I never thought the uttering of a 40-year old man's name would make me depressed, but it does. Whenever someone brings up Bo Pelini, I feel like someone (maybe Kevin Cosgrove?) is punching me in the stomach and kicking me in the nuts simultaneously. All of us as Husker fans have entertained the fantasies of what might have been had Pedey offered Pelini the head coaching job after the '03 season instead of Callahan. Immovable defenses, unstoppable defenders, Big XII titles and BCS bowls are all things that seem possible now that we've witnessed Bo's run at LSU and his one season at Oklahoma after his departure from Lincoln. And as much as I sometimes find myself yearning for that kind of defensive supremacy, I'm realizing a bit more each day that if I hope to keep my insanity for the duration of this season, I have to stop thinking about Bo.
You might be wondering what it is that brought me to write about Pelini. It was this article, which somebody posted on Huskerboard that was the source of my emotional pain today. Quotes like this, from Barrett Rudd, don't help in making me forget about what might have been:
"Guys were ready to run through a wall for him," said Ruud, a junior on that Nebraska team. "He was such a great motivator. He'd print out cards with different quotes and leave them in our locker to fire us up before games, and when it came to X's and O's, he definitely had the 'it' factor.
It'd be one thing if it was the offense, not the defense, that was sucking this season. Maybe then I'd be able to forget about Pelini. But when a unit that was once good enough to have a sweet nickname like the Blackshirts is playing like a bunch of Powder Puff players, it makes it that much harder to forget that the preeminent defensive coordinator in the country once roamed our sidelines and wanted to stay there. The fact that the second-biggest douche in the universe (Pedey, Jimmy Clausen being #1) hired the first big-name guy to come available when his fan base and the players wanted Pelini is perhaps the biggest testament to his stubbornness. And the sad thing is, I saw it coming. When Callahan was fired by the Raiders right after our search started, I told my brother, "Watch, I guarantee you that we hire him, he's the biggest name on the market now." Which, at the time, he was. He had gone to the Super Bowl (and gotten his ass kicked)a couple years earlier, and I figured bringing in Jon Gruden's system to Lincoln was the type of change that Pedey thought necessary.
Let it be clear that I don't think Callahan was necessarily a bad hire. I think he has done a good job turning a program that ran a power-option game into the West Coast machine we currently see playing on Saturdays (although someone should have told him that we still wanted SOME KIND of a running game, not that we wanted to scrap it entirely, which is apparently what he has done). I have my doubts about his ability to interact with players the way college coaches should, but I still think he can turn it around here.
Ugh, but our defense. It has been so painful to watch this year, I find myself slamming beers at an unsafe rate during games just to numb the pain and anguish of having to watch the poorly-coached Husker D half-ass it around the field for the better part of 3 hours. I have to admit, there are times I find my mind wandering.........if we got rid of Pedey and Callahan, what would Bo think.........dammit, I'm doing it again!
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