Nebraska Football: AD starts Dave Aranda fire while trying to douse it

When it comes to the Nebraska football team, it’s a safe bet that rumors about who is going to be the next head coach are only going to heat up in the coming weeks. After all, it’s assumed that Scott Frost’s official “permanent” replacement will be named either right before or right after the Black Friday game.  That’s coming up rather fast.

The internet being the internet, rumors flying around at a breakneck pace are nothing new. A member of the athletic department fanning the flames, even by accident, is rather new, though. That’s exactly what Doug Ewald, who is the Executive Associate AD and Chief Financial Officer for the university, did earlier this week when he posted a reply to a tweet that was poking fun at the coaching rumors.

A Nebraska football fan account that goes by the moniker HuskGuys tweeted out a message board theory that claimed Baylor head coach Dave Aranda coming to Lincoln was a done deal. The tweet was clearly poking fun at the message board post. That’s important to remember because the tweet would have been quickly forgotten. Then Doug Ewald stepped in and brought quite a bit more attention to the thread than it ever would have gotten.

“Completely wrong!” That was all Ewald had to write in order to get Nebraska football fans all over social media raising their eyebrows and taking notes.

There are a couple of things quite weird about this tweet. The first is that it’s still up more than 24 hours after responding to a random person on Twitter about a rumor regarding the Cornhuskers’ head coaching search. The second is that while apparently shooting down the idea that Aranda is coming here, he’s made more than a few people think that he protested just a bit too much.

Even if Ewald isn’t trying a misdirect, even if the idea that Aranda is the next Husker head coach is totally wrong, it seems odd that a member of the athletic department is going out of his way to shoot down the rumor. It wasn’t that long ago that there were rumors that Lane Kiffin was heading to Lincoln for a secret meeting with Trev Alberts. Ewald didn’t knock that one down. Does that mean it happened? Of course not. So why in the world is someone this high up in the program tweeting denials to randos?

And why hasn’t anyone (perhaps his boss, Trev?) told him to take the tweet down? The whole thing is just going to keep the conversation going.

Nebraska Football rumors run amok

Those thinking that the account is a fake … it’s not. This also isn’t the first time that Ewald has replied to a random Husker fan on Twitter about something.

There was the time he made sure it was Mickey Joseph and not Scott Frost who got credit for recruiting Trey Palmer.

There was the time he took a little shot at Bill Moos.

The bottom line is that Doug Ewald doesn’t tweet all that often. Which makes his commenting on the Nebraska football coaching search all the weirder.

If his intention was to kill a rumor that Dave Aranda is in the Huskers’ cross hairs, he didn’t do a particularly good job of it. On the bright side, it won’t be long now before Husker nation finds out whether he was just being forthcoming or trying a very interesting misdirect.