Curt McKeever: Osborne went about search the right way
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BY CURT McKEEVER / Lincoln Journal Star
Score one for the open-interview process, because you know Tom Osborne wanted to get this hire over with ASAP — and not just so people would stop tracking his every move.
Osborne joked about that being the case right before he introduced Bo Pelini as Nebraska’s football coach in the Memorial Stadium press lounge Sunday afternoon. I should say he half-joked, because if you’re someone like the Husker interim athletic director and have served the public most of your adult life, you take great pleasure in peace and quiet.
But this was not the reason for his urgency to fill a position that had been open since he fired Bill Callahan on Nov. 24.
It was about trying to apply a steady hand to a proud family tree that had just skipped a generation.
As a legendary coach, Osborne knows the importance of the recruiting window that runs through mid-December. He also knows how nervous the Big Red fandom becomes without a leader.
Turns out TO could have ended his search last Sunday, when he had his first in-depth chat with Pelini “in a little building” at the Baton Rouge, La., airport.
“I kind of suspected when I interviewed him the first time,” Osborne said Sunday when asked when he knew Pelini, in his third year as LSU’s defensive coordinator, was his and Nebraska’s guy.
Considering Pelini spent the 2003 season as the Huskers’ defensive coordinator, it would have taken nothing for Osborne to pull a Bill Byrne, who hired Mike Sherman to be Texas A&M’s coach just as soon as the ink on Dennis Franchione’s severance package had dried.
Nebraska also could have pulled a Mississippi, which opened the door to Houston Nutt before the one he was walking out of at Arkansas even shut.
To Osborne’s credit, he stayed the course of open-mindedness. Pelini might have looked like can’t-miss material, but his future boss kept looking for further proof.
In fact, he said he interviewed five other candidates before making his decision.
Asked about some things he needed to settle in his mind as he went through the process, Osborne said he mostly listened, because he had only determined that Nebraska needed someone whose area of expertise was defense.
“He fit the bill probably better than anybody,” Osborne said of Pelini. “But most of the head coaches I talked to were people who came from the defensive side of the ball. So, I don’t know — you just have an instinct, and everything I felt about him was positive.”
Though Osborne would not name the other candidates, one was University at Buffalo coach Turner Gill — someone who, if Osborne considered only personal feelings, would now be steering the Huskers.
Imagine how hard that phone call was for him to make to Gill.
Then again, something tells me Gill understood completely. Down the road, he (and probably the other four candidates) will be better off for having interviewed.
Just like Pelini was for spelling out his vision for NU with former AD Steve Pederson in January of 2004.
OK, so maybe that was more of a token deal than open-ended. But four years later, Pelini was still a highly regarded defensive coordinator looking for his first head-coaching gig. And he could draw on his experiences with the Huskers.
“Regardless of what happened, it was a good decision to come here,” Pelini said days after Nebraska beat Michigan State 17-3 in the 2003 Alamo Bowl in which he was interim head coach.
Who knew back then how big his month leading the Huskers would turn out to be?
“One thing that takes some of the risk out of it,” Osborne said of hiring Pelini, “is that he was a head coach for one month, and at a very difficult time. And if there were a lot of flaws, I think they would’ve shown up, because I knew so many people that either coached for him or played for him at that time that I trusted.”
But as impressed as he was, Osborne still didn’t take shortcuts with the rest of his search. To hear him Sunday, the Huskers would have been in pretty good hands with any of the candidates he interviewed.
It sits well to know Nebraska ended up with more than a predetermined people’s choice.
Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.
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