Norm Peterson

If this thread reaches 40 pages, does that mean we don't get any of the coaches we're talking about?

Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation.

#MeToo

And Sallis.

I'm not arguing with you. I agree, I would have liked to have had Khyri Thomas. I think Patton was a reach at best until he blew up the summer Creighton offered. He wasn't on anyone's radar. But, frankly, neither was Thomas. Some guys pan out; some don't. Some guys get to college and end up far better than anyone projected them to be; others get to college with all kinds of hype and never adjust. Daum is an example of a kid who ended up being far better than the best crystal ball out there would have projected. I give a pass to coaches for missing on Daum and I give a pass to coaches for missing on Thomas. For every Daum or Thomas who blew up, there are dozens of players of equal stature coming out of high school in Nebraska who didn't amount to much. And you don't know which one it's going to be ahead of time. If we had gone after Daum and he turned out to be the player he was projected to be (not all that good at the next level) rather than the player he ended up being, the coaches would be getting bitched at for that. Bottom line: I think you have better odds of winding up with a successful college player if you're going after 4- and 5-star talent than hoping some local kid who's been completely overlooked by every other Power 5 program winds up eating the right combination of magic beans and becomes something. And, having said that, I will be very quick to point out that the kids with in-state offers now appear to be the kinds of players you can win with at this level. That hasn't often been the case in the past.

If your 4-6 Nebraska players can be walk-ons, we have that right now: Justin Costello, Johnny Trueblood, Tanner Borchardt and Brady Heiman. But you can only have 13 scholarship kids and, under Miles, we've typically only had 12 or fewer. So, six scholarship kids from Nebraska would be basically half the roster.

Yeah, we did great with the attitude and work-ethic of Deverell Biggs. All kidding aside, I think the idea that we could have success at this level with half of the roster consisting of in-state players is pure fantasy. But I think we should try it. Get it out of our systems. And, who knows, maybe Chip Dorfenbruner from Wynot will turn out to be the next Mike Daum. We can always hope, right?

Not trying to be a jerk or anything but if we had offered guys like Daum when Barry or Doc were the head coaches, you would have been one of the loudest opponents, voicing the most strenuous objections to offering all these local nobodies whom no other major conference teams offered. I remember that very complaint being made -- by you -- when Doc signed Brandon Ubel. You looked at who his next best offer was and decided he was a reach. Have you changed your mind about these things? Should we now be taking chances on these lower-rated in-state players hoping they blossom? Also, you used to say that you'd rather leave a scholarship open than use it on a guy you considered a reach. Is that still the case or has your opinion about that evolved as well?

One notable name not on that list ...

I’m fine with that. I wasn’t trying to make a political point. Only to echo that my experience is similar to HB’s. I’m sure there are some super rich people out there who are total dicks. But the ones I’ve met were really cool.

Oh, ain't that the truth. I don't rub elbows often with the upper crust, but as a result of being a dad with kids who do stuff, I've encountered some people who were EXTREMELY wealthy. Like top 1% of the top 1%. They've always been gracious and warm people whom you'd never think had money if you didn't know who they were.

There are good fans and average fans and then there are shitty fans. All teams have some of each. We should never make the mistake of thinking that the shitty fans represent the whole of the fan base. I think I can defend a claim that Nebraska fans are, on balance, better than most. I have NEVER seen or heard opposing fans claim to be brutalized here the way I've seen videos and heard first-hand accounts of fans being brutalized in other venues. Penn State and Colorado being among the absolute worst offenders. Show me another football venue where the home fans give a standing ovation to the opposing team leaving the field, win or lose. Show me another basketball program just hoping to make the post-season that gets 15,000 fans to come out. Show me another volleyball program that gets 8,000 fans to show up to every home game. Hell, the 5th best attendance team in volleyball gets less than half the number of fans that we get. I keep on seeing people point out the assholes, though, and use that to claim we don't have the best fans. Listen, the exception doesn't disprove the rule. Unfortunately, some of the exceptions inhabit this board from time to time (but usually only when we're losing, so …)

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I'm still here.

I believe that's incorrect. I believe we were knotted up at 29 when Cope was hurt.

Yes. And Doc was trashed mercilessly by trolls on this very board who wanted to dance on Doc's (er Kenneth's) proverbial casket on his way out the door, because firing him wasn't enough. No, this was personal. Doc had failed to advance this program into an NCAA tournament team and for that he needed to be ridiculed, mocked, and verbally assaulted, not merely relieved of his duties and sent packing. And for the love of all things holy, the university gave him a RAISE. A RAISE FOR PETE'S SAKE. TO SOMETHING LESS THAN A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. So then his buyout was almost half of what Scott Frost gets paid in a year. How could the university possibly be expected to foot that bill? Oh, the insult to humanity that Doc Sadler got a raise to less than half of what we're paying Tim Miles for the same job. I hope some of you people are ashamed of how you acted when Doc got fired. And I further hope you learned something from that experience and don't repeat that assholery if and when Miles leaves.

Truth.

Not saying that. Never did. What I have said recently and continue to say is that you don't blow up that 2017 roster and make a coaching change then, like some people are arguing now. And the trajectory of this season is not a justification for making a different call than what was made at the time. There were enough reasons to think the next two years could be pretty good to leave that situation alone and not make a coaching change at the end of the '16-'17 season. We were better positioned at that point than we'd been in three decades, and if we'd made a coaching change then, we would never have seen the team enter the AP rankings this year. I will say to the end of time that it was worth leaving things in place to see what would happen.

