They really hated Bob. Good lord. Sometimes I think we overreact but these fans are harsh.
https://the-boneyard.com/threads/diacos-debut-at-nebraska.115943/
https://the-boneyard.com/threads/diacos-debut-at-nebraska.115943/
Uconn Board...Ouch
- Thread starter JohnRossEwing
- Start date
UCONN's recruiting has always been at or near the bottom of their league, Big East to AAC. True under Edsall, Paul P and Diaco. It's actually amazing that Edsall did as well as he did the first time he was there.
UCONN is an East Coast fanbase. They will let you know how they feel. Not an easy school from a recruiting angle. They play their home games 25 miles away in East Hartford. Campus facilities aren't anything to wow a recruit, and people in the state are far more interested in basketball.
I am sure the fans thought Diaco was some sort of weirdo that couldn't get it done.
UCONN is an East Coast fanbase. They will let you know how they feel. Not an easy school from a recruiting angle. They play their home games 25 miles away in East Hartford. Campus facilities aren't anything to wow a recruit, and people in the state are far more interested in basketball.
I am sure the fans thought Diaco was some sort of weirdo that couldn't get it done.
Not every good coordinator makes a good head coach.
Nebraska fans should be acutely aware of this fact.
Nebraska fans should be acutely aware of this fact.
Most I would say, and "hated" might be an understatement. If they are anywhere close in their predictions this is going to be a very long season.
I thought they had some solid D's at UCONN and had some high draft picks on the defensive side of the ball. I could be wrong, but it seems like they are letting his odd personality and the poor win-loss record as HC at UCONN (they had a putrid offense, right), skew their opinions.
And why would you even care what they say? They hate on him because he didn't succeed there. Most fans are going to hate on a coach and think he's going to fail at their next job after they've been fired. I doubt Youngstown State fans care much what we think of Bo.
It's a decent job when you are .500 against teams with a winning record. Nothing ground breaking.
Nah - Edsall inherited Skip Holtz's 10 win playoff team, could sell having a fancy new stadium on the way, and their athletic department IIRC was financially healthy.
I mean, this guy isn't wrong about some of the posters here, and from what I heard from Diaco I can't say he's wrong about the defense. I guess we'll see.
Well, after watching the game, readings RK's blog post and now what these UCONN fans are saying, my optimism for the season is fading.
Yeah-boy everybody says UCONN fans are the most knowledgable about football don't they? I mean their comments can't be tinged with bitterness and resentment. They know it all. Silly us for ever thinking we could make predictions on this season without asking the most knowledgable college football fans on the planet. Why didn't we just think to ask them?
I think most of the disappointment on this site, and it seems to be more acute on this site than on most other Husker fan boards I've seen, is the fact that nothing we do can lead to an instant "We're back" kind of moment.
No one on that train wants to hear about more time at this point. However I think Herman said it best in his PC "I don't have any magic fairy dust to spread on a 5-7 team". That's probably the top coaching candidate in the country the last couple years.
While we're probably not a 5-7 team, that same core concept applies to "we're a 3-4 team without a OLB who can pass rush" or "we're a 4-3 team without championship quality DE's who can pass rush". Parella did a good job in Year 1, and in Year 2 he's looking for totally different body types with scheme change. Same for Bray.
People generally think because we paid Diaco 800K and bought a name, he's going to waltz in here and paper over stuff with scheme. It also doesn't help that lots of folks lack perspective in terms of timeline....We've been hearing about all these sweet recruits that Williams x2 have been hauling in and "expecting big things" to happen when most of those kids won't even be *on campus* for another season. Having the expectations now, and the players later, is sort of backwards.
Most of the folks we're truly excited to see play on the roster are RFrosh or younger this year (folks like Deontre T, or Guy T or Tyjon or Spielman) or True Frosh next year (basically anyone DW recruited).
That's not to say Riley gets 7 years like Bo, but if "now" is truly when the players are starting to see the field we expect to turn the program around, its going to be a year or two, before we truly see what they are capable of.
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We need to get better Lbs. We've been too slow for too long. Compare to Wisconsin's or even Iowa's. We may have some talent, but they are young.
We need better OLBs. Right now we have a patch job of Gifford and Davis. We have a wealth of options on the inside, with Ferguson and Barry, we may be downright dominant in the middle in the coming years.
The secondary looks bright too, but most of the guys in the pipeline are sophomores who played limited snaps (Dismuke/Jackson) or younger or not even on campus yet (anyone DW is recruiting).
We are entering the 3rd year past "Now"
The roster deficiencies and the current "reboot" in learning a new system are at least in part do to decisions made by the current staff.
I do not expect to be all the way there in year 3 but I do expect to be heading in the right direction. I hope this year continues to show progress and we aren't making a uturn and taking a detour.
The fact that in year 3 some feel we don't have the personnel to field a quality 4-3 or 3-4 defense is concerning and can't all be at the feet of Bo.
I hope we are hitting the JUCOs hard because I find it hard to believe that true freshman are going to have a big impact next year
Indeed they are. So the dissenting faction has to figure out what they are going to tolerate, of things they say they won't tolerate.
1. Be flexible on the "now" requirement and bring in a new staff who will fix such deficiencies in their own three year window.
2. Be flexible on the "no reboot/mulligan" requirement, and let the current staff upgrades go to work.
Quite honestly, if we take the position that "Year 3 is Year 3, so help us God", we face the very real prospect of firing a staff in which Donte Williams has *zero* recruits ever hit the field, and Parella/Bray had zero years to get anyone on the field to fit the present scheme.
