Solich Invited Back to Receive Tom Osborne Award

This was a hot topic on 1620 the Zone both during Sharp & Benning as well as Nick Bahe's (sp?) show.  If you look at Frank's record in the 6 seasons he was here-Wow.  Pretty darn good: He won the division three times, went to a national championship, won a conference championship, and coached a Heisman Trophy winner.  His poorest season was 7-7 AND HE WAS FIRED?  I remember hearing that Pederson (Pedersen) contacted Urban Meyer to offer him the Nebraska job and Meyer said, 'No way!  You fired a coach who averaged at least 9 wins a season and you fired him?'  That whole deal set a precedent in college football and was the undoing of Nebraska. 

  I hope Frank can come back and can be recognized for the good things he did for Nebraska.  He played here, he was an assistant coach for 19 years and coached here for 6 years.  He deserves a little love in my opinion.  (Yeah, I know there were other things going on that went towards Frank's demise but come on!  He did everything Pedersen asked and was still kicked to the curb! Poor form!)

 
ladyhawke said:
Pederson contacted Urban Meyer to offer him the Nebraska job and Meyer said, 'No way!  You fired a coach who averaged at least 9 wins a season and you fired him?'  That whole deal set a precedent in college football and was the undoing of Nebraska.
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Certainly Eichorst took that precedent to heart...

 
I have no problem with this.  Frank did a lot for the football program over a lot of years.  It's too bad that it ended like it did but if this is a way to bury the hatchet then it's a good thing.  It's nice for the Athletic Dept or whoever to offer something like this.

But Frank deserved to be fired.  He just isn't that great of a head coach.  He was a loyal assistant and was probably pretty good at that.  But he was in over his head as head coach of the Huskers and particularly should never have tried to be both HC and OC.  He just didn't have a feel for that part of it.  When Tom's recruits ran out, so did Frank's success.  It was time to do something different.  The direction we tried was a colossal failure but that doesn't make the original change wrong.

 
Mavric said:
I have no problem with this.  Frank did a lot for the football program over a lot of years.  It's too bad that it ended like it did but if this is a way to bury the hatchet then it's a good thing.  It's nice for the Athletic Dept or whoever to offer something like this.

But Frank deserved to be fired.  He just isn't that great of a head coach.  He was a loyal assistant and was probably pretty good at that.  But he was in over his head as head coach of the Huskers and particularly should never have tried to be both HC and OC.  He just didn't have a feel for that part of it.  When Tom's recruits ran out, so did Frank's success.  It was time to do something different.  The direction we tried was a colossal failure but that doesn't make the original change wrong.
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I agreed at the time that Frank should have been fired, it's just too bad that Pedeyshine had no idea how to make the 2nd part of the deal work, and hire a better coach after firing a decent head coach.

Hindsight being 20/20, I think it would have been interesting to see what Solich and his new staff could have done with some more time.  But, given his chosen QB was Joe Dailey, and who knows how long Bo would have stuck around as DC (he seemed to always want to move upwards to better jobs), things still probably wouldn't have ended well for Frank.

 
ColoradoHusk said:
Hindsight being 20/20, I think it would have been interesting to see what Solich and his new staff could have done with some more time.  But, given his chosen QB was Joe Dailey, and who knows how long Bo would have stuck around as DC (he seemed to always want to move upwards to better jobs), things still probably wouldn't have ended well for Frank.
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It seems to me - from bits and piece pieced together over the years plus my own observations being a student from 1997-2001 - that we were going to get bogged down without major changes.  As you said, had Bo stuck around perhaps the defense could have made strides.  But I also get the feeling that the same thing that made Nebraska great for a lot of years - assistants staying around - was starting to make the recruiting side harder.  As some of those guys got older, the energy they had to put into recruiting was starting to wane.  Plus the effects of the scholarship limitations were really starting to take hold.  The Huskers couldn't stockpile talent like they could at one time and the playing field was starting to level significantly.

To be honest, at this point the last two years of Franks tenure look to me to be almost exactly like the first two years of Riley's.  We finished .500 for the first time in quite awhile then got back to 9 wins the next year.  But the nine wins were largely built on a weak schedule and we got drilled by the good teams we played.  I'm not saying Frank would have crashed like Riley did but I don't think his last season was nearly as much of a rebound as many like to think.

And that's before you include anything away from the Stadium.

 
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In his six years, Frank Solich only had one season that wouldn't have been welcome on Tom Osborne's resume. 

But man....that 7-7 season hit Nebraska fans like a Callahan/Riley sandwich back in the day.

Of course we should welcome the man back. Some forget that Frank was also the toughest 160 pound fullback you've ever seen. 

 
Mavric said:
 he was in over his head as head coach of the Huskers and particularly should never have tried to be both HC and OC.  He just didn't have a feel for that part of it. 
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A big part of the problem was probably just that he went straight from position coach to a top-tier head coach job. How many other coaches can you think of who made that kind of a jump, let alone successfully? I always wonder how things would have went if Osborne had made him OC for his last five years or so. Maybe Solich would have been better prepared for the job. Then again, for all we know the offense could've ended up being weaker during Osborne's last few seasons, and we'd be short a few national championship trophies.

