[personal] [Husker] The only good thing

[Steve Reichenbach]

> Regarding the 9-3 season, it was quite a farce.  We beat about 9 BAD teams
> and got smoked by 3 good ones.  Were we improved, yes.  Were we anywhere
> near where we needed to be, no.

Ahh, I think this is the crux of the problem:  when 9-3 isn't "anywhere
where _we_ need to be" [emphasis on "we" added].  And, everyone "we"
beat is "BAD".

I looked at the best college football coaching records of all time.
Barry Switzer and Tom Osborne are near the top of the list, with .837
and .836, which is about one win a season better.  What was Osborne's
winning percentage in the same time Solich had at NU?  The same as
Solich's, only 75%, only at a 9-3 rate.  Devaney?  About 80% for his
career.  Below 80%, coaches like Bryant, Bowden, Spurrier,
Schembechler, Paterno, and Hayes.

This is the same thinking that inspired petitions to fire Devaney when
he was 6-4 for two years in a row, the same perspective that the people
who wanted to fire Osborne because he couldn't beat OU in the 1970s or
win the big games (against the "good" teams) in the late 1980s and
early 1990s.  In fact, the Daily Nebraskan ran an editorial in the
early 1990s suggesting that Osborne should be fired becuase those 1, 2,
and 3 loss seasons weren't "where we needed to be".

If we don't learn the lesson about how success was achieved even as
people said "we" weren't good enough, then it's the definition of
insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different
result.

When you fire a coach in a 9-3 season with 75% career winning record
and who less two years earlier had the team in the BCS Championship
game, IT'S A RISKY AND FOOLISH MISTAKE!!  It would have been a mistake
to fire Devaney; it would have been a mistake to fire Osborne; it was
A MISTAKE to fire Solich.

Pat's post on this was much more comprehensive than mine, but this is
the core lesson to be learned.