You're right. They didn't suck at all. I stand corrected.
But hey, since you cherry picked a single data point (5th most wins, guys!) and keep ramming that down our throats, allow me to throw out a few additional considerations. First off, only one of those four coaches, Solich, inherited a non-shitmess. In fact, he inherited the Ferrari 250 GTO of college football programs at that time, a reigning champ fresh off the best five-year run in history. You don't think that momentum and the presence of players recruited by Osborne had
anything to do with his ability to win a high percentage of games, at least in his first four seasons?
For that reason alone, you could argue that Solich's results should be thrown out in any comparison with the coaches that followed. But for the sake of debate, I'll keep playing along with your carefully framed "analysis" of the bridged Solichini (Polich?) tenure. Rather than look at total wins, however, which is bullshit when not every team plays the same number of games, I'm going to look at winning percentage as a more objective metric. Fair enough? Shall we see what the results look like?
Solich (w/ Osborne recruits)
1998-2001
42-9
82.4% (4th)
Wow, this guy is good!
Solich (w/o Osborne recruits)
2002-2003
17-10
63.0% (t-37th)
Wow, this guy sucks!
Solich (all years)
1998-2003
59-18
75.6% (12th)
This guy is... not that bad I guess.
Pelini (all years)
2008-2014
66-28
70.2% (16th)
This guy is a total dick, but also not terrible.
I used
this database to compile the above. Far cry from 5th most wins, which of course sounds better, but still not bad overall when you include the Osborne recruiting assist. I'm not going to spend the time to compile the aggregate results of all D-1 teams across two separate time spans, but I think we can safely assume that we'd fall somewhere in the 10th-15th range when you include Solich's first four years. Without, not so good, but despite Bo's many flaws, we'll at least give him credit for winning a respectable percentage of his total games. Certainly looks much better from 30,000 feet than it did on the ground.
Of course, it still ignores things like strength of schedule, a pattern of blowout losses to ranked (and even nonranked) teams and those pesky conference titles that have eluded us since 1999. It's also reminiscent of the fans that were simply happy to win 9 games under Bo while ignoring that we now play more games than we did under Osborne and we were often embarrassingly non-competitive when it mattered most. You could also argue that any competent coach backed by Nebraska's resources and tradition should be able to replicate those results while limiting blowouts and occasionally competing for conference championships, but I digress.
Anyway, carry on with your campaign to prop up a heavily-assisted Solich and a seriously flawed Bo who was able to rack up a decent number/percentage of meaningless wins against average opponents. I don't think anyone disagrees that Solich and Bo were better than Callahan and Riley. I just think debates like these make people sad because it's been forever since NU has won anything meaningful and this feels like a sad attempt to polish a turd. It's an exercise akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but knock yourself out, Tom(s wife).