 
Toe said:
A big part of the problem was probably just that he went straight from position coach to a top-tier head coach job. How many other coaches can you think of who made that kind of a jump, let alone successfully? I always wonder how things would have went if Osborne had made him OC for his last five years or so. Maybe Solich would have been better prepared for the job. Then again, for all we know the offense could've ended up being weaker during Osborne's last few seasons, and we'd be short a few national championship trophies.
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I think Osborne had been giving some administrative duties to Solich in the 90s, when Solich was named "Assistant Head Coach".  I don't think Solich being OC under Osborne would have helped him succeed.  If anything, Solich should have hired an OC to call plays right away while Solich focused the big picture items of the team.

 
Toe said:
A big part of the problem was probably just that he went straight from position coach to a top-tier head coach job. How many other coaches can you think of who made that kind of a jump, let alone successfully? I always wonder how things would have went if Osborne had made him OC for his last five years or so. Maybe Solich would have been better prepared for the job. Then again, for all we know the offense could've ended up being weaker during Osborne's last few seasons, and we'd be short a few national championship trophies.
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Entirely possible.  But it's not like he had to reinvent the wheel.  If there's anyone who should have know the offense inside and out (other than Osborne), it should have been him.  I just don't think he had a grasp of how to put a game-plan together.

I was listening to his post-game one time and someone asked him about the unusually high number of carries the fullback got that day.  His response was "you have to run inside to set up the outside rushing plays."  I literally could not believe anyone watching Husker football for the previous 10 years could think that way, let alone someone who'd be a coach for 20+ years by then.  Nebraska's MO had always been option-option-option and then you bust the fullback late in the game after everyone had forgotten about them - such as the 1995 Orange Bowl.  But there he was, claiming it was exactly the opposite.  

I just don't think he "got it" as an OC.

 
I think that many people thought it was time for a change but the way Frank was kicked to the curb was just cold, especially since he did what the administration had asked him to do. That’s no way to treat someone who had given so much to the program. Frank was one of us. He deserved to at least go with some dignity. 

Do you think he got a fair shake? Maybe he wasn’t going to be a great coach but I would have liked to have seen him given a fair chance.  

 
ladyhawke said:
I think that many people thought it was time for a change but the way Frank was kicked to the curb was just cold, especially since he did what the administration had asked him to do. That’s no way to treat someone who had given so much to the program. Frank was one of us. He deserved to at least go with some dignity. 

Do you think he got a fair shake? Maybe he wasn’t going to be a great coach but I would have liked to have seen him given a fair chance.  
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If he was going to be fired, what would like like to have seen done differently that would have been "with dignity"?

I think six years is a pretty fair chance.

 
Certainly if there was a time to fire him, it was after the .500 season, not when he'd just went 9-3. I've never really been convinced one way or the other on whether Solich would've done much better than that in the long-term, though. How would people have felt if Solich's record beyond 2003 looked about like Bo's 'consistently good but never quite great' results?

 
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Mavric said:
But Frank deserved to be fired.  He just isn't that great of a head coach.  He was a loyal assistant and was probably pretty good at that.  But he was in over his head as head coach of the Huskers and particularly should never have tried to be both HC and OC.  He just didn't have a feel for that part of it.  When Tom's recruits ran out, so did Frank's success.  It was time to do something different.  The direction we tried was a colossal failure but that doesn't make the original change wrong.
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Mavric said:
It seems to me - from bits and piece pieced together over the years plus my own observations being a student from 1997-2001 - that we were going to get bogged down without major changes.  As you said, had Bo stuck around perhaps the defense could have made strides.  But I also get the feeling that the same thing that made Nebraska great for a lot of years - assistants staying around - was starting to make the recruiting side harder.  As some of those guys got older, the energy they had to put into recruiting was starting to wane.  Plus the effects of the scholarship limitations were really starting to take hold.  The Huskers couldn't stockpile talent like they could at one time and the playing field was starting to level significantly.

To be honest, at this point the last two years of Franks tenure look to me to be almost exactly like the first two years of Riley's.  We finished .500 for the first time in quite awhile then got back to 9 wins the next year.  But the nine wins were largely built on a weak schedule and we got drilled by the good teams we played.  I'm not saying Frank would have crashed like Riley did but I don't think his last season was nearly as much of a rebound as many like to think.

And that's before you include anything away from the Stadium.
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Hit the nail right on the head. I've been saying the same stuff on reddit, as the topics keep getting brought up. Once Tom's recruits were gone, it was all down hill. A 10-3 record is nice, but when you get blown out by a combined score of 69 (nice) to 17, it ain't as pretty. The '03 year was eerily similar to Bo's tenure.

 
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