[personal] [Husker] The only good thing

[Pat Gaule]

Skylar Dodds wrote:
>>Shame on everyone who partied after Solich was canned, and who defended
>>to the HILT all the monstrous changes to the system that Pedey, BC and
>>company wrought,  and who defended the removal of all vestiges of the
>>traditions that built NU to its tremendous reputation over 40 years of
>>hard work!
> 
> 
> If that's shame, I'll take that shame still.  Solich needed to go.  He
> wasn't doing the job.  I still thought as this year that Callahan would do
> it, but I was wrong.
> 
> Just because I have hindsight, doesn't make me think it was a bad decision.
> It was bad results, but given what we knew AT THAT TIME, I still say it was
> a good decision.  I could flip-flop, but that's not how I was brought up. 
> 

Maybe Solich needed to go (I don't agree that he did), but firing him 
after a 9-3 record was a huge mistake.  I said it at the time, and I 
stand by it now.  There was a segment of the Nebraska fanbase that was 
able to rationalize such a move, but the the rest of the country 
perceived it as a horrible decision.  Like it or not, it just looks 
awful to outsiders (and plenty of people inside the program too).  It 
seems like a classic example of a win-at-all-costs program who will 
stand for nothing less than a national championship every season. 
Well-respected coaches like Urabn Meyer showed their disgust publicly, 
and he was not alone.  Very few (possibly none) of the great coaches 
would want to work at a place where a coach can get fired for going 9-3.

The excuses given by the anti-Solich crowd back in 2003 were mostly 
along the lines of "Why delay the inevitable?  He will have a bad season 
next year and then we'll even be further in the dump.  We shouldn't let 
him completely destroy our program before doing something about it." 
Well, the reality is that we are all 4 years older and in much worse 
shape than we were in 2003.  If Pedey would have been more patient, the 
worst of this could have been avoided.  He went for the "quick fix" of 
firing Solich, rather than looking at the big picture.  If he would have 
been more patient with Solich and his staff, I have no doubt that 
Nebraska would have a better coach right now (whether it was Solich, 
Pelini, Gill or somebody else entirley).  Tom Osborne is handling the 
Callahan situation perfectly because he's doing the exact opposite of 
everything Pedey did when he fired Solich.

You can rationalize Solich's firing and celebrate it until the end of 
your life, but the reality is that it pretty much killed any chance of 
landing a great coach 4 years ago.  If Solich had been given a 2nd 
chance in 2004 he may have sustained the success of the 2003 season and 
continued Nebraska's bowl streak and streak of non-losing seasons.  If 
he bombed out, we could have moved on gracefully and avoided this entire 
mess.  There would have been no hard feelings amongst the coaching 
fraternity over firing a sub .500 coach, and there never would have been 
such a decisive rift amongst the fanbase.

Instead, Steve Pederson let his ego get in the way and jumped the gun. 
   He put us in a position where the only coaches who would want to come 
to Nebraska would be:

1.)  Desperate failures like Dave Wanstasche or Callahan
2.)  Tired retreads with significantly worse career records than Solich 
(i.e. Houston Nutt)
2.)  Coaches with current ties to the program such as Turner Gill or Bo 
Pelini

Since it was obvious that Pedey would only consider outsiders, that left 
him with coaches in categories 1 and 2.  If you ask me, Pedey and the 
Solich bashers got exactly what was coming to them with this move.