Basically your choices are "give the next guy more time" or "give this guy more time" but none of the above generally include "have a championship pass rush or seasoned secondary in the now".
Me personally, I'm ok handing out 4 or so years (which is another season or two). At worst, we'll hand the next guy a team full of DW recruits and perhaps "now" is in the cards for him.
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Well, they do have 3 years of experience with Diaco.
What are Husker fans opinions on Callahan, Cosgrove, Pelini, Watson, or Beck?
Yeah, there's still a contingent of fans who's apathy/Stockholm syndrome made them fans of Pelini as "9 wins" is as high as a bar there is to them, but I would say it's pretty safe to say none of those coaches will have statues made and put in front of Memorial Stadium.
Considering 99.5% of CFB hires are retreads, what a particular fan base thinks of a coach means little, however used to winning said fanbase is.
I am firmly in the camp of giving this guy more time and giving him a huge raise if things show continued improvement from years 1 and 2. If we backslide he still needs more time but I think it is fair to say he F'd some things up along the way that contributed to the deficiencies. No way should he be fired unless the season is a complete dumpster fire but that doesn't mean he can't be criticized.
What's disheartening is how Wisconsin can seemingly take a homeless 68 year old that's never played football and turn him into an All American LB.
If I recall, they'll be playing a walk-on QB at LB. He'll probably be great.
Are we out of walk-on QB's? Where's our LB development?
Sure he can, but dwelling on its a bit unhealthy at worst, and makes it seem like the "fire everyone now" train is the ultimate motive. Hard to tell on a message board when folks just won't let something go. Everyone just keeps intimating...this takes too long. With no real solution as to how they actually speed something up, that can't be papered over with a check for the right scheme.
We have people defying any sort of common sense wondering if Diaco's PC was an indicator he was actually thrilled with Saturday's performance in their effort to wonder if these guys are the right fit for Husker nation.
To be quite honest, Husker Nation isn't really demanding a whole heck of a lot. Billy C would still be here had he done something as simple as replace Cosgrove. No one really cared that Bo pulled a couple of kids out of an LSU dorm and made them the centerpiece of his defensive staff. If he would have fired himself as DC or at least Els as RC, he'd still be here, personal issues aside.
On that basic scale (the desire to improve NU), I don't think Riley can be questioned and assuming the backslide isn't huge, he probably has a pretty good chance of coaching as long as he wants to if these recruits do develop as we expect.
Considering the way the pendulum swings around here, the next guy will almost certainly be Frost-like, if not Frost himself. After having put up with Nice Guy Old Man Riley, folks will be clamoring for a young buck with fire in the belly and all the other yuppy speak.
Any transition back to a spread option type of offense (read "run first") will take a bit of time, at a minimum he'll have to redo the QB room and a good chunk of the WR room, in addition to the current holes (3-4OLB, young secondary) on D. That won't be fixed overnight.
I guess if mediocrity and irrelevancy are inevitable you might as well sit back and enjoy it. I believe Bobby Knight had a similar quote back in the day.
I have no issue hiring a former HC back into a coordinator role, what was concerning is reading their comments about the defense. They seemed greatly amused at Husker fans hoping that the base D he used for 98% of the game was a means of hiding things for Oregon, among other things.
SSO on another board seems to think Diaco won't roll out the base D for 98% of the snaps against Oregon. Thinks Riley will kibosh that gameplan if he even wanted to suggest it, or the Assistants wouldn't let him again.
Edit: The puzzling thing for even folks who are at practice, is why we went so vanilla. Only Diaco knows at this point. Certainly the mystery of the year so far.
Their experience with Diaco was as head coach, not as DC. There is a big difference there. I remember some of their fans using their pathetic offense as a reason for making fun of us hiring him as DC-as if one has anything at all to do with the other. That's how ridiculous some of their criticism is. Like I said above, fans always hate on coaches that got fired from their job and say they aren't qualified for their next one, even if they aren't the same job. Since when has a fanbase said to fans at a coach's next job "Coach X was a disaster here and we're glad he's gone, but I think he'll do fine for you." Nobody says that. Everything they say will be tinged with bitterness and resentment for what they did there, and they'll always play up every bad thing that goes on at their new job as a way of saying "see, that's why we wanted him out"-because it confirms what they want to believe. Nobody ever wants to admit they made a mistake in firing a coach. If you think they know so much, why were you not asking them for all of their great wisdom before? And what was it you expected to hear from their fanbase anyway? Did you expect them to be full of praise for somebody they fired? It's just laughable to me that some people actually take their comments seriously. I look at it as fans from a program that fired a coach making fun of a coach at the coach's new job as being about as obvious as water being wet.
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Most of that board has a personal vendetta against Diaco. I think they are mad because he promised so much and produced so little. However, I am with you. Time in and time out they kept talking about Diaco constantly sitting in the Base D with a bend but don't break philosophy. One lamented that he would blitz about twice a year. I'm not sure we are good enough to just keep everything in front of us hoping the other team makes a mistake. We need to force the action knowing we could get hurt on the back end...but we might make something happen.
Nebraska fans just want the Bob Stoops moment, where a new coach turns it around in one season, with a championship the second year. Of course, that almost never happens. And Bob Stoops was unable to repeat the stunt over the next SIXTEEN seasons.
The 1993-1997 run made us all a bunch of spoiled, whiny babies. What isn't going to fix thing is hiring new coaches every off-season.
The 1993-1997 run made us all a bunch of spoiled, whiny babies. What isn't going to fix thing is hiring new coaches every off-season.
I believe the new logo on their helmet is an actuarial value calculator.
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