Solich Invited Back to Receive Tom Osborne Award

Husker_Bohunk said:
Frank had 5 years as the assistant head coach under one of the greatest minds ever in collegiate football and in the end, he couldn't keep the Ferrari running.
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The other argument here is that there are only so many coaches that are like Osborne. It would have been incredibly lucky and unlikely if Solich was also one of them. Him not keeping things going doesn't mean he was bad. It just means he wasn't a once in a lifetime great coach. (On top of that he started around the time where some of the rules that hurt Nebraska were taking effect). Hopefully we do get lucky and Frost is another one.

 
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Mavric said:
Borderline elite?  You have quite a definition of that.

Frank was 16-12 in his last 28 games with losses by 26, 23, 33, 22, 36, 24 and 29 points in there.  If that's "borderline elite" to you, you're welcome to it.  You must have been plum tickled with Riley.
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...you literally cherrypicked your stat to conveniently include the 2001 Colorado and Miami games, while ignoring the rest of that season, to make it look worse.

Doesn't look as damning as 16-10 (his last 2 full seasons) or 27-12 (his last full 3 seasons), I suppose.

 
Landlord said:
...you literally cherrypicked your stat to conveniently include the 2001 Colorado and Miami games, while ignoring the rest of that season, to make it look worse.

Doesn't look as damning as 16-10 (his last 2 full seasons) or 27-12 (his last full 3 seasons), I suppose.
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Like this?

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I honestly thought Solich did a helluva job coaching that good but not great 2001 Nebraska team to the National Championship Game.

That particular Miami team is regularly cited among the all time college football greats. 

The Colorado debacle sticks in a lot of craws as a turning point, but it was in the same ballpark as some end-of-the-season beatdowns Tom Osborne suffered against Oklahoma. 

I was on the fence about the Solich firing back in the day. Still am, I guess.

 
Landlord said:
...you literally cherrypicked your stat to conveniently include the 2001 Colorado and Miami games, while ignoring the rest of that season, to make it look worse.

Doesn't look as damning as 16-10 (his last 2 full seasons) or 27-12 (his last full 3 seasons), I suppose.
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I didn't cherry-pick anything.  Cherry-picking would only be considering certain games here and there.  I chose a starting point and continued through the end of his career.  But since you don't have any actual defense of your "one bad season" mantra you're stuck trying to quibble instead of presenting a defense of your own argument.

That is just the point where the wins and losses started reflecting what was going on.  We had won a lot of games in 2001 but we weren't exactly impressive doing it a lot of the time.  We were only seven points ahead of an eventual 6-6 TCU team near the end of the third quarter (at home).  We were seven points ahead of a 7-5 Texas Tech team until late in the fourth quarter (at home).  We struggled with a 6-6 Kansas State team (at home).  So, yes, we were able to win those games - with the last of the Osborne recruits - but we weren't always looking like a national championship contender.

So, even if you continue to only focus on one thing - record - and ignore HOW we were getting to that record, are you are still going to say that 16-10 or 27-12 would be "borderline elite"?

 
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Guy Chamberlin said:
I honestly thought Solich did a helluva job coaching that good but not great 2001 Nebraska team to the National Championship Game.

That particular Miami team is regularly cited among the all time college football greats. 

The Colorado debacle sticks in a lot of craws as a turning point, but it was in the same ballpark as some end-of-the-season beatdowns Tom Osborne suffered against Oklahoma. 

I was on the fence about the Solich firing back in the day. Still am, I guess.
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I don't really fault our performance against Miami.  As you alluded to, they had a crazy collection of talent.  I don't think anyone was beating them that year.  And I actually don't even subscribe to the theory that we "didn't deserve to be there."  We didn't have a *great* team be we "deserved" to be there as much as anyone else did (to play Miami).  I always thought it was funny how much Belotti whined about the BCS being "a cancer" because Oregon got left out.  A couple years earlier - before the BCS - Oregon still wouldn't have gotten to play Miami.  Miami would have been in the Orange Bowl and Oregon would have been in the Rose Bowl.

But anyway, I wouldn't fault the Colorado game quite so much if we didn't have the next two seasons to see that it probably wasn't as much of an anomaly as it seemed like at the time.  Starting with that game, Solich really wasn't competitive against any of the better teams on our schedule.  I think it's more likely that the team was held together because Eric Crouch was a magician running the option and we could just keep going to that well and bail us out of a lot of situations.  Once he was gone, we didn't have the offense to compete like we needed to.

