Was Mike Riley the Biggest Miss of the Post-Osborne Era?

NOTE: The Reckoning, a series of podcast episodes and articles focused on the post-Tom Osborne era of Nebraska football, was originally released last summer. It is being published on si.com for the first time. The article below originally ran as part of the Common Fan newsletter on July 9, 2024. 

Four days. That’s how long it took Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst to announce the hire of Mike Riley after he fired Bo Pelini. Four days. You’re the Athletic Director at one of the most accomplished, prestigious football schools in all the land. You fire a coach who played for three conference championships and just went 9-3. And it takes less than a week to zero in and get your guy. Wow, must be a big time coach, right? Certainly it must be a proven, championship winning, no-brainer of a hire. Right? Right?!?!?!?

Not quite. This is the focus of Episode 4 of The Reckoning series: Was Mike Riley the Biggest Miss of the Post-Osborne Era? In talking to long time sportswriters Brian Christopherson and Brandon Vogel, it felt a little bit like deja vu all over again for the Huskers. Just like the firing of Frank Solich, Nebraska terminated a coach who had won a lot of games and played for championships (and in Solich’s case, actually won a conference championship). Just like the hiring of Bill Callahan, Nebraska brought in a coach with no championships at the college level and zero experience in the Huskers’ conference. And in the case of Riley, he had basically proved himself to be a .500 coach by that point in his career.  

The Curious Case of Shawn Eichorst

Mike Riley is a good man. Brian and Brandon both pointed out that he is one of the best human beings they’ve ever worked with. As a football coach, he won a couple of Grey Cups in the Canadian Football League, and had some really good teams at Oregon State. He was often able to make ribeyes out of the chuck roast he had to work with at an under-resourced program.   

By the time Nebraska came calling, however, one could argue his best coaching days were behind him. Riley had been at Oregon State for 12 years. Three of his five previous teams before coming to Nebraska had losing seasons. His most recent body of work at the time – Oregon State’s 2014 squad – went 5-7. Plus, he was 61 years old when Nebraska hired him. There are plenty of coaches who have had successful tenures in their 60s and 70s, but there are very few examples of coaches that late in their career starting at an entirely new spot, in a conference where they have no experience, and building a winner. 

It is really difficult to understand what Shawn Eichorst must have been thinking. The best predictor of future performance is past performance. Certainly Eichorst knew the expectations at a place like Nebraska. Certainly he understood the stakes after firing a consistent 9-win, division title winning coach. He tied his entire tenure as AD to a coach he didn’t know, a coach who had never been in the Big 10, a coach coming off a losing season. 

And by many accounts, he didn’t even interview any other coaches! He zeroed in on Riley and made the move quickly. It was a head scratcher at the time, and it remains a head scratcher to this day. If championships are the expectation – and let’s be clear, at Nebraska, they are – why would you hire a career .500 coach who had never won a championship at the college level? Eichorst was basically asking – hoping – for Riley to do the best coaching job of his career, at an entirely new place, in the face of decades of data indicating that wasn’t likely. 

As Brian told us, “It was the hire that made the least amount of sense.” 

Would the Entire Last Decade of Nebraska Football be Completely Different if We Hadn’t Hired Riley? 

During the episode, I argued that Riley was indeed the biggest miss of the post-Osborne era. That may not be totally fair, considering he at least had a winning season and took the Huskers to two bowl games, both things Scott Frost never did. But allow me to explain. 

After firing Pelini, Nebraska was in a much more vulnerable place than where we were after firing Callahan. I don’t remember thinking about it like that at the time, but in looking back, it’s clear how important it was to get this right. Up to that point, you could argue that the Callahan era was a blip on the radar. He had a couple of losing seasons, and then Pelini quickly got us back to some semblance of respectability (at least with the play on the field; perhaps not so much with the sideline behavior). 

Ideally, the next coach would be someone who could take us back to the level of winning championships. Nebraska needed to act like the big boy program that they are. Be like LSU going to get Brian Kelly from Notre Dame. Be like USC going to get Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma. I don’t know who that would have been for Nebraska in 2017, but that’s the AD’s job. His job is to make sure Nebraska is acting like the blue blood, championship winning program that they had been for decades.

At the very least, we needed to avoid going backwards. And unfortunately, backwards is exactly where we went. This is where the instability and dysfunction of churning through athletic directors and football coaches starts to catch up with us. And it could not have come at a worse time. 

Think about how different the last decade of Nebraska football would be if we could have hired someone to get us Pelini-era results or better. 2014 is not that long ago, and at the time that certainly didn’t seem like too much to ask. But instead of excellence or even competence, we have suffered through one of the worst stretches of Husker football ever. 

If some of this feels repetitive, Common Fans, it’s because we’ve made the same mistakes more than once. That’s what makes the entire post-Osborne era so mind boggling. Perhaps we wouldn’t have sustained TO levels of greatness, but it absolutely never needed to get this bad.

Hope for the Future

I don’t mean to be all doom and gloom, Common Fans. We are looking forward with Big Red Kool Aid colored glasses, with much more to come. So stick with us! In the meantime, we’d love to hear your contribution to this discussion. Send us an email at commonfangbr@gmail.com, comment on YouTube, or message us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. 

Stay tuned for Episode 5 of The Reckoning: How in the World Did Scott Frost Not Work at Nebraska?

PODCAST EPISODE: Was Mike Riley the Biggest Miss of the Post-Osborne Era?

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NOTE: Thanks so much to special guest Brandon Vogel from the Counter Read, who joined us for all of The Reckoning episodes. For each episode, we also had a featured guest: someone from the Nebraska sports media who covered the era being examined. 

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