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Why Bo Pelini Should Not Have Been Fired by Nebraska: Compare Him to Tom Osborne

By Caleb Calhoun

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Early Sunday morning, it was announced that the Nebraska Head Coach Bo Pelini had been fired after seven seasons, according to news reports you can see here.

Pelini served as head coach of Nebraska for seven seasons, being hired by Tom Osborne at the end of the 2007 season. The decision appears to have been made by Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst, who said the program is looking to move in a “new direction,” and it was supported by Nebraska Chancellor Harvey Perlman.

But it doesn’t matter if it was supported by the President of the United State or the Queen of England.

This was a terrible decision.

Bo Pelini now gets to go down as the most successful coach in college football history to be fired. He never had fewer than 9 wins a year, oversaw Nebraska’s move into the Big Ten, and has never failed to finish in the Top 25 since his first season.

His overall record is 67-27 there if you count the Alamo Bowl game that he coached in 2003. And yet he’s gone. Can anybody guess what legendary Nebraska Coach Tom Osborne’s record was through his first seven seasons at Nebraska? It was 65-18-2. Yes, that’s a better overall percentage than Pelini’s record through seven years. But it’s not by much.

And when you consider that Osborne’s Cornhuskers had much easier schedules in the 1970s than Pelini’s teams and the fact that Osborne inherited a program that had just won two national championships in three years while Pelini inherited a program that had two losing seasons in four years, it’s clear that Osborne had a much easier situation. And he was only barely better than Pelini.

Pelini’s detractors will point to the fact that he never had fewer than 4 losses in a season. Fine, but he also never had fewer than 9 wins. And three of those times his team had 4 losses, it was because they lost in the conference championship game. Are we going to punish him for making that game?

This is seriously one of the most unfair firing decisions in the history of sports.

Not only did Pelini inherit a program that had fallen off the face of the Earth and immediately turn it into a 9-win team, but he also had to oversee its transition into a new conference.

And while the Big 12 and Big Ten aren’t that much different, going from the Big 12 North, which was the easiest division in the major college football conferences at the time, and into the Big Ten West was definitely a jump.

The schedule for the Cornhuskers got considerably more difficult, and the style had to change. Pelini has done a good job doing that.

His detractors will also point to lackluster recruiting. But this is Nebraska. What happened to taking pride in walk-ons and unheralded tough guys to win football games? That’s what they have always done, but Pelini gets grilled for that.

And speaking of recruiting and the future. Nebraska could have as many as 15 starters back next year, despite losing Ameer Abdullah. So why, again, are we worried about this team’s future under him?

Yes, the staleness of the program right now is frustrating. Yes, at Nebraska you expect to win championships.

But also, Nebraska is the program built on consistency, toughness, and working from the ground up.

It was nine years before Osborne even had a Top 5 finish at Nebraska, and he had been there for 20 years without ever winning a national championship.

But he was allowed to stay the entire time.

Pelini, whose record is comparable up to this point despite taking over a program in far worse shape, is done after seven season. Something seems incredibly wrong with that.

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