Matt Ruhl: 8 year contract, $74 million, 90% guaranteed. Well. This will be interesting.

Contract is interesting, but as far as track record goes he does a nice job of turning around college programs relatively quickly. The only thing to note is that when you turn a program around in 2-4 years it generally isn't your own recruits.

All that being said if I woke up and saw "Hawkeyes hire Matt Ruhle" I'd be pretty optimistic.
 
Interesting that they are bringing in yet another dude with coaching experience exclusively in conferences that don't play defense. Worked out real well for every hire so far since joining the Big Ten, but at least Rhule built a team that resembles what Nebraska wants at Baylor. Expecting Scott Frost and an entire staff of offensive-minded coaches to build a tough nosed team that can compete in the B1G is still head scratching. I think Rhule is at least a solid coach, but I would've offered this contract to Chryst over Rhule in a heartbeat. Maybe he wasn't interested. I'd probably give something a little more modest to Beliema before offering this to Rhule as well.
 
JoeyLabasForPresident said:
Interesting that they are bringing in yet another dude with coaching experience exclusively in conferences that don't play defense. Worked out real well for every hire so far since joining the Big Ten, but at least Rhule built a team that resembles what Nebraska wants at Baylor. Expecting Scott Frost and an entire staff of offensive-minded coaches to build a tough nosed team that can compete in the B1G is still head scratching. I think Rhule is at least a solid coach, but I would've offered this contract to Chryst over Rhule in a heartbeat. Maybe he wasn't interested. I'd probably give something a little more modest to Beliema before offering this to Rhule as well.
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Correct. But that is because you have watched Big Ten football your whole life and you know that when you have a tire fire like the one in Lincoln you have to start by rebuilding the trenches and defense because if you are competent, just competent not even great, in those two areas you have at least a 7 or 8 win team.
 
I like Rhule, but Im with others on here. Nebraska hasn't adapted to Big10 play yet. Why not go for a coach with Big10 or SEC history?

Did he build Baylor up or was that someone else?
 
rschneider said:
I like Rhule, but Im with others on here. Nebraska hasn't adapted to Big10 play yet. Why not go for a coach with Big10 or SEC history?

Did he build Baylor up or was that someone else?
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I believe his tenure coincided with the fallout of the sanctions. He was there three seasons, with one good season. Records of 1-11, 7-6, and 11-1. The seven seasons that preceded him were all winning seasons, five of which were ten or eleven wins. Overall I wouldn’t consider his tenure particularly impressive, especially given that their only real competition in his 11 win season was Oklahoma. Art Briles did the building, and then exited with the sanctions. Very similar flash in the pan performance to Scott Frost at UCF, and the AAC and Big 12 have the same defensive deficiencies.
 
FloridaHawks said:
Contract is interesting, but as far as track record goes he does a nice job of turning around college programs relatively quickly. The only thing to note is that when you turn a program around in 2-4 years it generally isn't your own recruits.

All that being said if I woke up and saw "Hawkeyes hire Matt Ruhle" I'd be pretty optimistic.
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Sorry, but "turning around" Temple isn't even close to what's required of a coach in this situation.

And Baylor? Lol. He had a single good season (as you said with someone else's recruits), was under .500 for his short tenure, and never beat a ranked team. He bailed after a single unicorn season like his predecessor Frost, and proceeded to drive an NFL football franchise into the ground.

Rhule knows he's in an unwinnable position and in 3-4 years we'll be right back here in another one of these threads while the Huskers are looking for their 5th coach in ten years with 3 on the payroll.

Nebraska is scraping the crusties off the bottom of the barrel and trying to sell it as undamaged goods because no coach worth his weight in guano would go there.
 
Fryowa said:
Sorry, but "turning around" Temple isn't even close to what's required of a coach in this situation.

And Baylor? Lol. He had a single good season (as you said with someone else's recruits), was under .500 for his short tenure, and never beat a ranked team. He bailed after a single unicorn season like his predecessor Frost, and proceeded to drive an NFL football franchise into the ground.

Rhule knows he's in an unwinnable position and in 3-4 years we'll be right back here in another one of these threads while the Huskers are looking for their 5th coach in ten years with 3 on the payroll.

Nebraska is scraping the crusties off the bottom of the barrel and trying to sell it as undamaged goods because no coach worth his weight in guano would go there.
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Your last line left me wondering what Bielema's weight in guano would look like...
 
Fryowa said:
Sorry, but "turning around" Temple isn't even close to what's required of a coach in this situation.

And Baylor? Lol. He had a single good season (as you said with someone else's recruits), was under .500 for his short tenure, and never beat a ranked team. He bailed after a single unicorn season like his predecessor Frost, and proceeded to drive an NFL football franchise into the ground.

