Nebraska...not feeling Frosty anymore

[entropy]

it was tough to watch..

[entropy]

Osborne Announces Change in Men's Basketball Program



Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne announced on Friday that he intends to make a change in the leadership of the Husker men's basketball program.
Osborne announced that Doc Sadler would not be retained for the 2012-13 campaign after six seasons as the Huskers' head coach.
"I appreciate all of the efforts of Doc Sadler and his coaching staff," Osborne said. "Doc has worked hard, has great integrity and has been nothing but positive through a difficult season. Doc and I both felt this season could be his best with an experienced team returning, and with new facilities we could start moving into a brighter era for Nebraska basketball. However, injuries, a difficult schedule and competing in a new conference has made the season even more difficult.
"Unfortunately, I feel the program has lost momentum which makes recruiting and fan support more problematic, thus the change.
"Having been a coach, I realize more than most how difficult coaching can be. I consider Doc to be a good friend and a good coach, and he has been a great representative of the University of Nebraska. Since I am ultimately responsible for the athletic department, there is no need to look further than me to assign blame for a disappointing season. I wish for everyone's sake, we weren't making this announcement today."
Sadler completed his sixth season with Nebraska on Thursday evening with a 79-61 loss to Purdue in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament. Sadler compiled a 101-89 record in his six seasons at the helm, including a 12-18 record in 2011-12. Sadler's 101 wins at Nebraska are fourth all-time at the school.
Sadler guided Nebraska to three postseason appearances, with the Huskers advancing to the NIT in 2008, 2009 and 2011. His 2009 team finished Big 12 play with an 8-8 league record, the Huskers' best conference mark in a decade, and his 2008 team posted a 20-13 record, giving NU its first 20-win campaign since 1999.

[entropy]

Doc: You're looking at a guy who tried

Posted by: Brian Christopherson on March 9, 2012 at 4:22PM CST

You won't see many press conferences like the one we just saw.

Nebraska coach Doc Sadler took the rostrum on the day he was fired to give a goodbye talk of sorts.

It was an emotional and powerful ending to the coach's six-year stay at Nebraska.

At one point, he left the room in mid-sentence to compose himself.

"You're not looking at one of the smarter guys in the business, but you're looking at a guy that ... tried," he said.

"Six years ago when I came here, I meant what I said, I came here to do this and this is where I wanted to be. And that hasn't changed until here today...."

Sadler was overcome with emotion at that point, momentarily leaving the room. He said when he returned that "the people in the back" -- his assistants -- were making him cry..

"I wanted to be the first guy that won an NCAA tournament game (here) and it didn't happen."

Later, Sadler said "it all comes down to winning, and that's what it should."

Sadler said he honestly didn't think this would happen Thursday night when he talked to reporters after the loss to Purdue.

He said he respected Tom Osborne's decision. He also said he told Osborne he didn't agree with it but understood the position Osborne was in.

"Coach Osborne is always going to do what's best for Nebraska, and that's why he' a special guy."

Sadler ended the press conference by saying: "Appreciate ya. Thank ya. Have a good day."

[entropy]

Belichick's visit beneficial for both parties

Posted by: Brian Christopherson on March 10, 2012 at 2:37PM CST

Area coaches packed the Hawks Championship Center on Friday night to glean wisdom from arguably the best coach in the game of football right now.

Be sure of this: Bill Belichick draws a crowd. How big a crowd? Jeff Jamrog, NU's assistant athletic director for football operations, told me Saturday he thought there were about 750 coaches on hand to hear Belichick give the keynote speech at the Nebraska Coaches' Clinic.

No, he did not wear a hoodie.

But Belichick did spend all of Friday in Lincoln, chatting X's and O's with Husker coaches, watching game film, even working out three Nebraska draft hopefuls -- Lavonte David, Alfonzo Dennard and Marcel Jones.

"He's as good as there is in the business, probably the best in the business, and he took time out of his schedule to come," Pelini said. "And he was also able to get something out of it for himself, watching some good tape of our guys working out ... So I think it was a win-win. I really appreciate him coming and being a part of our clinic."

Belichick had a prior connection to the Husker coaching staff. His son played high school football under NU receivers coach Rich Fisher when he was coaching The Rivers School in Weston, Mass.

Pelini was glad the New England Patriots coach came. And he seemed to think the feeling was mutual.
"I think he walked out of here feeling pretty good about his trip, too."

[Wild Hoss]

it was tough to watch..

Think about his $3.5 million buyout, and it gets easier to bear.

[Wild Hoss]

Criteria for new coach
1) Need someone with integrity and academics
2) Someone who treats players well
3) Recruits hard
4) Someone who wins, do the little things right, winning will come

Experience matters but not required. Will look at assistant coaches but track records are hard to evaluate without comparable experience.

No formula--depends on the person and won't be a science to pick that person, will be an art.

Well I read all of that and I am convinced Osborne hasn?t learned a damned thing. In fact, I would say he is more adamant than ever about hiring Doc Sadler v2.0 since he obviously feels his hand was forced in firing Sadler v1.

