Nebraska Football: It's Time to Expect Better from Bo Pelini's Cornhuskers

Is that good enough?

For the second year in a row, Nebraska ended its season with a spectacular thud, getting run out of the Capital One Bowl, 30-13, by South Carolina. So as we draw a line under another Nebraska season, Bo Pelini’s fourth as head Husker, we find ourselves in a position to step back and ask where things are with the Nebraska football program and where they are going.

First of all, let’s look at where things are now. In each of Pelini’s four seasons, Nebraska has lost four games. Pelini has won two divisional titles and no conference championships. He’s won two bowl games and lost two. He’s never appeared in a BCS bowl game.

Is that good enough?

In each of the last three seasons, Nebraska’s offense has sputtered. In 2009 and 2010, an ineffective offense cost Nebraska a shot at a conference championship game. In 2011, an inconsistent offense combined with a suddenly fallible defense meant Nebraska finished third. In its division.

Is that good enough?

Ever since Pelini arrived, Nebraska has been plagued with mental mistakes. Turnovers. Penalties. Poor second-half performances. The types of mistakes that mature and mentally strong teams don’t make.

Is that good enough?

In each of the last three years, Nebraska has suffered a home loss to an (at best) mediocre opponent. In 2009, it was Iowa State, with a mystifying eight turnovers. In 2010, it was Texas, a team that ended up missing a bowl game but whom NU had inflated with its “Red Out Around The World” campaign into a giant needing to be slain. In 2011, it was Northwestern, a team that needed a win in the final week of the regular season to become bowl eligible and who had to swap quarterbacks throughout the game due to injury. Looking back, Nebraska was clearly better on paper than each of those teams, yet managed to lose at home to all of them.

Is that good enough?

The high-water mark of the Pelini era was after the 2009 Holiday Bowl, where Nebraska dismantled an overmatched Arizona squad, 33-0, and Pelini announced that “Nebraska’s back, and we’re here to stay.” Since then, NU has gone downhill, duplicating its regular season but losing the bowl game in 2010 and not winning a divisional title and losing a bowl game in 2011. In those two seasons, Nebraska is 4-6 in the final five games of each season.

Is that good enough?

Let me be clear. This is not a column calling for Pelini to be fired. Anyone who thinks that wasn’t sitting in the Memorial Stadium located in Lawrence, Kansas, on a November afternoon in 2007 watching Bill Callahan’s NU squad lose 76-39 to the Jayhawks. Anyone in that stadium saw a Nebraska team that simply could not—or would not—respond to its coach, and let Kansas have its way against it. Anyone in that stadium would have been convinced that Nebraska would not see a 10-win season and make a conference championship game appearance for another decade.

(As you’ve probably guessed, I was in that stadium, watching that debacle. I was the guy shouting “just wait until basketball…oh, wait,” to the delight of the celebrating Jayhawk fans.)

As much as I wasn’t convinced at the time, I now firmly believe that Pelini was the right man to take over in Lincoln. To put together the pieces of Nebraska’s shattered psyche and form them into the foundation of a football culture was a remarkable accomplishment. It’s easy to forget how bad things were in 2007, and how slippery the slope to irrelevance Nebraska seemed to be on. The job Pelini did in stopping the rot and putting Nebraska back on the map was remarkable.

But we go back to the question of this column: Is that good enough?

In 2008, a 9-4 season was more than enough. In 2009, an appearance in a conference title game and a plucky loss to a favored opponent was enough, particularly when it was capped off with a dominating bowl win. In 2010, coughing up the lead in a conference title game felt a little empty, and that empty feeling was amplified with an embarrassing no-show in the bowl game. And in 2011, watching Nebraska make the same mistakes it has made since Pelini arrived and having those mistakes cost NU a divisional title—and get beat by 17 points in a bowl game—ceased to be amusing.

It’s not 2007 any more. It’s 2012. So the question Nebraska fans have to ask is—you guessed it—is this good enough? Is a four-loss season the benchmark, with the hope of sneaking an unexpected win or two and slipping into a conference title game, the standard by which Nebraska football should now be judged? Some Nebraska fans love to lampoon their new rivals to the east for having that level of expectation for their program.

So if that’s not good enough for Nebraska—if competing for divisional titles, conference titles and ultimately national titles is where the fans demand the Nebraska program aspires to—then the return on the investment NU has made in Pelini has not yet paid off.

That’s not to say it won’t. But going into Year 5, it’s not unreasonable to start expecting to see some returns on the field for Nebraska fans’ investment in Pelini.

Which is why his decisions over the last two seasons to hire his offensive and defensive coordinators from within his own inner circle, rather than going outside and bringing new ideas into the upper echelons of the coaching staff, is troubling.

Pelini has, in essence, doubled down on his own system and his own process, making the implicit claim that his system and his guys are good enough on their own to win trophies. But the worry is that Pelini has done nothing but set up his own echo chamber, shutting out other voices that might contain solutions to the mistakes Pelini’s team makes time and time again.

Anyone who has watched Nebraska over the last few years knows what needs to improve for NU to return to national prominence. Discipline on the field. Consistency on offense. Dominating defense. And the ability to get the most of the talent recruited to NU and get that talent on the field.

Pelini’s success in saving Nebraska in 2007 should give him the faith of the fans that he can take NU past the four-loss plateau he has reached to date. But faith is not an indefinite resource. And at some time—perhaps some time soon—that resource will run dry if the Children of the Corn see Nebraska costing itself victories and trophies due to the same problems that have plagued NU since Pelini’s arrival.

Insanity is often defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Pelini is often portrayed as a crazy man on the sidelines during the game. But in 2012, if Pelini is crazy—or stubborn—enough to keep making the same mistakes and getting the same results, fans will have every right to start asking if Pelini has reached his ceiling at NU, and whether that ceiling is acceptable for the program.

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