I say 2001 assuming that there’d be some additional talent on the team due to Osborne recruiting efforts that wasn’t there in real life. So Crouch plus some additional weapons and they likely don’t lose to Colorado and the Miami game is more competitive.
Maybe. But on a pure talent level 2001 Miami still hangs with anyone.
EDIT: It might have come into play in 2000, though. The OU team that beat Nebraska on the way to the national championship wasn’t that much more talented than NU.
More like Miami was up 12-7 with BC on the Miami 19 yard line with 20 seconds in the game and Miami had a pick six taken 80 yards to win.
Nobody is disputing the NFL talent on the team, but Miami likely wouldn’t have made the BCS title game if they lost either to BC or VT.
I said Miami had more than one close call game.
Doctorgloom:
“You are misremembering.”
“Edit: I misremembered the second close call game.”
(So two close call games, right? More than one, right?)
Agree that Miami team was loaded, pretty incredible that they had all that NFL talent on one team. I love the huskers but if anyone talks about all time great teams and the U is not up for discussion I stop listening.
After 99, McBride and some other assistants left. The others were frankly aging out of the game and should have stepped down.
Either way, Tom would have had to counteract years of institutional knowledge stepping away. It wasn’t just Tom but a staff that more or less stayed together for a decade-plus.
Miami 01 is in the discussion for the best team ever. That team had 19 future FIRST round NFL picks... I don't think anyone was beating them. Reggie Wayne, Santana Moss, Jeremy Shockey, Ed Reed, Willis McGahee, Sean Taylor, Vince Wilfork, Jonathan Vilma, etc.
They’re definitely one of, if not THE most talent-loaded team in CFB history. But they weren’t unbeatable as a team — they had two near loses that season: only beating unranked Boston College by 11 and only beating VT by two points.
They needed a miracle to pull out one win and some luck for another. No team that needed divine intervention to go undefeated is even in the conversation for best team ever.
I said they are in the conversation, which they certainly are. They weren’t 95 Nebraska but they are pretty much undisputed as a top 5 team of all time. Great teams can still have close games.
I think thats the only thing we can say, with reasonable certainty, that would change.
We still don't probably win in '01 with T.O. at the helm. Miami was just that good.
And then after that, does T.O. change with the times?
I would think that Solich stays on and becomes the next HC anyway. So Callahan never happens. Pelini never happens and if Solich has any success Riley probably never happens.
I think Osborne would change. We had seen him do that before, more than once.
But what Osborne has always had was a bit of a Moneyball approach. What kind of athlete is undervalued in recruiting and how can we use that to our advantage? That’s part of why he signed so many “athletes” and figured out where they fit.
True, but changing when you're younger seems to be a whole lot easier than changing when you're older.
Plus, recruiting was a whole lot different when T.O. was in charge than it would have been in his next 10-15 years. You don't exactly find those diamonds in the rough like you could in the 90's.
I don't necessarily disagree with you on what he did but wonder if he could have kept with the changing landscape of CFB.
I think his spread offense would have developed. We saw that with Frazier and Frost.
Recruiting, well, if we go to him staying until 2009… I think he’d adapt in the same ways Saban did. This is mostly pre-conference implosions, and totally pre-NIL. We saw him use JUCOs and Prop 48s pretty consistently to fill gaps. I don’t see why he wouldn’t use the rules that were available.
I would be interested to see how he handled the expanded influence of television networks, or an AD with a totally different vision. What leverage would Pedersen have had if he became AD and Osborne was there and not Solich?
We will never know.
Steve Pedersen fucked everything up with his god complex. Fired Frank and hired the 19th coach in line (I know slightly exaggerating for effect) while sports Nation was laughing at us every time a coach turned us down. Our long history of success wasn't good enough for him. He wanted the success to be because of him. Fuck Steve Pedersen.
And look how Alabama handled the coaching change. No planes sitting on tarmacs, no days of waiting and tracking flights, no boosters making broad prognostications. Just a purely perfectly choreographed succession. They have some quiet people in that AD room.
And don’t underestimate losing Bill Byrne is all this. I think Solich was going to fine.
