The task facing Mickey Joseph, the first African American Head Coach in the history of the University of Nebraska, is to turn back the clock on Husker football.
Call it the new definition of irony.
On one hand, the lack of diversity in hiring head coaches has been a black mark hanging over an otherwise pristine athletic program. On the other hand, for Nebraska to get back to competing for conference titles, the program must go back and find its stolen identity by rediscovering its power football roots.
Back to the future.
After the firing of Prodigal Son Scott Frost, Athletic Director Trev Alberts – himself a former Husker All-America defensive end – had little choice but to promote Joseph, who was in his first season as the Associate Head Coach. Joseph now trades “Associate” for “Interim.” How well he and his team fare in their remaining eight games will likely determine if “Interim” becomes synonymous with “Temporary.”
It’s got to start at the line of scrimmage, where Nebraska – a program long known for power football and dominance at the line of scrimmage – has fallen woefully behind teams like Oklahoma, it’s long-time rival who rolled into Lincoln for Joseph’s first official game and drubbed the Huskers 49-14.
For Joseph to have the kind of success coaching in Lincoln that he enjoyed as a Husker quarterback in the early 1990’s, he will need to return the program’s mindset and approach to the days when powerful Husker teams dominated up front. With a couple of brief exceptions, that hasn’t been the case for roughly two decades now. One former player called the program “soft” and noted, “if you want to be physical, you have to practice physical.”
It won’t be easy to reverse a downward trend that began two decades ago, when then-Athletic Director Steve Pederson – another “prodigal son” who returned to Lincoln and flopped – fired Hall of Fame coach Tom Osborne’s hand-picked successor, Frank Solich, after the Huskers had finished a 9-3 regular season in 2003.
After that began the tenures of four different head coaches who each utilized more “modern” offensive schemes, including the “West Coast Offense” and the “Spread.” Hard-nosed, Big Ten style-football was cast aside.
Square pegs, meet round hole.
The biggest blow to the proud Husker fan base were the struggles of Frost, who had promised to go back to doing things the Nebraska way. “Coach Osborne had the right formula. Nebraska went away from it,” he told the media prior to his first season in 2018.
But instead of bringing back power football, Frost made things worse by trying to blend Chip Kelly (he’d been the Offensive Coordinator at Oregon before getting his first head coaching job at Central Florida) with Osborne. When asked how his spread offense system would fare in the burly Big Ten, Frost replied, “I’m hopeful the Big Ten has to modify their system for us.”
They didn’t.
So in actuality, it was Frost who failed the worst in trying to restore Nebraska’s identity, and get back to Osborne’s successful formula of playing hard-nosed, power football.
The end result after two decades is that a program that once upon a time represented the essence of power football had morphed into a finesse program ill-suited for their conference or anything else at the big boy level.
Now Joseph – who like his predecessor played quarterback for Osborne from 1988-1991, is looking to go back to doing things the way Osborne did them – including simple things like extra running in practice for players who make critical mistakes during games. Call it “tough love.” On the plus side, he takes the reins minus any of the intense “Savior of the Program” pressure his predecessor faced. Few if any expect him to be the head coach in Lincoln in 2023. Dozens of potential replacement names have already been tossed around, and Comedian “Larry the Cable Guy,” a prominent Husker booster, was openly begging Fox TV analyst Urban Meyer to take the gig during the pregame show.
But as another TV guy always says, not so fast my friend. The schedule is favorable moving forwar, so in essence Joseph – and the remainder of the current Nebraska coaching staff – are playing with house money. They have a chance to see what they can “git ‘er dun.” Having finally progressed in the diversity department, Nebraska will now need to look back to find that lost identity.
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