 9.6 wins/year.
So Pelini was the most successful post-Osborne HFC and stayed the longest. But it seems to me that he basically forced the Nebraska admins to fire him. The first leaked audiotape was effectively a kick to the nuts of the University of Nebraska.
In that first one, after many fans left during the 3rd quarter of a comeback win over tOSU, he said: "Our crowd. What a bunch of f***ing fair-weather f***ing—they can all kiss my ass out the f***ing door. 'Cause the day is f***ing coming now. We'll see what they can do when I'm f***ing gone. I'm so f***ing pissed off."
He also had numerous heated/furious/out-of-control confrontations with officials, some of them resulting in penalties. After a loss to Iowa--during which he had lost control and been penalized--at the end of the 2013 season, he remained defiant in the post-game presser, referring to his penalty as "chicken shit." He also declared, "If they want to fire me, go ahead . . . I don't apologize for anything I have done." He did apologize later.
From afar, I thought that Pelini was a weekly embarrassment to the University of Nebraska. But his behavior didn't keep him from winning at a decent clip, and it didn't queer the deal with the move to the Big Ten. Still, it seems to me that Nebraska fired him more for his bad behavior than his reasonable level of success, "only" winning 9.6 games/year. (This is more or less consistent with your last post quoted.)
In the second audiotape, 2 days after he was fired, meeting with his former team in a high school, he said: "It wasn't a surprise to me. It really wasn't. I didn't really have any relationship with the AD. The guy — you guys saw him (Sunday) — the guy's a total p----. I mean, he is. He's a total c---." I think there's some insight into his character. Not many schools would have had him coach after a tirade like that.
Youngstown State did, of course, but he's a hometown boy.
I wonder how things might have worked out between Pelini and Nebraska had they hired him after the 2003 Alamo Bowl rather than going on a 41-day coaching search that resulted in Callahan coming to Lincoln. Would he have lasted as long as he did? Or would Nebraska's standards have still been high, so high that Frank Solich hadn't met them, resulting in less patience with Pelini's antics than the University showed from 2008-2014?