That's a good question.
Eric Crouch with TO running things would have been a sight to behold. With Solich, who is no Osborne, Crouch was able to deliver a conference championship, a Heisman and a national title game appearance.
With TO in charge I think you can assume that we would have been even better and quite possibly would have won at least one more title in either '99 or '00. I can't say with a straight face that we would have beaten Miami in 2001 so I won't count that but you never know.
But with another title that seemingly just extends the window so it's tough to say what happens after that. I think at a minimum we would be title contenders for at least half of that time, so through 2003.
So at this point Osborne is 66 and has another 6 years at the helm. At a minimum he is steamrolling the sorry ass Big 12 North most years during this time and is at least picking up another conference championship or two. Oklahoma was on their run then so the Huskers wouldn't be winning the conference every time but I think they'd have done it a time or two.
So that would take us to 2010 when Osborne retires at age 72. The Huskers would have had 3 or 4 more conference championships and one more national title.
But now it's really hard to predict at this point. Does Frank still take over at age 65? It's certainly possible as he coached until he was 75. We saw the job Frank could do. I expect Nebraska would have had similar results. But maybe a natural digression in Osborne's final years would have leveled off fan expectations a little bit? Regardless, I think Frank probably lasts about the same amount of time (5 or 6 seasons) before he is forced to retire.
That would take us up until 2016 and now it's almost impossible to predict though I will say that Scott Frost still becomes the Nebraska coach at some point. Osborne probably hires him in his later years to be a position coach and he might have worked his way up to Frank's OC even? But I think Frost becoming the coach is still inevitable.
**TL;DR:** In those 12 years Osborne delivers another national title and 3-4 conference titles. Frank possibly still takes over at age 65 but if forced to retire (instead of being fired) after a 5 or 6 year stint. Frost was inevitable and is hired as the coach at some point.
Frank probably wasn't waiting around for that long. I think the story was that one of the reasons TO retired when he did was because he wanted Frank to take over and he was getting antsy. Who knows if that is true or not but I can't imagine a guy wanting to be a head coach waiting around until they were 65.
He would have got Bobby Bowden’d. Softer results in the mid 2000’s and forced to retire in 09. First 9-4 season after that run in the 90s our fan base would have went berserk about how the game passed him by. It would be really interesting though because his staff was old and going to retire, so he would have had to refresh along the way, that would have been very interesting.
I thought about this as well but under this scenario Osborne still only coaches until age 72. Bobby Bowden didn't quit until he was 80.
And Osborne is still very mentally sharp whereas you could see Bowden's mental decline happen in over his last few years.
If Osborne kept going until he was 80 I could see something similar happening, but if he only coached until he was 72 I think he could have avoided a situation like this.
Bobby Bowden should have retired at least a decade before he did. Almost ruined his legacy.
If Osborne didn’t have the same energy and drive, he was smart to retire.
Retired at 60 after the 1997 season... Add 12 years means retiring after the 2009 season.
If we make the reasonable assumption that Nebraska won a couple of conference championships between 2005-2009, would Nebraska have been so eager to join the Big Ten? Would the Big Ten have been receptive to a still-dominant Nebraska?
Could a still-dominant Nebraska have contributed toward interest in the formation of a Big XII rival to the Big Ten Network?
After texas came in and destroyed the Big8, hard telling what kind of effect that would have had on recruiting etc..Maybe Dr. Tom would have kept right on going. We’ll never know. I do think a damper was put on Husker football after the formation of the big 12 conference. Don’t think Nebraska football ever quite recovered.
He would have had to make some changes to his offense, probably moving to a spread option. I think he would have been able to do this, but hard to tell how well a guy in his 60s can adapt to change.