Yeah, it wasn't a perfect analogy. It kind of came together as I was typing it and so there were some holes in it, like the money thing, that I had to fill in later. But, I was reading these posts that were talking about firing the coach 2 years ago and I was trying to come up with an analogy that would put some perspective on how rare it is that Husker hoops has assembled a roster like what we had going into this season, that so many people say they would have been willing to blow up 2 years ago. This doesn't happen every day that we have 4- and 5-star talent at every spot in the starting lineup. In fact, it's never happened before, for as long as Rivals has existed. So, how do you convey that, this time (2017), you had to let it ride and see where it goes?

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I'm sorry, but are you that out of touch? We had little depth and precious little margin for error. Going into this season, anyone who was paying attention was already concerned about our lack of depth down low. You take a Copeland out of the lineup and what you replace him with is a Brady Heiman. You've gone from a senior, 5-star player to a freshman 3-star whom many people on this board doubted was worthy of a scholarship and many others thought would at least need to redshirt. And you don't think that's going to have an impact? By the way, I'm not a "big Miles fan [who] will loyally defend him to the end." I'm a guy who's been around long enough to see a number of coaching changes and, as often as not, they haven't produced the results we were promised they would. And while I would agree that Miles isn't perfect, he's at least put together a somewhat competitive roster. And he's the ONLY coach we've had THIS CENTURY who has guided us to a better-than-.500 record in league play. And he's done it twice. In six seasons, Doc Sadler reached .500 in league play once; Barry Collier produced losing conference records every year; and Danny Nee's last season was trash. So, in TWENTY seasons this century, we've only gone better than .500 in conference play twice, both times under Miles. You can strive all you want for something better. You have precious little control over it, and by that I mean none at all. And when you say, "I have not seen anything in 7 years that has told me this guy is any different from the last 2" it makes me want to ask you, given what you've described, what makes you so confident that the next one is going to be any better than the last 3?

No. This wasn't about whether we should do a no-sit for Purdue vs. Iowa. This was about a lot of things, but mostly about the people coming out of the woodwork, with the benefit of hindsight, saying we should have canned Miles 2 years ago. I wanted an analogy that would capture the kind of futility we've experienced as fans of a program that has never won an NCAA tourney game. Because that's a reality that multiple coaching changes hasn't fixed. And if it hasn't readily worked in the past, I'm not sure what would make anyone think it would readily work the next time we try it. For Pete's sake, people, we have been to only six NCAA tourneys in the last 30 years and only two of the last 25. And so you're the Nebraska AD standing on the fairway of #15 trying to decide whether to lay up and fire the coach or let this thing play out. Sure, there was a disappointing end to the '16-'17 season. But it was a young squad with plenty of young talent. On top of that, we had 2 transfers sitting out who were both consensus top 100 high school recruits, including the program's FIRST EVER Rivals 5-star. And, though you haven't seen the transfers play yet, you have to realize the talent level is better than it's been in years. Decades, even. Are you going to blow up that roster and take your chances with a coaching change? I don't think there's any way in hell you would do that. What's it gain you to change coaches in 2017? If you do a coaching change, you start over at square one and with a lot of unknowns including probably a completely revamped roster. If you keep the coach, the absolute worst-case scenario is that you just make the coaching change a year later. And for a program that's been around longer than any current fan has been alive, what's one more year? The best-case scenario if you keep the coach is that we make the dance and win a game, with those Rivals 4- and 5-star player, which is frankly better than the best-case scenario if you change coaches. The talent was there. There might be some rosters you'd be willing to blow up to make a coaching change, but not that one. Not if you're Nebraska. Miles had already shown you he could get you there. And so I think you had to let it play out. See if all these Rivals 4- and 5-stars could get you into the top half of the conference and back into the Big Dance. And last year, they almost did it. And this year, virtually every single one of us was confident they actually would. And most of the national media agreed. We were ranked for several weeks for goodness' sake. Or at least receiving votes. In all probability, we wouldn't have been any of those things if we'd made a coaching change two years ago. You had to let it play out, you had to try to reach the #15 green in two. And even if it didn't work out, it was still the right decision. Because you were doing what gave you the best chance at that moment. Even knowing what happened with Copeland's knee, I would not have traded the opportunity to see this season play out with this coach and these players in exchange for whatever the hell would have been behind door #3 two years ago. Until Copeland's untimely injury, these players and this coach represented the best chance to get us into position to win that elusive NCAA tourney game that we've had since 1994. Think about that, and then tell me again how we should have fired Miles 2 years ago.

I forgot to mention this was the 2017 Masters. What "going for it" means is that certain factors have come together that have put you in position, have given you an opportunity, to do something you've never done before. You gotta let it play out. You're within 2 strokes of the lead. And it's a risky play. But you gotta trust your swing and hit the shot. Because you don't get in this position often enough to not approach things as though you're going to try to win. If you switch caddies, maybe you'll find a guy who does a better job of reading putts, but he might not be as good at helping you when you're between clubs and need to chose whether to hit a firm 7 or a soft 6. Besides, you've changed caddies about every 6-7 years lately and you haven't gotten any better results. Except now, in 2017, you're actually in contention. You gotta try to win with what you have.

Copeland getting hurt has a lot to do with how many games we're likely to win for the rest of the season. I'm not sure I understand your question. Were you expecting a major, season-ending injury to one of our starters? Because, yeah, a 7-game losing streak was not what I would have expected prior to Copeland getting hurt.