Nebraska football: Current, former defensive coordinators feuding as season spirals
At the center of the latest drama surrounding the Nebraska football program is ruby style tackling and who came up with the idea.
Current Nebraska football defensive coordinator Bob Diaco knows exactly what the problem with his defense is. Spoiler alert: it’s not his scheme.
According to Diaco, the problem is that the previous defensive coordinator Mark Banker started teaching the Huskers about rugby-style tackling. After practice on Tuesday, Diaco launched into his diatribe about what he meant by his “no reasonable reason” speech he gave after the Northwestern game.
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Diaco said that when he arrived in Nebraska he found that the rugby style tackling that former DC Mark Banker had employed last year was not popular with the players. He added, according to the Omaha World-Herald, that the players had completely forgotten how to tackle because of it.
Diaco also tried to excuse both Banker and head coach Mike Riley for the change, saying he had heard it was directed from someone above Riley. It seems as though the defensive coordinator was attempting to blame the since-fired Shawn Eichorst.
"“So I had no idea until we went to our tackling drill in the first full practice of spring football and found that the players were spectacularly frustrated during the drill, because they’re willing, they’re talented enough to tackle, they’re tough enough to tackle, they’re willing tacklers, they want to do well, but they don’t fundamentally know, anymore, how to tackle. At all. So we’ve been working hard at just that one thing.”"
Diaco added about their struggles. For his part, Mark Banker isn’t buying it. When the paper reached the former coach for a comment, he said he felt Diaco was “full of it.” He also said his successor was making excuses for poor performance.
Banker also said that Nebraska’s tackling got noticeably better in 2016. For his part, it appears he believes Diaco didn’t like the rugby style tackling, scrapped it and the players are back to being the poor tacklers they were before the 2016 season.
It’s apparent that this is exactly the kind of drama programs that are in a good place don’t have to deal with. When you consider that current athletic director Bill Moos has said he hasn’t made a decision on whether Riley will return, it seems as though we might be in for at least another season of this.
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It’s more likely than not that the Nebraska football team is going to see a change at the top this offseason. The coaching staff is already behaving as if they want to get their version of what went wrong out to the public. That’s never a particularly good sign for a program.