Rhule knows he's in an unwinnable position and in 3-4 years we'll be right back here in another one of these threads while the Huskers are looking for their 5th coach in ten years with 3 on the payroll.

Nebraska is scraping the crusties off the bottom of the barrel and trying to sell it as undamaged goods because no coach worth his weight in guano would go there.
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Anytime you can take teams from 2-10 and 1-11 and make those teams 10-3 and 11-3 in three years then you're probably doing something right. Nobody said he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just said I'd be optimistic about the hire.
 
FloridaHawks said:
Anytime you can take teams from 2-10 and 1-11 and make those teams 10-3 and 11-3 in three years then you're probably doing something right. Nobody said he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just said I'd be optimistic about the hire.
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It's a whole different dynamic at the P5 level. Scott Frost did the same thing, lots of coaches do the same thing. And ultimately, almost fail statistically when they move to major conference football.

At the end of the day the guy has never done anything with his own recruits, hasn't had to recruit in P5 ball where it's orders of magnitude more cutthroat than a G5 conference, never beat a ranked team...He has no resume really.

Add to that the fact that Nebraska is the only team in P5 football that hasn't been to a bowl game since 2017, and has no in-state talent nor any real geographically located major talent pool, and absolutely zero selling points to give any recruit, and you can see that nebraska is grasping at straws.
 
Gander Hawk said:
I wonder if Nebraska made a run at Fickell. On paper, Fickell looks like the stronger hire. We'll see.
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My money says they made a run at a whole lot of people, and a whole lot of people said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

Any coach they'd be going after would be a multimillionaire already anyway, and the thought of growing old being known as the next Scott Frost or Mike Riley failure probably isn't appealing no matter what the money is. Those guys know what an absolute shit show and impossibility nebraska is, why would they want to ruin their legacy permanently. Why do you think there's so much guaranteed money? You don't offer that on a job that has people interested, you do that because no one is interested and you have to sell it. Rhule's smart enough to know that his chances of success are about 1.9%, and he's going to make sure he gets a big check no matter what. He also knows he's not a big name coach and if he gets blown up in a couple years...no biggie. He's still set up for life.

I mean, we're all aware of this, but look at what's become of nebraska's coaches after osborne and after they've stumbled through the dumpster fire that is husker football...

Frank Solich - Fired and went to the MAC to coach Ohio never be heard from again other than a few Idaho Potato and Beef O'Brady's bowls.

Bill Callahan - Fired and bounced from team to team as an assistant in the NFL, got a "we don't have anyone else" promotion to HC of the 'Skins where he went 3-8 and got fired.

Bo Pelini - Fired and went on to stink up the Missouri Valley conference for Youngstown State, followed by a stint as DC at LSU where he got fired after 3 games, never to be heard from again.

Mike Riley - Fired and after a two year sabbatical wound up as head coach of the Seattle Dragons and now the New Jersey Generals in a beer league that only plays games in one town. Which is pretty much never to be heard from again.

Scott Frost - Fired and no one knows where he's at. Likely drinking what he has left of his millions away at the Bay Horse Tavern in Tuscon, arguing on speaker phone with his future ex wife about how he shouldn't have to pay her $100K/month alimony because he's already strapped for cash after knocking up that beer cart chick. Odds are WAY above 50% we see him on a VH1 reality show within 3 years.

Moral of the story: elite head coaches know not to touch that place with a 30' pole no matter what the money is, because they don't want their grandkids growing up and hearing that their biggest and final contribution to college football was losing 9 games a year in a shithole out in the middle of nebraska, and being run out of town to a sunset job as assistant TE coach for the Browns.
 
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I think one of the biggest misconceptions about coaching is that building things is the hard part, and after that sustaining (or continuing to climb) should be easy. There is a fairly long list of coaches who have been able to build a program to one or two great seasons, but most of them cannot keep it there.
 
CP87 said:
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about coaching is that building things is the hard part, and after that sustaining (or continuing to climb) should be easy. There is a fairly long list of coaches who have been able to build a program to one or two great seasons, but most of them cannot keep it there.
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I am of the opinion that the average prole lacks even the most rudimentary understanding of the sheer number of things that have to go "right" just for their day to day existence to continue, let alone the number of things that have to go right to sustain a football program at even a moderately high level.

There is one guy who is amazing, Nick Saban. The rest of these guys are just a crap shoot. Even the games themselves have some element of pure luck to them. Ferentz only having that one 4-8 season once he got the ball rolling is damned near a miracle.

A three year rebuild is impressive, but what Ferentz has done is way more impressive. At least when he got his miracle team in his third year he could beat ranked teams.
 
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