The University of Nebraska football program lost to Northern Illinois on Saturday, the first time in 13 years a team from outside a power conference won in Lincoln. The deeply humiliating loss prompted swift and merciless change just five days later. Nebraska abruptly announced the firing of athletic director Shawn Eichorst on Thursday, the first step in an inevitable overhaul of the athletic department.

Let’s not dance around this. A new athletic director is going to come in and hire a new football coach. (And likely a new basketball coach.) The loss to Northern Illinois and sluggish 1-2 start marks the beginning of the end of Mike Riley’s three-year tenure in Lincoln. Riley is a nice guy, and in less than three months he’s on track to get fired and paid more than $6.6 million to find out where nice guys tend to finish.

The university’s decision to remove Eichorst is about football, pure and simple. The university’s awkward press release complimented Eichorst before noting, “those efforts have not translated to on-field performance.” Notice it didn’t say court. Or pool. Or mat.

In other words, Riley going 16-13 through three seasons and losing to a MAC team for the first time in school history isn’t going to cut it. When he is inevitably let go, Riley will make $170,000 per month through February 2021. Former coach Bo Pelini is still slated to get nearly $2.2 million between now and February 2019 and Eichorst is due $1.7 million. You don’t have to be on the House Appropriations Committee to deduce that Nebraska potentially paying out $10.5 million for three people not to work isn’t the most efficient use of state funding.

Firing Eichorst isn’t a big loss for Nebraska. He was an awkward fit, never comfortable with the external demands of the job. Eichorst is a buttoned-up lawyer miscast among the boundless passion of Nebraska, a benign personality who lacked the dynamism and creativity necessitated to forge a new identity and stop the school’s free-fall from relevancy. He was doomed as soon as he hired Riley, now 64, who was already deep in his twilight at Oregon State. Riley offered little other than a smiling foil to Bo Pelini’s perpetual scowl. Eichorst simply gave Riley a retirement cushion, and anyone smart enough to realize Nebraska is flat and the Earth isn’t could have seen this Riley flop coming.

This leaves Nebraska with both a football problem and an identity crisis, and those two are intricately intertwined to make this one of the trickiest jobs in college sports. To solve the problem will take a deep and painful look at the school’s modern realities. And the answers are going to be uncomfortable for Big Red loyalists, who double as one of the school’s strengths. Nebraska first needs to realize its limitations before maximizing its strengths.

So let’s start with a few cold body blows. Nebraska’s football job is not one of the top 20 jobs in college football. The school has established no consistent identity since joining the Big Ten in 2011, lacks a fertile recruiting base and has lost all of the major advantages it held by winning or sharing the national title three times from 1994-97. Nebraska is a worse job than Wisconsin, as it’s been bereft of talent and resonates with modern recruits less than places like Mississippi State, Boise State or TCU. Calls to athletic directors and industry sources on Thursday kept yielding the same defining left-handed compliment: “Well, it’s on the right side of the division [in the Big Ten].” Yep, Nebraska is the potential prom date being tabbed as having a “great personality.”

Nebraska football head coach Mike Riley (R) chats with Shawn Eichorst during fan day in Lincoln. Nebraska fired Eichorst on Thursday. (AP) More

So what can Nebraska be? One Power Five athletic director offered this analysis: “Nebraska can be a better version of what Virginia Tech, Wisconsin and Kansas State have been,” the AD told Yahoo Sports. “They can be on the high end of that. They can’t be what Ohio State, Alabama and Florida have been recently.”

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