Riley should have thought about where he was in his career and asked himself if he still had the ambition to get it done prior to taking a new job. Had he been honest with himself he would have stayed on at OSU for a couple of more years and retired unless things were becoming so unbearable at OSU then he should have just retired. These thoughts were probably secondary since someone was stupid enough to throw him a lifeline and provide him and his buddies a nice retirement package.
I honestly think Riley was brought in to coach 4-5 years at NU, and then hand the job over to someone else. Eichorst thought a monkey could win 8-9 games at NU every year, so he expected Riley to do that, while repairing the image of NU football. When Riley was ready to “retire”, Eichorst would hand the job over to an asssitant coach or another hire outside the team. When Eichorst and Devaney brought Diaco to the team, they fell in love with his style, so that’s who they had in mind for heir apparent. Think about Diaco, he’s handsome, smart, he teaches well in practice,and he’s a good face to put in front of the program. Eichorst must have had a total boner for him once he came on campus.
Nothing against old people, but Mike’l Severe has said numerous times that it was foolish for Riley at age 62 to do the best work of his career and have a significant upgrade in his performance during that time. His work was DECLINING at Oregon State at the time of his hire at NU.
Boy if SF can bring that kind of 'you play like you practice' mentality into the program, we will be a long ways down the road in correcting the problems wt the program.
