Dear Mike Riley,

I might owe you something in the line of an apology.

While you were spending your Thursday afternoon packing up the Prius for a trip to the airport and a twilight flight into Lincoln to be introduced as Nebraska’s new football coach, I was busy working through my feelings about your sudden and unexpected hiring in what Human Resources would later term “a shocking display of unprofessional behavior.”

Nobody liked those plants anyway. Or that window. And the copy machine was asking for it.

I said bad things about you, Mike Riley. Really bad things. I don’t even know you. But I aggressively and unmercifully tore through your coaching record, questioned your heritage, mocked your hairline…it was brutal. And then I found out you coached in Canada. Oh boy.

I wasn’t really prepared for your selection. I wasn’t ready to grasp that Nebraska, lost in the wilderness as a program for the better part of the last dozen seasons, was reduced to robbing Oregon State for football leadership. In retrospect, I’m not sure I was emotionally ready for anybody to be announced as the next coach of my beloved Cornhuskers. And I’m not alone.

We Husker fans are a curious lot. We tie up a lot of our identity into our football team. You can argue that Nebraskans are a fairly homogenized group of folk to begin with, what with chewing the same prairie dirt and fighting the same winds and all. We Nebraskans are all in this strange land together, where it snows sideways and we all agree that Stonehenge would have been much more useful to the druids if it were made out of hollowed out 1962 Chevy Bel Air station wagons. And Husker football is the only game in town. We get even tighter, and stranger, on football Saturday.

Husker football is our baby. We’ve had to sit by for years watching interlopers and native sons alike deconstruct this perfect beast. There was anticipation that this next hire might be a step in a better direction, a chance to recapture the magic.

And then we hired the guy from Oregon State.

Which is how a moderately productive Thursday morning in the office turned into a rage rodeo.

I’m better now. I’ve had time to read everything my browser can serve up on Mike Riley: your career, your character, the risk and possible reward of hiring you.

I like what I see. You are a nice guy with a deeply competitive nature. Your fellow coaches speak of you as a worthy adversary and a friend. You treat people with respect and demand the same from your players. You adapt your style to the talent at hand. You recruit aggressively in hotbeds like California and Texas and have left a trail of high school coaches who believe you to be a man of integrity and honor. You loved and admired your dad and continue to work hard to make him proud even after his passing. You allow players and fans to bring their dogs to practice. Reminds us Nebraskans of a guy who coached us once, minus the dog part.

These are no small things. College athletics is not for the timid. Seems you’ve carved your own unique path.

I worry about your ability to mine the barren midwest for talent, the downfall of your predecessors. I am concerned about your team’s recent trend of fading late in the season. There have been some ugly blowouts at Oregon State. And how will you handle being the center of attention in Nebraska, where every move by the football coach is broken down, celebrated, questioned and debated. Bricks fly through television screens at alarming rates on football Saturday in Nebraska. Surely that is not how things operated at your previous coaching gigs in Corvallis, San Diego and Winnipeg.

And for lack of a better term, how will you handle prosperity? You are a builder and an underdog maintainer. Nebraska, if and when rolling, is a monster. Lots of resources, plenty of money, passion to spare. That beast will need to be fed.

I hope we find out. I’m sorry, Mike Riley, that I did not give you a fighters chance right off the bat. I’ll start on the right foot tomorrow by rooting for you to win the press conference. And then cheer you as you win over the team and the state.

And then, by God, you better win. A lot. Or your heritage and hairline are fair game.

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