"Its not a science, its an art". Give me a fucking break Tom. Its not art, its Goddamn common sense; our players stink. Funny how the one guy we?ve hired who could recruit (Danny Nee) is also our winningest coach, owns our only conference tournament win, our only NIT title, and 5 of our 6 NCAA appearances. Yes, he was fired in disgrace...and 9 of 10 Nebraska fans would take him back right now, no questions asked. Figure it out.

Reading this shit is exaperating.

[entropy]

not sure I read it that way. I'm not interested in a cheater... it will take time to fix what Nebraska has ignored.

[Wild Hoss]

Its going to take time to fix the program doing things the same way we have been alright...it?ll be forever. There are times to stay the course, and there are times to realize you need to change the paradigm. The latter is where we are now, but we lack the leadership to see it.
　
Our choices aren?t limited to "bargain-bid coach" or "cheater". Osborne is attempting to frame the argument that way to get what he wants however.

[Wild Hoss]

Nebraska hasn't scored 100 points in a game since the 2000 season.

That tells you everything you need to know.

[Hannibal]

Our choices aren?t limited to "bargain-bid coach" or "cheater". Osborne is attempting to frame the argument that way to get what he wants however.

Reminds me so much of our own basketball situation when we hired Tommy Amaker. We were so ashamed of the Fab Five that we kept a shmuck around for six seasons before finally getting Beilein.

[Wild Hoss]

I wish we had some shameful event to hide behind, but for us its worse; Nebraska doesn't even know to think about basketball as a winner. Our leadeship (Last three ADs, not just Osborne) defaults to applying football-centric thinking to the problem, and it won't work.

Osborne has the momentum and cache to pivot the program in a new direction, but is unable to grasp the concept.

[WM Wolverine]

You guys are going to have a tough task to build your basketball program up... It doesn't have much history to sell, you play in a very tough conference and your program is going to have a tough time recruiting in the B10 given its geography. The talent in the B10 is in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois & Michigan... Good news is your investing your football dollars into your basketball facilities, that will pay off in the long-term...

You guys are going to need an excellent hire at head coach, one of the very best in the B10 as the competition here is real tough as even the programs in states with loads of talent have terrific coaches... I'll be very, very impressed if your next coach can get you consistently in the top half of the B10 and in the tourney most years.

[entropy]

SI.Com

Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman is a member of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee. He previously served as the committee's chairman. He also previously served on the NCAA's Board of Directors.

SI: You've been the only high-profile president in the past few months to come out in favor of the current system. Why have you stood firm while others have gone another way?

Perlman: I don't know if everyone else is going a different way. I don't see a lot of presidents out there taking strong positions at this point. I certainly haven't seen the presidents of the Big Ten out taking positions. There may be some tweaks about the present system that I'd be supportive of. I know there's great concern among the non-automatic qualifying conferences about this automatic qualifying/non-automatic qualifying and the branding issues and whether that is driving conference expansion that doesn't comport with common sense. If that's true, I do think that could be addressed without radically changing the postseason. I've testified. I've given all the arguments why I don't want to see a playoff even if it's a plus-one. More recently, I've just been asking the question, "What benefit does it have?" I can't find one. This notion that now we'll have an undisputed national champion is a pipe dream. We're not going to have an undisputed national champion. We'll have an undisputed winner of a playoff. That's all you've got. You don't necessarily have the best team. I don't know if LSU or Alabama is the best team or what Stanford would have done if they had played either one of them. Or Oklahoma State. Or Oregon. If you played a round robin of two games each, how would it come out? Football is not the kind of game in which you can create a circumstance in which everyone will stand up and salute and say, "Yep, that's the national champion."

SI: I don't know if you can do that in any sport.

Perlman: I don't, either, but I think it's pretty clear in football. So what do we gain? We gain one more game. I can appreciate the interest in that, because I don't like to see the college football season come to an end, either. But you look at that against the potential risk to student-athletes, the disruption of the bowl season, the inconvenience of fans, the academic part of the enterprise, and I just don't see what the argument is other than the fans want it.

SI: Would semifinals at home sites take away that inconvenience to fans, or would they add other problems?

Perlman: Nebraska probably has as passionate a fan base as any institution, and it's hard to see that they would want to go one week to a semifinal game with two weeks' notice and with one week notice go off to a finals game. I don't think that's going to happen. Moving it to a home field would at least assure that the home crowd would be there and that there would be some level of excitement. The disadvantage would be that the bowls would become second-class citizen.

SI: How do you protect the bowls with public opinion going in this direction?

Perlman: The question is whether public opinion will drive the answer once you look seriously at what the consequences are. Certainly you could do a plus-one, three-game playoff within the bowl structure, and that would preserve -- to some extent -- at least the three bowls that got to participate.

SI: Florida's Bernie Machen said this would be decided by the presidents. At what point are your voices heard in this process?

