It’s becoming strangely familiar.

After nearly 40 years of enviable stability and perennial success from 1962-2001, Nebraska football now finds itself hunting for its fourth head football coach in eleven years.

The firing of Frank Solich in 2003 shocked the Nebraska fan base and the national media. Solich was like family, a former player who coached under Tom Osborne. He won 75% of his games and led the Huskers to a national title game just two seasons prior to his firing. It was a difficult and controversial decision.

And it backfired.

Bill Callahan was next man up, a fallback candidate for the job in a coaching search that dragged on for 41 days and became very public. Callahan was never a good fit, his teams were wildly inconsistent and his final team in Lincoln completely fell apart in 2007.

His firing was a foregone conclusion.

Bo Pelini arrived in 2008 as a savior of sorts, promising a tough, disciplined return to traditional Nebraska football along with a considerable swagger that appealed to a fan base that felt beat down and embarrassed by the blowouts and loss of prestige on the national stage that marked the Callahan era.

I was at the Gator Bowl victory over Clemson that first season in 2008. Nebraska was outmatched in talent but not scheme. The Huskers rallied to win that game and the impromptu celebration on the field, with Husker fans spilling down to the end zone to greet the team, slap some shoulder pads and shout encouragement, was a great moment. It was like a resurrection pep rally. Clemson was coached by Dabo Swinney, an interim coach stepping in for the fired Tommy Bowden. I thought to myself on the ride back to the hotel in Jacksonville that Nebraska was truly blessed to have a guy like Pelini at the helm, a young and dynamic coach on the ascent. I wondered about the future for Clemson, a talented team that was being lead by a young offensive assistant possibly in over his head.

I was wrong.

Since that day, Dabo Swinney has a record of 56-23 and is preparing his Tigers for a bowl game, fairly secure in his job, at least as secure as most head coaches in Power 5 conferences can be. His Tigers have the best defense statistically in college football.

Bo Pelini has a record of 57-23 since that Gator Bowl and is now unemployed.

And I’m okay with that.

Nebraska will take some lumps nationally for this move, although the expected backlash from the national sports media appears to be much less aggressive than anticipated. Nebraska fans are told that expectations of greatness at Nebraska are unrealistic, that Nebraska football is no longer at the epicenter of college football.

That is correct. But Nebraska ceded that position by losing a lot of important football games in the last ten years, many of them in blowout fashion. Nebraska has removed itself from the discussion. Self-inflicted.

We hear ad nauseam how Nebraska has won nine games or more each season for the last seven seasons, one of only three programs to do so. But as I wrote in a previous blog entry, that statistic is incomplete at best and deeply misleading at worst. When judging Nebraska’s performance under Pelini, step away from the numbers and trust your eyes: this is a program that feasts on teams that it has a decided talent advantage over, slugs it out with comparably talented teams, and gets taken to the woodshed by teams that possess more talent. It’s really that simple.

There has been no demonstrated coaching advantage that I can see. The coaching win–what some refer to as the “signature win”–is difficult to find. I think Pelini and staff outcoached Texas in the 2009 Big 12 Championship loss. I believe Pelini outcoached Mark Richt in the bowl victory over Georgia to end the 2013 season. The 2011 win over Michigan State in Lincoln stands out as an exceptional coaching effort by Pelini.

That’s it. That’s the list of games where I think Nebraska used superior coaching to outplay a superior opponent. Seven seasons, nearly 90 games, and I come up with three.

And that’s why Pelini must go.

The reality for Nebraska is that coaching must make most, if not all, of the difference. If there is any one takeaway from the Tom Osborne era, it’s that a tight-knit coaching staff led by a capable leader and fueled by a scheme that spotlights physical dominance is tailor-made for the athletes that Nebraska has the best chance to attract. Osborne has been repeating this mantra for years following his retirement from coaching. Most Husker fans take it as nostalgia; it’s actually excellent advice.

So what is next for Nebraska football? What is the path back to the success that Nebraska fans crave? Here’s a few thoughts:

Ignore the critics. There will be many that grill Nebraska over firing Pelini. So be it. The reality is that many of the same people questioned why he was kept after the very public disaster that followed last year’s season-ending game with Iowa. If Pelini had been fired 365 days ago, it would have been well received nationally. So what has changed in one year? The record? The swagger? The litany of “I don’t know” answers from the head coach after yet another blowout on the national stage? Critics are fickle.

Embrace the challenge of being great. Nebraska has won more football games than all but three other college programs in the country. There is no modern criticism of football in Nebraska–poor recruiting area, the weather in Lincoln, the glut of talent in other parts of the country, the national exposure that other programs enjoy–that didn’t also apply 90, 70, 50, 25 or 10 years ago. In fact, the Nebraska story is all about overcoming a lack of natural resources to create something unexpected and special. Embrace the challenge. Nebraska has made a bold statement with this coaching change: Nebraska wants more, Nebraska knows it is capable of more and Nebraska will work for more. That should be celebrated.

Find a coach that likes to battle. I think this is the key element of why Bo Pelini struggled. Pelini put on quite a show for the cameras with the yelling, the anger, the chewing of players on the sideline. But we’ve learned that he was not the same hardass coach off the field. And this is undeniable: the Husker team did not perform well for 60 minutes when punched in the face by tough, physical opponents. Something went wrong in that locker room over the last few years. Players began to accept good, but not great, effort from themselves and their teammates. And it went unchecked. Here is where Nebraska can borrow from its past. My favorite part of Tom Osborne was his unreal competitiveness. The man wanted to win, but he also wanted to physically impose his team’s will on the opponent in the process. It was more than winning. Nebraska must recapture this attitude, and it starts with the coaching staff.

I have no idea who the candidates are. That may be for another blog post. But I am excited about the young, capable coaching candidates that are available. Nebraska has made a gutsy, bold move here. I have confidence it will yield a new attitude in Lincoln and move Nebraska football closer to where the fans, supporters and alumni desire it to be.

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