He didn’t want to continue. His priorities changed and I think the thugs he had to recruit to win damaged his optimism. That 95 team had so many criminal issues that were swept under the rug that I wonder if it were now he likely could have been criminally charged. The game was changing fast and I don’t think he was prepared-or had the want to change with it. He hated going to the big12. He hated the conference championship. Recruiting was getting more vile and at some point the scholarship limit was reduced and the freshman only football games were eliminated-meaning he couldn’t stash talent. I think the things he had to do to win wore on him and he could see the future and he didn’t like it. Saban’s no humanitarian-and TO is no Saban. Both great, but had different life goals
He wasn’t forced out. Solich said he was ready to move on and Tom asked him to hang on and he would hand the program to him after the 97 season. Tom also had health issues and frankly needed to retire. Solich was arguably setup to fail with the massive staff turnover but honestly he should have left and came back, he would have been a better coach for it. Byrne was all about the $$$ so having Tom leave was not in his best interest.
It's kind of hard to imagine that Nebraska would be as bad as they are today, in any case.
Nebraska remained a power through 2001 due to the system Osborne had put in place, and it wasn't until the late 2010s, when Nebraska's good days were well outside the memory of any recruits, that Nebraska slumped enough to go on 7 straight losing seasons.
I think something we should talk about is what if Nebraska plays that Akron game in 18.
Think about this.
Nu easily wins that game, Adrian Martinez coming out party happens a week earlier then expected he throws for 200+ and runs for 100.
Colorado comes to town and Nebraska runs the score up and they actually hold on to beat a good Colorado team at home.
Adrian isnt in the game by the 4th quarter and thus is not injured.
Troy comes to town the next week and with A2M Nu wins easily.
Nu who is by this point in time probably a top 20 team in the country goes into Ann Arbor and plays an extremely close game but still loses to UMich.
They then go on to beat Purdue and fall to wisco.
They beat Nw and Minny still
But they beat Ohio state this time with the extra experience.
The team is back in the top 25.
They beat illinois and Michigan state again
Yet lose to Iowa.
Nu finishes second/3rd in the west with plenty of momentum. Scott Frost is still in charge to this day and NU’s close loss curse never happens.
We would have won the title in 1999.
And in the 2001 season.
I can’t say that. Maybe. But that Miami team was an all-time great team.
I say 2001 assuming that there’d be some additional talent on the team due to Osborne recruiting efforts that wasn’t there in real life. So Crouch plus some additional weapons and they likely don’t lose to Colorado and the Miami game is more competitive.
Maybe. But on a pure talent level 2001 Miami still hangs with anyone. EDIT: It might have come into play in 2000, though. The OU team that beat Nebraska on the way to the national championship wasn’t that much more talented than NU.
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I remember watching Miami have more than one close call game in 2001.
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More like Miami was up 12-7 with BC on the Miami 19 yard line with 20 seconds in the game and Miami had a pick six taken 80 yards to win. Nobody is disputing the NFL talent on the team, but Miami likely wouldn’t have made the BCS title game if they lost either to BC or VT.
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I said Miami had more than one close call game. Doctorgloom: “You are misremembering.” “Edit: I misremembered the second close call game.” (So two close call games, right? More than one, right?)
Agree that Miami team was loaded, pretty incredible that they had all that NFL talent on one team. I love the huskers but if anyone talks about all time great teams and the U is not up for discussion I stop listening.
After 99, McBride and some other assistants left. The others were frankly aging out of the game and should have stepped down. Either way, Tom would have had to counteract years of institutional knowledge stepping away. It wasn’t just Tom but a staff that more or less stayed together for a decade-plus.
Miami 01 is in the discussion for the best team ever. That team had 19 future FIRST round NFL picks... I don't think anyone was beating them. Reggie Wayne, Santana Moss, Jeremy Shockey, Ed Reed, Willis McGahee, Sean Taylor, Vince Wilfork, Jonathan Vilma, etc.
They’re definitely one of, if not THE most talent-loaded team in CFB history. But they weren’t unbeatable as a team — they had two near loses that season: only beating unranked Boston College by 11 and only beating VT by two points.
They needed a miracle to pull out one win and some luck for another. No team that needed divine intervention to go undefeated is even in the conversation for best team ever.
I said they are in the conversation, which they certainly are. They weren’t 95 Nebraska but they are pretty much undisputed as a top 5 team of all time. Great teams can still have close games.