 
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Mavric said:
So, even if you continue to only focus on one thing - record - and ignore HOW we were getting to that record, are you are still going to say that 16-10 or 27-12 would be "borderline elite"?
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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.

 
Landlord said:
That's a lot of conjecture, but the tangible results were all bordering elite except for, wait for it, one bad season.
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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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Well, I'm glad you're at least backpedaling from "all bordering elite" to "well, except for the last two seasons".  That was a graceful transition from one to two.  Good work.

And it's also nice that you've move into full-on conjecture mode after being dismissive when I supposedly did that.

And by "non-metric" you appear to mean "ignore the stats" which is a fancy way to say "I don't care what it looked like I want to believe something else."  Such as "nearly back to the baseline" apparently meaning "you're supposed to believe that we were almost winning conference and national championships even though we only beat two teams with winning records and got blown out in our three losses."

 
Only two teams were involved in the 2001 college football championship game. One was Nebraska. In the context of college football in 2001, that's the definition of elite. 

Nebraska lived almost entirely in the Top 10 for Solich's first four seasons, ending up ranked 19th, 2nd, 7th, and 7th. 

Again, there may have been justification for firing Frank in 2003, but I don't think we should keep devaluing a pretty good stretch of Husker football.

 
This is an interesting perspective that I heard (I think from S&B). Would TO have retired so early, if he did not have a gentleman's agreement with Frank Solich that he is the HC-in waiting? Frank had other opportunities that he turned down, presumably because he was promised the HC job at Nebraska by TO.

Imagine that.

 
Guy Chamberlin said:
Only two teams were involved in the 2001 college football championship game. One was Nebraska. In the context of college football in 2001, that's the definition of elite. 

Nebraska lived almost entirely in the Top 10 for Solich's first four seasons, ending up ranked 19th, 2nd, 7th, and 7th. 

Again, there may have been justification for firing Frank in 2003, but I don't think we should keep devaluing a pretty good stretch of Husker football.
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I think those four years were a very good stretch.  And I'm not saying that 2001 was a "bad" year.  But I think the cracks were starting to show and maybe wasn't quite as good as it seemed.  

We had a lot of recruits from one of the best stretches of success in college football history and a quarterback who was perfect for our offense.  Once those disappeared, so did our success.  So I don't think it's a terrible stretch to say that a decent amount of the success in those four years was "in spite of"* Solich as opposed to because of Solich.

* - I'm not saying Frank doesn't deserve any credit.  I'm saying that the Husker Football Machine was running in such a way that the recruits we were getting and the assistants we had would likely have had similar success for 3-4 years with someone else as the head coach as well.  The part where Frank hasn't been able to win a conference championship in 13 years in the MAC would seem to lend credence to the assertion that he's not as good of a coach as some would like to think.

Also, an interesting historical footnote is that Crouch nearly quit the team - or did for a day - because he wasn't the starting QB.  Crouch definitely deserves blame for a less-than-mature attitude about that but he did turn out to be correct in the end - he should have been the starter but wasn't.  So there would also be some level of blame on the coaches for not evaluating properly.  Had Crouch not come back, do the next four years turn out differently?  And would that have changed the perception of Solich?

 
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Solich was a player and assistant here for a long time before he became head coach. To me there's not even a shadow of a doubt that he should be welcomed back at all times.

 
2001 was pretty much The Eric Crouch Show. As much fun as he was to watch, it was hard not to notice that some things had slipped. I've often said that Jamal Lord's biggest 'flaw' was that he couldn't be a one-man offense like Crouch was. Of course, he shouldn't have needed to be a one-man offense, but once he took over, it became painfully clear just how far things had fallen.

Honestly, Solich's biggest failing may have been the same as Riley's: both of them failed to take control. It's no secret that some of Osborne's assistants who stayed on never entirely treated Solich like The Man in Charge. And when he'd made his decision about Newcombe vs. Crouch, he ended up having to beg Crouch to come back instead of putting his foot down and saying his decision was final (or, you know, making the right call in the first place) (though there's still some who insist that Solich just drove up to Omaha for afternoon tea with the Crouch family). A good question is just how much had changed in 2003. He made some necessary changes to his staff, and they were probably more loyal to him than some of their predecessors. I'm curious as to how things were with the players, though - was Solich really the boss of the team at that point?

 
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