The ‘N’ on the side of the helmet stands for ‘Nobodies.’ To anyone under 30, Nebraska football is your balding uncle with the beer belly and the oversized truck who’s told you the same stories about his glory days since 1998.
If I’m Cornhuskers athletic director Trev Alberts, I dare Kentucky coach Mark Stoops to say no. And say it to my face. I plop $10 million per year on the table. As a starting point. Whatever his assistants are making in Lexington, I double it.
I overpay, because Nebraska is to major college football what the Green Bay Packers were to the NFL in 1993. Because I need somebody who can turn perceptions on a dime. Someone who brings the party — and by party, I mean top-flight coaches and recruits — with him from Day 1.
If Stoops says no, I make the same offer to Luke Fickell at Cincinnati. If he says no, the package moves to Kyle Whittingham at Utah. And Matt Campbell at Iowa State after that.
As a brand, Nebraska football cannot sell itself anymore. It needs a proven, bankable face. A proven, bankable figurehead.
Think Urban Meyer without the baggage. Nick Saban without the pretense. A coach the Aflac duck wants to make awful commercials with.
Like CU and the Pac-12, joining the Big Ten has largely been a disaster for Big Red, trading the promise of financial security for football anonymity.
Why not turn Big Ten membership from a weakness to a strength? Alberts has a problem. It’s time to throw money at it. Insane money. The kind of money Scrooge McDuck goes swimming in. After all, wasn’t that the point?
Alberts fired Scott Frost last Sunday, the start of Oklahoma week. Which is ironic given that Nebraska at the moment isn’t all that dissimilar from where the Sooners were a generation ago, at the end of the John Blake Era.
Blake was a stellar player under Barry Switzer the way Frost was under Tom Osborne. And like Frost, he wasn’t close to matching the program expectations set by his mentor. Blake went 12-22 (.352) in three seasons as the Sooners coach and 7-17 (.277) in league play, winning percentages that run fairly close to the numbers Frost put up (16-31 overall, .340; 10-26 conference, .277) over four-plus seasons in Lincoln.
Like the Huskers, the Sooners had tried a few flavors to get that ‘70s/’80s mojo back, from Gary Gibbs to Howard Schnellenberger to Blake. Oklahoma eventually hired Bob Stoops, then the hotshot defensive coordinator at Florida, in December 1998. The Sooners went 13-0 in 2000 and haven’t looked back.
Bob’s little brother Mark, 55, has done such a good job at UK that he’s making basketball coach John Calipari twitchy. The Wildcats just beat Florida in back-to-back seasons for the first time since ’76-’77. The younger Stoops has won 10 games in a season twice in Lexington — basketball-mad, hoops-first Lexington — since 2018. The Huskers haven’t hit double digits in victories since 2012.
Like his brother, Mark has Big Ten roots. He’s a Youngstown, Ohio, guy, a coach’s kid who played college ball at Iowa under Hayden Fry. On paper, he ticks every box: A detail wonk who sweats the little things. A coach who gives line play and physicality his time instead of lip service. The Wildcats are 12-6 over the past five years in games decided by eight points or less, which would make for a nice change of pace.
Mind you, he’s also on a contract through 2027 that pays him $6.75 million this season and as much as $8 million in five years. Relevance doesn’t come cheap.
But wouldn’t it be worth it to stop the Big Red from being treated like the Big Ten’s red-headed stepchild? Like CU and Utah, Nebraska got shotgun-weddinged into a “hate-pact” with Iowa upon joining its new league. And despite the annual Black Friday date and a national television showcase, it’s never taken off the way Buffs-Huskers did. Or come even close to the epic Nebraska-Oklahoma tussles of old. (Frost never beat Iowa).
The Big Ten is flush with more cash and depth than the Big Eight of old. The fans and the Runzas are the only things that make Nebraska football unique anymore. The Big Red got ahead of the pack under Bob Devaney by being ahead of the curve. Alas, even Rutgers has Husker Power now.
Gone are the four-deep rosters of potential all-conference salvations as scholarship limits leveled the playing field. These days, everybody is on television somewhere, even if the somebodies are easier to find.
Once the Huskers gave it up in 2003, the triple option became a dodo bird’s martial art, largely confined to military academies — including one about an hour south who’s knocking on the door of the top 25 — and the desperate.
“I think kids want to play that one-back (system), ‘Put the spotlight on me,’” Darian Hagan, the CU running backs coach and former national championship option QB with the Buffs, told me last week. “I don’t think they want to be out there and throw (their bodies) around doing things like that.”
Swing for the fences anyway. Heck, as a last resort, make Urban say no. But if he does, Trev, and then tries to recommend an old friend for the gig instead, ignore him. For your sake.