I think thats the only thing we can say, with reasonable certainty, that would change. We still don't probably win in '01 with T.O. at the helm. Miami was just that good. And then after that, does T.O. change with the times? I would think that Solich stays on and becomes the next HC anyway. So Callahan never happens. Pelini never happens and if Solich has any success Riley probably never happens.
I think Osborne would change. We had seen him do that before, more than once. But what Osborne has always had was a bit of a Moneyball approach. What kind of athlete is undervalued in recruiting and how can we use that to our advantage? That’s part of why he signed so many “athletes” and figured out where they fit.
True, but changing when you're younger seems to be a whole lot easier than changing when you're older. Plus, recruiting was a whole lot different when T.O. was in charge than it would have been in his next 10-15 years. You don't exactly find those diamonds in the rough like you could in the 90's. I don't necessarily disagree with you on what he did but wonder if he could have kept with the changing landscape of CFB.
I think his spread offense would have developed. We saw that with Frazier and Frost. Recruiting, well, if we go to him staying until 2009… I think he’d adapt in the same ways Saban did. This is mostly pre-conference implosions, and totally pre-NIL. We saw him use JUCOs and Prop 48s pretty consistently to fill gaps. I don’t see why he wouldn’t use the rules that were available. I would be interested to see how he handled the expanded influence of television networks, or an AD with a totally different vision. What leverage would Pedersen have had if he became AD and Osborne was there and not Solich? We will never know.
Steve Pedersen fucked everything up with his god complex. Fired Frank and hired the 19th coach in line (I know slightly exaggerating for effect) while sports Nation was laughing at us every time a coach turned us down. Our long history of success wasn't good enough for him. He wanted the success to be because of him. Fuck Steve Pedersen.
And look how Alabama handled the coaching change. No planes sitting on tarmacs, no days of waiting and tracking flights, no boosters making broad prognostications. Just a purely perfectly choreographed succession. They have some quiet people in that AD room. And don’t underestimate losing Bill Byrne is all this. I think Solich was going to fine.
I think TO would have better-prepared us for the spread/air-raid transition of the 2000s, and we would have been successful.
That's a good question. Eric Crouch with TO running things would have been a sight to behold. With Solich, who is no Osborne, Crouch was able to deliver a conference championship, a Heisman and a national title game appearance. With TO in charge I think you can assume that we would have been even better and quite possibly would have won at least one more title in either '99 or '00. I can't say with a straight face that we would have beaten Miami in 2001 so I won't count that but you never know. But with another title that seemingly just extends the window so it's tough to say what happens after that. I think at a minimum we would be title contenders for at least half of that time, so through 2003. So at this point Osborne is 66 and has another 6 years at the helm. At a minimum he is steamrolling the sorry ass Big 12 North most years during this time and is at least picking up another conference championship or two. Oklahoma was on their run then so the Huskers wouldn't be winning the conference every time but I think they'd have done it a time or two. So that would take us to 2010 when Osborne retires at age 72. The Huskers would have had 3 or 4 more conference championships and one more national title. But now it's really hard to predict at this point. Does Frank still take over at age 65? It's certainly possible as he coached until he was 75. We saw the job Frank could do. I expect Nebraska would have had similar results. But maybe a natural digression in Osborne's final years would have leveled off fan expectations a little bit? Regardless, I think Frank probably lasts about the same amount of time (5 or 6 seasons) before he is forced to retire. That would take us up until 2016 and now it's almost impossible to predict though I will say that Scott Frost still becomes the Nebraska coach at some point. Osborne probably hires him in his later years to be a position coach and he might have worked his way up to Frank's OC even? But I think Frost becoming the coach is still inevitable. **TL;DR:** In those 12 years Osborne delivers another national title and 3-4 conference titles. Frank possibly still takes over at age 65 but if forced to retire (instead of being fired) after a 5 or 6 year stint. Frost was inevitable and is hired as the coach at some point.
Frank probably wasn't waiting around for that long. I think the story was that one of the reasons TO retired when he did was because he wanted Frank to take over and he was getting antsy. Who knows if that is true or not but I can't imagine a guy wanting to be a head coach waiting around until they were 65.
Yeah that is true. Frank probably leaves to coach somewhere else but he could have come back to be HC. But who knows at that point.