Perlman: We've tended, both on the oversight committee and within the conferences, I think we've tended to let the commissioners work hard on the details and work hard on the options. We certainly value their advice as they bring it forward to us. But the Big Ten presidents have not had any significant discussion about what our ultimate views are of a playoff. To my knowledge, I don't think the Pac-12 presidents have had a serious discussion about it. There are other groups that would weigh in on any particular proposal. Faculty athletic representatives, at least from my standpoint, would have something serious to say, because they're the ones that are safeguarding the academic enterprise.

SI: What is the ideal calendar for the football postseason?

Perlman: Left to my own devices in a perfect world where I didn't have to pay attention to anything else, it would be great to have everything over on Jan. 1. That's clean. Student-athletes would have a chance to go home and build their reserves for the second semester and come back and concentrate on academics. What we said in the committee that I chaired is that there should be a three-week window in which all bowls have to be played. The three weeks, in theory, would be the weekend after most institutions complete final exams to the week before classes started, so you could really confine the bowls to a single academic term. It's hard to do that because of the calendar shifts and all that. It's hard, realistically, to end the football season on a Saturday or Sunday in January because at that point in time, you've got the professional playoffs and you need the television windows. We recommended they take those three weeks as the concept and add a Monday if you need it to play a national championship game. It depends again on how the calendar works, but Jan. 8 or Jan. 9 would be the last time in the next 10 years that the game would occur. That would be before the second semester begins for most institutions on a semester system. It would create a problem for some schools on the quarter system.

SI: Where did you fall on the concept of multiyear athletic scholarships?

Perlman: We were supportive. I think it's not without some questions about how it would be administered. There are some details that I think need to be worked out. It is optional. You don't have to do it. Competition may drive everybody to do it. I don't know. I think we're a little uneasy. There are some questions about athletic performance in some way or another could be taken into account as a reason to withdraw a scholarship. The lingering concern I have is if you have a student-athlete on a four-year scholarship and you can't withdraw the scholarship because of athletic reasons and they're going to count against your scholarship limits, there's certainly an incentive for coaches to not treat those student-athletes very well and get them to leave on their own. That worries me a little. But on balance, I'm a deregulator. I think the NCAA has too many regulations. If a school wants to give four-years scholarships, why not?

SI: Where did you fall on the issue of cost-of-attendance stipends?

Perlman: I think we should go farther than $2,000. I think the NCAA ought to allow us to give up to the cost of attendance, whatever it is. It depends on where you live, and how high-cost your institution is. For me, the line is we don't pay student-athletes to participate. We don't give them a wage. They're not employees. This is college. If they want to get a wage for doing it, they should go to the pros. But the cost of attendance, which is calculated by the institution for every student, creates that line.

SI: Washington president Michael Young mentioned that his school provides academic scholars with full-cost-of-attendance scholarships. Does Nebraska also do that?

Perlman: We have some scholarships that go that high. And certainly for low-income students, it is the cost of attendance that you start with when you calculate how much to give those students to survive and be successful.

SI: Do you worry that there may need to be further division of the FBS because of the financial disparity?

Perlman: I don't think that the NCAA can regulate in a way that would equalize different-resourced institutions. Nebraska is probably one of the better resourced institutions. You can tell me that I can't give them bagels with cream cheese and I can't give them more scholarships and I can't do this and I can't do that, and I follow those rules. But then what I do to recruit competitively is I spend the money on other stuff. So I build facilities where there is no limit on what I can do, and I make those facilities far beyond what normal students live in because there's no limit on that. There's a standard understanding about regulatory environments that if you regulate something, people will move to the part of their activity that isn't regulated. That's what's happening. I think there is nothing wrong with a less resourced institution saying "We can be smarter. We can be more clever. We can have a tactic, a strategy in which we don't have to have a $75 million athletic budget to be competitive." I think they ought to be allowed to do that. But I don't think they ought to be allowed to say, "We only have a $20 million athletic budget, so everybody only should be able to spend $20 million."


Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/andy_staples/03/08/nebraska-perlman-playoff/index.html#ixzz1osQKIpDZ

[entropy]

You guys are going to have a tough task to build your basketball program up... It doesn't have much history to sell, you play in a very tough conference and your program is going to have a tough time recruiting in the B10 given its geography. The talent in the B10 is in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois & Michigan... Good news is your investing your football dollars into your basketball facilities, that will pay off in the long-term...

You guys are going to need an excellent hire at head coach, one of the very best in the B10 as the competition here is real tough as even the programs in states with loads of talent have terrific coaches... I'll be very, very impressed if your next coach can get you consistently in the top half of the B10 and in the tourney most years.

I'd be thrilled with those results.

My concerns are who wants to come to UNL. It is known in the basketball coaching circles as a career killer. And considering TO is going to retire in the next couple of years, any coach coming to UNL will want a huge buyout clause, just in case the next AD wants to do something different.

I think UNL will be overpaying just for a step up..

[WM Wolverine]

At least you guys should dominate in baseball oh and womens bowling.