Bo Pelini out at Nebraska

Bo Pelini, the former Nebraska head coach who was fired on November 30, will accept the same position at Youngstown State once he is formerly offered the job, according to Football Scoop.

Update, December 16: Multiple reports from local media state Pelini is taking over the Penguins.

Nebraska made a surprising move when it hired Mike Riley on Thursday to replace Bo Pelini, selecting a 61-year-old coach with a sub-.500 record in 14 years of conference play. Riley has a long history of being a nice guy, and has six bowl wins on his resume, at a school that has only won nine bowls in program history.

Reaction from Nebraska players was mixed. Days before, Huskers players were upset about Pelini’s firing and continued praising him several days after his exit.

Nebraska shocked the college football world Thursday, suddenly announcing the hire of longtime Oregon State head coach Mike Riley. Riley replaces Bo Pelini, who was fired after a 67-27 record in seven seasons with the Cornhuskers.

Riley, 61, has been with Oregon State since 2003, following a stint in 1997 and 1998. His teams made eight bowl games in 14 years with four ranked finishes. He’s the winningest coach in the history of OSU, which is not an easy place to win. His staff already capably recruits Texas, which is one market Nebraska needs to get back into after moving to the Big Ten.

Numerous Nebraska players expressed strong displeasure with Bo Pelini’s dismissal over the weekend, and it appears some of them had an emotional meeting to catch up with their recently fired coach:

In the meantime, the search is on for a Pelini replacement, with several interesting candidates available. It’s a process that might require some reckoning of where the program is at this point, and from the look of things, it’s going to take some winning over of players and recruits.

Oregon offensive coordinator Scott Frost is Vegas’ favorite to take over Bo Pelini’s position as head coach of Nebraska, via Bovada. Frost topped my list of names to know on Sunday, while Corn Nation has concerns about his lack of head coaching experience.

Frost was the last quarterback to win a national championship at Nebraska, doing so in 1997. After a professional career, he bounced around staffs at Nebraska, Kansas State and Northern Iowa before sticking with Chip Kelly’s staff at Oregon. He was promoted to offensive coordinator before the 2013 season, producing two top-five scoring offenses in his time in Eugene.

Nebraska isn’t totally insane for firing Bo Pelini. Seven seasons of Pelini at the helm yielded no conference championships in either the Big 12 or the Big Ten, a losing record against ranked teams, and an unofficial residence in Orlando as the designated 9-3 or 8-4 team bound for the Capital One bowl. (Most likely against Georgia.) (No one ever needs to see a Georgia/Nebraska bowl game ever again.)

It is hard to say precisely what the peak was for Pelini. It could be 2009, when Ndamukong Suh singlehandedly destroyed Mizzou before the Huskers came within one extremely contested second of beating Texas in the Big 12 Championship. 2012 might be up there, too, when the Huskers came back in four different Big Ten games behind Taylor Martinez’s frenetic running, only to lose to Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship Game.

Nebraska’s dismissal of Bo Pelini Sunday means the Cornhuskers will undergo their third coaching search in just over a decade. Pelini was unable to break the nine-win barrier at Lincoln, and Nebraska’s search for his replacement will attempt to identify a candidate who can bring them their first conference title since the Frank Solich era. Like Pelini, Solich was fired after a nine-win season.

Nebraska’s main issue under Pelini appears to have come on the recruiting trail. The Cornhuskers transitioned from the Big 12 to the Big Ten, making it more difficult to continue recruiting out of Texas. Just 30 percent of the recruits Nebraska signed over the last four classes were four- or five-stars. 21 teams have done better in that stretch.

It’s pretty standard to see an outpouring of tweets from college athletes when their coach gets fired. It makes sense: their mentor, the person who recruited them out of high school, has been taken out of a job and removed from their lives. But the outcry from Nebraska players and former players after the firing of Bo Pelini was a bit more intense and more cutting than usual.

Starting QB Tommy Armstrong:

Saturday night, Nebraska coach Bo Pelini was celebrating a victory. Sunday morning, he was fired. His infamous Twitter counterpart, SB Nation contributor Faux Pelini, did not take the news very well. Here is his Twitter journey, from elation, to realization, to sudden and inevitable flame-out.

Godspeed, Bo. Farewell, Faux. May you both land on your feet somewhere.

Bo Pelini has been fired after seven seasons at Nebraska, the school announced Sunday. Pelini leaves Lincoln with a fairly impressive career record there of 67-27, but zero conference titles and an inability to get over the 10-win mark eventually did him in. Offensive line coach Barney Cotton will serve as the interim head coach.

After several seasons of solid, if unspectacular results, Pelini faced his most difficult campaign in 2013. In addition to another middling season, several off-field issues began cropping up as well, issues that surely contributed to Pelini’s firing just as much as any loss on the field -- a very public dispute with former Huskers legend Tommie Frazier certainly didn’t help his cause, nor did a leaked recording in which he ripped the Nebraska fanbase.