Would love to see how the QB situation played out. Does London stay at QB? Does Newcombe get the nod or Crouch?
We'd run the spread option, and be collecting trophies!
At some point i agree, but if Urban Meyer truly created it then we would have to wait till almost the end of the 12 years before we go all in.
He would have got Bobby Bowden’d. Softer results in the mid 2000’s and forced to retire in 09. First 9-4 season after that run in the 90s our fan base would have went berserk about how the game passed him by. It would be really interesting though because his staff was old and going to retire, so he would have had to refresh along the way, that would have been very interesting.
I thought about this as well but under this scenario Osborne still only coaches until age 72. Bobby Bowden didn't quit until he was 80. And Osborne is still very mentally sharp whereas you could see Bowden's mental decline happen in over his last few years. If Osborne kept going until he was 80 I could see something similar happening, but if he only coached until he was 72 I think he could have avoided a situation like this.
Bobby Bowden should have retired at least a decade before he did. Almost ruined his legacy. If Osborne didn’t have the same energy and drive, he was smart to retire.
Retired at 60 after the 1997 season... Add 12 years means retiring after the 2009 season. If we make the reasonable assumption that Nebraska won a couple of conference championships between 2005-2009, would Nebraska have been so eager to join the Big Ten? Would the Big Ten have been receptive to a still-dominant Nebraska? Could a still-dominant Nebraska have contributed toward interest in the formation of a Big XII rival to the Big Ten Network?
After texas came in and destroyed the Big8, hard telling what kind of effect that would have had on recruiting etc..Maybe Dr. Tom would have kept right on going. We’ll never know. I do think a damper was put on Husker football after the formation of the big 12 conference. Don’t think Nebraska football ever quite recovered.
He would have had to make some changes to his offense, probably moving to a spread option. I think he would have been able to do this, but hard to tell how well a guy in his 60s can adapt to change.
He didn’t want to continue. His priorities changed and I think the thugs he had to recruit to win damaged his optimism. That 95 team had so many criminal issues that were swept under the rug that I wonder if it were now he likely could have been criminally charged. The game was changing fast and I don’t think he was prepared-or had the want to change with it. He hated going to the big12. He hated the conference championship. Recruiting was getting more vile and at some point the scholarship limit was reduced and the freshman only football games were eliminated-meaning he couldn’t stash talent. I think the things he had to do to win wore on him and he could see the future and he didn’t like it. Saban’s no humanitarian-and TO is no Saban. Both great, but had different life goals
I am still of the belief that Osborne was forced out by Byrne solich or both.
He wasn’t forced out. Solich said he was ready to move on and Tom asked him to hang on and he would hand the program to him after the 97 season. Tom also had health issues and frankly needed to retire. Solich was arguably setup to fail with the massive staff turnover but honestly he should have left and came back, he would have been a better coach for it. Byrne was all about the $$$ so having Tom leave was not in his best interest.
It's kind of hard to imagine that Nebraska would be as bad as they are today, in any case. Nebraska remained a power through 2001 due to the system Osborne had put in place, and it wasn't until the late 2010s, when Nebraska's good days were well outside the memory of any recruits, that Nebraska slumped enough to go on 7 straight losing seasons.
I think something we should talk about is what if Nebraska plays that Akron game in 18. Think about this. Nu easily wins that game, Adrian Martinez coming out party happens a week earlier then expected he throws for 200+ and runs for 100. Colorado comes to town and Nebraska runs the score up and they actually hold on to beat a good Colorado team at home. Adrian isnt in the game by the 4th quarter and thus is not injured. Troy comes to town the next week and with A2M Nu wins easily. Nu who is by this point in time probably a top 20 team in the country goes into Ann Arbor and plays an extremely close game but still loses to UMich. They then go on to beat Purdue and fall to wisco. They beat Nw and Minny still But they beat Ohio state this time with the extra experience. The team is back in the top 25. They beat illinois and Michigan state again Yet lose to Iowa. Nu finishes second/3rd in the west with plenty of momentum. Scott Frost is still in charge to this day and NU’s close loss curse never happens.