The blame game is getting old at Nebraska.
Harry Husker can whine from here to Scottsbluff about Bo Pelini's comportment, but there is a disturbing trend at Lincoln. Through all kinds of administrators and searches and saviors, the program continues to swim in OK-but-not-great waters.
Pelini's replacement -- he was fired Sunday -- will be the fourth coach since Tom Osborne retired in 1997. Osborne guided the Huskers to greatness and the Big Ten. But in this new, winnable conference the Huskers haven't come close. Yes, and I'm counting Wisconsin hanging 70 on ya'll a couple of years ago. That's not close.
Yes, there were two narrow Big 12 championship game losses, too, but is it worth going there on this day of change? You've switched conferences, Harry. Changing the level of competition, slightly. You became programming for the wildly successfully Big Ten Network. The money is great too. But the story remains the same. No conference title since 1999.
That's what every day going forward in this search is about. That's the standard Nebraska has shot for and fallen short of for 15 years. The Huskers compete for championships, not for page views, during a coaching search.
Sure, Scott Frost could change all that, but he might not. In the public bus station that is social media, Oregon's offensive coordinator probably tops the list of candidates right now. Frost has mentored Marcus Mariota, this year's likely Heisman winner.
Hiring a native son and former Huskers quarterback makes too much sense. But Frost has been a coordinator for all of two seasons. He was coaching receivers when the Ducks went to the BCS title game in 2010. Before that, Frost, 39, was at Northern Iowa.
While that's a nice career arc, his consideration comes with a warning sticker: Make sure Frost is ready because those OK-but-not-great waters can be murky and political.
There aren't many coaches with a .713 winning percentage coming off a nine-win season (without scandal) like Pelini who get fired.
Nebraska has canned two of them. Frank Solich -- the last guy to win a conference title -- was dumped after six seasons in 2003 after winning more than 75 percent of his games.
In a vacuum, Nebraska has had some fine coaches. In Lincoln, they haven't measured up lately. There is a formula to be figured out, and Nebraska hasn failed to solve it. The school hasn't hired a guy with college head coaching experience since Bob Devaney in 1962.
Maybe that's a good place to start. The problem is what we don't know about Shawn Eichorst we don't know. He's Nebraska's reclusive AD, the man who will be making the hire. And while Frost has never been a head coach, Eichorst has never hired one in football.
Yeah, it was probably time for Pelini to go. He was maddeningly consistent as a coach -- four losses, exactly, for six consecutive seasons.
Off the field, he might pitch a fit, he might carry a cat. Fake Bo Pelini was a treasure, but the real Bo lost to Minnesota and, at times, antagonized.
A year ago Pelini dared Eichorst to fire him. Maybe Nebraska's AD finally got around to taking him up on his challenge.
Don't worry about Bo. He'll pop up soon as a coordinator of some SEC defense or perhaps at some rebound job like Kansas. The focus now is on Nebraska. It can't whiff on this one. The blame game is getting old.
