In 2002, Mike Riley turned down an offer to become head coach at his alma mater, Alabama.
The Crimson Tide’s second choice, Mike Price, was fired before he could coach a game; dogged strip club visits and visits from strippers.
Instead, the next year, Riley returned to Oregon State. He’d go on to build a respectable program and be handed a lifetime contract.
But there’s also an unwritten lifetime contract that every coach understands that says something like, “You don’t turn down both Alabama and Nebraska in the same life.”
So there it is. The bombshell broke Thursday morning, undetected by the entire local and national press corps covering or keeping an eye on the Nebraska coaching search until it exploded over Lincoln, Corvallis, and the college football world.
Mike Riley is the new coach at Nebraska.
It’s as stunning as any coaching move will be this offseason, and when a big school makes a hire out of left field like Nebraska did with Riley, there’s usually a very good reason.
Nebraska’s last coach, Bo Pelini, didn’t get fired simply because he didn’t win enough games, though there were too many nine win seasons that didn’t turn into ten win seasons and too many January bowl games that didn’t turn into BCS games.
Pelini got fired because he was volatile and sour, and though his players loved him, his relationship with his bosses and fans was on rocky ground after seven years.
There’s a lot more nuance in evaluating coaching than meets the eye.
Mike Riley is the anti-Bo Pelini. Stable, warm, congenial, welcoming, and experienced.
He steps into an environment at Nebraska that is baying for blood. Pelini’s players have been vociferous in voicing their displeasure over their coaches firing, but if anyone can turn them around, Mike Riley can.
Nebraska Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst hit a home run in hiring a nice guy; the speed of this hire says that Eichorst had Riley in his sights long before he parted ways with Pelini.
For Riley, this was his last shot at the big-time. At 61, with four tough years at sleepy old Oregon State behind him and all the shine of his NFL days gone, it was now or never.
Riley steps out of his comfort zone with this move and takes a huge risk – but the alternative was coaching out his final days with the Beavers in a town that has always underappreciated him.
It’s possible that Riley saw the writing on the wall after the OSU’s frustrating 5-7 campaign this year that saw fans calling for his head. It was time for a change.
There was no buyout drama with the Beavers. They’ll finally see what they can make of themselves without Riley, and Riley can finally see how high he can fly at a program with national championship potential.
It’s just a good move. For all involved.
Comparing Riley’s record at Oregon State to Pelini’s at Nebraska is cheap and uninformative. The situations are the two schools are too different.
The people who are panning this move are pointing those overall records. Those applauding it – Kirk Herbstreit, Sam Ponder, Bruce Feldman, Joe Schaad and Brock Huard to name a few – see past the numbers.
Riley is universally respected and well-liked by players, coaches, and media. In fact, you can’t find a guy in sports who is better liked by people he’s worked with. Riley is a class act, and most everyone is rooting for him now.
Being a good guy isn’t a fault. It doesn’t mean you can’t draw up a play or recruit a kid. Riley didn’t just get hired because he’s downright pleasant, though being downright pleasant certainly didn’t hurt – which should tell you something about the benefits of being downright pleasant.
Riley could have had the USC job after Pete Carroll left, and the murmurings around the coach is that he’d been closer to leaving Oregon State than many have realized at various points over the last decade.
Nebraska is scheduled to play Oregon in 2016. It’ll be a bigger game than the Civil War.
The reality is that the Riley – Oregon State marriage ended in the best way possible. No one got fired. Nothing too ugly happened. Now, both sides go their separate ways.
For Oregon State, an interesting and unexpected coaching search begins immediately. What kind of candidates the job draws will be a good indicator of the program’s true standing in the college football world.
There’s no clear direction to go. Scott Frost, Bronco Mendenhall, Jonathan Smith, and Beau Baldwin have all been linked, but very preliminarily. What we’ll get is the first real coaching search in this state for almost fifteen years.
It could be a moment of truth for the Beavers. They’ll sink or swim under their new coach, but they probably won’t be stuck at slightly above-average which is where Riley had them for a decade.
What was said about Riley by fans in the tightly knit community of Corvallis must have hurt this year. Now, he gets a chance to show Oregon State the totality of what they lost.
In Riley speak, this was a “Jiminy Crickets!” move.
It’s also the move that will release coach and program to seek greater glory.
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