Solich Invited Back to Receive Tom Osborne Award

I think some of the posters here forget how much football changed during the solich era. Solich was slow to respond to the rise of the spread offense and some of the aforementioned cracks in his tenure were this. But he did after 2002 try to address the changes going on by bringing in Bo and I'm sure given more time his offense would have changed too, like it has at Ohio.

It wasn't all Frank's fault, some of it was, but not all of it. I still feel the same way I did today as I did then, that it was an enormous mistake. 

 
huKSer said:
Just had a teacher retire at age 77. 

Everyone is going "Awwww"

Everyone in my department is going "YESSSS, about time"

(He kept teaching so his ex-wife wouldn't get any of his retirement money)
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Hahaha!  That is awesome!!

I have a guy in my department that is sort of a living legend at the school and in the department.  He is halftime now and we thought he might not come back but he is...it is one of those things that is very similar to your story.

 
Landlord said:
1998-2001 was borderline elite. 2002 was not, 2003 wasn't either, but was A) a 'good' season, B) a 2 (eventually 3) game improvement in results, and an improvement in performance.

There's plenty of of non-metric reasons why Frank would eventually fully reveal his true ability, but he hadn't yet. He had a blip, then he course corrected the blip, was mostly trending in a positive momentum direction and nearly back to baseline, and then was fired. He didn't deserve to be fired. He would have eventually, I have no doubt. But he hadn't yet actually done anything to deserve it.
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I just don't understand how 2003 is looked down on by some fans.  If one goes back and looks, I'd say the 03' season was ever bit as good as the 76' season.  We finished fourth in the conference both years.  There was eight teams in the conference in 76' and twelve in 03'.  In 76', we lost to an unranked 6-5 Mizzou squad by ten and tied an unranked LSU squad that went 6-4-1.  In 03', we lost to an unranked 8-5 Mizzou squad by 17.  The other two losses came at the hands of teams that were top 10 heading into their bowl. 

 
junior4949 said:
I just don't understand how 2003 is looked down on by some fans.  If one goes back and looks, I'd say the 03' season was ever bit as good as the 76' season.  We finished fourth in the conference both years.  There was eight teams in the conference in 76' and twelve in 03'.  In 76', we lost to an unranked 6-5 Mizzou squad by ten and tied an unranked LSU squad that went 6-4-1.  In 03', we lost to an unranked 8-5 Mizzou squad by 17.  The other two losses came at the hands of teams that were top 10 heading into their bowl. 
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I don't really care how it compares to the 76 season or really any other season.  I judge it for what it was - not very impressive.  The record looks good.  But we piled up a bunch of wins against a bunch of not-very-good teams and got soundly beaten by the good teams.

Three losses:

@ 8-5 Missouri by 17 points

@ 10-3 Texas by 24 points

v. 11-4 Kansas State by 29 points

Wins in order of opponent record:

9-4 Oklahoma State by 10

9-4 Southern Miss by 24 (Southern Miss was 1-4 against non-Conference USA opponents)

6-6 Troy by 30
6-7 Kansas by 21

5-7 Colorado by 9

4-8 Texas A&M by 36

3-9 Utah State by 24

3-9 Penn State by 8

2-10 Iowa State by 28

So we did not beat a ranked team, only beat two teams with a winning record and one of those wins came against a team that was pretty bad against Power-5 level opponents.  And it took five Oklahoma State turnovers and a Blackshirt touchdown to manage that 10 point win.  We lost handily to an unranked Missouri team and got blown out by the two ranked teams we played.  The 9-3 record looked good but that's pretty much the same story as the 2016 season.

 
I really don't want to get into this any deeper, but I will end it by saying the 03' season was eerily similar to the better part of the 70's seasons.  I just find it interesting that some hold one coach on a pedestal while the other one deserved to be fired. 

 
junior4949 said:
I really don't want to get into this any deeper, but I will end it by saying the 03' season was eerily similar to the better part of the 70's seasons.  I just find it interesting that some hold one coach on a pedestal while the other one deserved to be fired. 
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The one coach that is "on a pedestal" nearly left and many wanted fired because of how the seasons were going in the 70s.

But I doubt they are as similar as you're making them out to be.

 
"I've never felt very comfortable here," he said. "I felt when I took over for Bob (Devaney after the 1972 season) that it would be uphill. I thought it would be difficult to last more than five years." Osborne often has said he almost didn't see a fifth year at Nebraska, such was the heat on him at the end of the 1976 season.


That fourth squad ended the 1976 season with a 27-24 triumph against Texas Tech in the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl. It seemed a rather mundane triumph. Hindsight shows it was a monumental victory in the program's history. "That evening, one of the regents got me aside and said, 'I'm glad you won tonight because if you hadn't, you would've been fired,'" Osborne has said.

 
Husker_Bohunk said:
There was nothing similar between the 03 season and the better part of the 70's seasons.
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The worst of the 70s teams were substantially better in comparison to their peers than the 2003 team was to its peers. I understand where this perception may come from, due OU's relative dominance, but Nebraska did very well against other ranked teams throughout the decade.

2003 very much did not. No comparison.

 
brophog said:
The worst of the 70s teams were substantially better in comparison to their peers than the 2003 team was to its peers. I understand where this perception may come from, due OU's relative dominance, but Nebraska did very well against other ranked teams throughout the decade.

2003 very much did not. No comparison.
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Yet the reaction from the fanbase was pretty similar.

Point well taken though: college football is more competitive across the board today than it was in the 1970s. 

Meaning Solich's 9 win 2003 wasn't any different than Pelini's seven 9 win seasons: they may look okay on paper, but the 3-4 losses showed a widening gap between Nebraska and the football elite. 

 
To anyone who's confused about why Solich was fired, I don't think you have to look beyond recruiting.  I'm not going to say it was bad under him.  What I'm getting at is that the perception was he wasn't long for the job.

I'm sure people have already covered how Frank had some folks on his staff who were practically retired in place, too.  That's still partly on him.

My favorite Solich memory, that I've shared here before, was of a billboard I saw in Omaha around the time he took over from TO.  It was a picture of Frank with a caption along the lines of:

"Shirt size: M

Expectations: XL"

 
Guy Chamberlin said:
Yet the reaction from the fanbase was pretty similar.

Point well taken though: college football is more competitive across the board today than it was in the 1970s. 

Meaning Solich's 9 win 2003 wasn't any different than Pelini's seven 9 win seasons: they may look okay on paper, but the 3-4 losses showed a widening gap between Nebraska and the football elite. 
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Ding. Ding. Ding.

Funny, people give Frank a lot more benefit of the doubt because he was a more likable guy than Bo. 

 
Husker_Bohunk said:
I'm thinking that is all on Frank. While Frank was the head coach, if someone wasn't doing their job properly then it was his job to fix it.

If someone was telling Frank he couldn't replace certain assistants then it was his job to successfully make the case for the changes.
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I'm not one who would argue Frank didn't have to go but to say that the assistants in question had no culpability isn't fair either.  I don't think we really have a difference of opinion, I mean.

 
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