Callahan Could Be Next to Go

Originally published on FOXSports.com.

Difficult decisions always have consequences.

For Steve Pederson the consequences of his most difficult decision as Nebraska’s Athletic Director caught up with him nearly four years after the fact as Chancellor Harvey Perlman fired Pederson Monday in Lincoln.

In 2003, less than a year after taking the AD job at Nebraska, Pederson fired Frank Solich following a 9-3 season and uttered the phrase that would haunt him through the rest of his tenure: “I refuse to let this program gravitate to mediocrity.”

For anyone who watched the Cornhuskers surrender 40-plus points in four of their past five games, mediocre seemed generous.

Some were picking Nebraska as a dark horse national title contender coming in to the season, others couldn’t see them winning the Big 12 North but the one thing that seemed most important was progress. After Saturday’s 45-14 drubbing at the hands of Oklahoma State many were left wondering if the Huskers could even progress to bowl eligibility.

While those questions might temporarily be blown off in the jet wash of a statewide sigh of relief, they’re far from gone and that still spells bad news for Bill Callahan.

When Callahan was hired in 2004—following an embarrassing search that saw a number of candidates turn down the job—he flipped the culture of Nebraska football, replacing the option with the more modern West Coast Offense.

As the records for consecutive winning seasons and bowl appearances fell in his first 5-6 season, Nebraska fans preached patience. Growing pains were to be expected. Four years later, Callahan’s team is poised to set records. The wrong ones.

The 2007 Blackshirts defense has been historically bad, allowing 40 or more points more times this season than they did in all of the 1970s and ‘80s combined. Nebraska has allowed at least 400 yards of offense in each of its last five games and is on pace to give up more points than any Cornhusker team in history.

Is any of that going to change with the Pederson firing? That doesn’t seem likely. The road from the front office to the field is often a one way street so don’t count on much renewed fire between the lines. But the move by Perlman wasn’t about immediate results, it was about the future.

Exactly what that future will be still remains to be seen. Before the firing was even announced, rumors were swirling that Tom Osborne would be the man to succeed Pederson in the interim as athletic director. Turner Gill, the former Husker great and architect behind a minor MAC uprising at Buffalo, has been bandied about as a possible replacement as head coach. Yet others still hope that with Pederson out of the picture, Nebraska will get a second chance to hire LSU’s Bo Pelini, a fan favorite in 2003.

What we do know is this: Nebraska fans have something that seemed to be snatched away from them as few as 48 hours ago, hope. Will any of that transfer over to Bill Callahan and his staff? Perhaps, but it may not matter.

The thing that scared Nebraska fans the most was that the trio of Perlman, Pederson and Callahan seemed inextricably linked. Each individual’s reputation was staked to the others’.

In the face of growing dissent Nebraska’s chancellor severed those ties on Monday and while Perlman was careful in his comments not to explicitly rule out Callahan’s return, implicitly he said it all. The time for change is now.

A mere four years removed from their last upheaval, it’s fair to question whether or not this is a sign of progress or just another step in the downward spiral of hiring and firing, but Nebraska has one valuable resource on their side should they go looking for only their fifth head coach in the past 47 years: experience.

They’ve been there, and failed, before.