Nebraska Football: Defining Expectations Will Define Success for Cornhuskers

The offseason is a time of preparation—a time when participants take stock of where they have been and where they are going. Athletes use the offseason to get healthy, to get stronger and to hone their skills in preparation for the season ahead.

Fans, too, use the offseason to prepare. Recruiting sites and preview magazines would not exist if there wasn’t an insatiable desire from college football fans to prepare for the upcoming season.

Certainly, as we get closer to signing day, much of the focus for Nebraska fans will be on the new recruits coming to campus and how the infusion of talent will change and improve NU in the years to come. Much ink will be spilled about how many stars each recruit has, where they will fit on the depth chart and how many will make an impact in 2012.

Heck, I’ll be part of that.

Those are big questions that need to be answered as we look to the future for Nebraska football. Plus, it’s still a long time before we even get to the spring game—much less fall camp, which means there’s lots of space to be filled.

But it might be valuable to take a step back and think a little broader. Ultimately, recruiting is about making a team better, so it can be successful. But that leads to a bigger question.

What is success for Nebraska?

It’s an important question, because it goes to the heart of expectations for a fanbase. Where do fans think that Nebraska should be, as a program? What results are good enough?

The answers to those questions can fluctuate and reflect the difference between short-term and long-term expectations. When Frank Solich took over from Tom Osborne, Nebraska went 9-4, 12-1, 10-2 and 11-2 before the 7-7 season in 2002 which sowed the seeds for Solich’s dismissal.

Clearly, at the time, those records (along with the talent levels coming into the program), was not viewed as sufficient by enough of the fanbase to tolerate the dismissal of a long-standing servant to the program.

Please, don’t misunderstand me.

I thought at the time that Solich’s dismissal was the right decision, a judgment I would stand by to this day. The problem was not dismissing Solich. It wasn’t even the hiring of his replacement, Bill Callahan. The problem was the toxic culture Steve Pederson created that would have made success impossible for almost anyone.

But Callahan was the face of the program going forward, and Nebraska went from competing for conference titles and national titles to struggling for bowl eligibility. Two times in Callahan’s four years, the Children of the Corn had no bowl game to plan a holiday trip around, not even a trip to Shreveport.

The glory days of the late 90s seemed farther and farther removed.

Out went Pederson, and in came Tom Osborne as athletic director.

Shortly thereafter, out went Callahan and in came Bo Pelini to lead Nebraska back to the Promised Land. But given how long Nebraska fans had wandered in the desert of mediocrity, and how much faith they had in the man who had brought them there and the man many thought should have replaced him, expectations in the short term went down.

And, more importantly, progress was seen.

In 2008, Pelini’s Huskers went 8-4 in the regular season, and won the Gator Bowl. Nebraska fans were very pleased, seeing that as progress from the year before. In 2009, NU went 9-3 and made it to the Big 12 title game against heavily-favored Texas, losing an agonizingly close game. Again, Nebraska fans were satisfied. But it was satisfaction with the progress, not with the result.

The fans were sated with the promise of things to come, not with the achievement as it was.

In 2010, Nebraska once again went 10-2, and once again lost the Big 12 title game in an agonizing manner. This loss did not feel quite so much like a win, as the same problems that plagued NU in 2009 reared their heads in 2010. An ugly loss in the Holiday Bowl capped off a year of questions for Nebraska.

Then 2011 saw Nebraska enter a new conference and take a step backward. NU went 9-3, missing out on the B1G conference championship game, and lay another egg in the bowl game. Once again, the same questions that plagued Nebraska for the previous two years reared their heads again, standing between NU and greater glory.

Signing day will soon be upon us, and Nebraska fans will get lost in grainy high school films and stories of 40-yard-dash times and star rankings. But once that excitement dies down, and NU fans settle in for a long offseason, there will be one question that needs to be answered before the 2012 season can truly be projected.

What is success for Nebraska? Is competing for a conference title every year enough? Is it too much to ask? Or is it not enough, with a national title being what NU should be aspiring to year in and year out?

The answers to those questions are what will define success for Nebraska, in 2012 and in years to come.

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