There’s been a lot of talk … a lot of talk about who the next Nebraska football head coach is going to be. Despite the noise getting louder about who the next head coach is going to be and the fact that there isn’t anything that could be considered agreement on who is going to get the job, there has been consistency in the rumors. Those rumors and whispers and analyst predictions have all been predicated on the fact that when Trev Alberts decides on his guy, he’s going to open the wallet and dole out a ton of cash to lure him to Lincoln.
But what if that’s not the goal? What if the approach isn’t to blow away Matt Campbell, or Lance Leipold or Lane Kiffin or whoever Alberts takes aim at away with more money than they’ve ever seen before?
Those that have read this site while the Nebraska football team has carried out its coaching search should know that while I’m not above reporting on rumors around the hunt, they tend to be sourced rumors. This time around, things are going to be a bit different because what I heard over the weekend, I have no interest in sourcing.
The people that talked to me and that I talked with over the weekend aren’t going to be named. They aren’t even going to be hinted at beyond the fact that they exist and I trust what they have to say. I’ll also say it was from them that I heard about Chinander being fired and Busch being promoted, as a certainty, before it went down.
Take the rest of this post with however many grains of salt as you need to. You can entirely dismiss everything that comes next. But if the Nebraska football coaching search is being carried out the way these rumors claim, then the program might be in a spot of trouble.
At the heart of the approach is that Mickey Joseph is almost certainly going to be named the head coach if he can find a level of success over the season’s final five weeks. It appears that if the Huskers do go that route, it might be more about the fact that they can’t lure anyone else in than complete and total confidence in Mickey as “the man.”
Nebraska football approach limits the field
Why wouldn’t the Huskers be able to lure someone else in, you ask? That would be because Trev Alberts isn’t offering up more money than the Nebraska football head coaching candidates have ever seen. The talk is that the Cornhuskers are instead attempting to haul coaches in by offering heavily incentive-laden contracts.
If true, the Huskers are severely limiting who is going to talk to them about the job and limiting it knowingly. One has to wonder whether the talk that Nebraska’s resources were almost endless when this search began was just incredibly wrong or whether things have changed.
Whatever the reason for reportedly going to this approach, it’s one that could have far reaching repercussions. There is a chance, of course that Mickey Joseph is the right man for the job. Praise for the former wide receivers’ coach has come from far and wide.
But whether it’s Mickey or someone else, what is clear is that the next hire might be the most important hire in the Nebraska football program’s history. It’s important enough that every stone should be overturned and every tactic should be tried. In short, if the university is trying to find a way to avoid a big payout to the next coach, it feels like a recipe for yet another disaster after two decades of almost constant disasters.