Nebraska head football coach Mike Riley has a one-year contract extension, the school announced Monday night. Riley’s five-year deal signed before the 2015 season will now run through 2020, and university president Mike Bounds told the Omaha World-Herald he has “every confidence” that Riley will get another year-long extension in December.
Nebraska extending Mike Riley’s contract right after a loss still makes sense, in the big picture
Is it weird? Yeah, but so is this whole sport.
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The newspaper doesn’t yet have a copy of the contract, but Bounds is “almost certain” that Riley’s pay ($2.9 million this fiscal year) is staying the same. Riley went 6-7 and 9-4 in his first two years in Lincoln. He’s 1-1 this year, after a narrow win against Arkansas State and a loss at Oregon. Bounds says the school put in for Riley’s extension “earlier in the year,” though the timing of saying so now is noteworthy.
This is about sending a message — to recruits, mostly.
“If you look across the landscape, contract lengths are all over the place — from three years to a much longer term,” Bounds told the World-Herald. “It was prudent at this time, as a signal, to show to everyone our support of Mike.”
I think Nebraska’s kind of bad this year. The Huskers defense regressed last year, lost a lot of talent, and has started 2017 by giving up 71 points in eight quarters. The Huskers would be tied for 110th in scoring defense even if you filtered out a punt return touchdown allowed in Week 1. The offense looks fine but not much more.
But whether Nebraska’s bad this year isn’t the point, especially not when the Huskers are near the bottom of the country in returning production.
The program has a vested interest in not looking like it’s falling apart. Negative recruiting is all the rage, and any uncertainty about Riley’s status would be catnip for the Huskers’ rivals. If Nebraska went an iffy 5-7 or 6-6 this year and Riley were to enter the offseason with two years left on his deal, that’d be devastating. Rival coaches would warn prospects that Riley’s staff was on the outs soon, and Riley wouldn’t have a convincing rebuttal.
As it stands, Nebraska’s 2018 class is ranked 38th nationally and eighth in the Big Ten. But it’s still early in the cycle, and the Huskers have a ton of quality to make up for the lack of quantity — just 10 verbal commitments — they’ve lined up. Their class will get bigger, and Riley will have every chance to land a top-25 class for the second year in a row. The Huskers were 26th in 2016 and 30th in 2015, so they weren’t far off before.
If Nebraska fires Riley, the extension might cost them. But that’s business.
It’s close to impossible for a program of Nebraska’s stature to fire a head coach in a financially neutral way. Letting a head coach’s contract expire at its finish would mean cratering recruiting for about two full years beforehand, because good players don’t generally want to tie themselves to obvious lame ducks.
If Nebraska wants to keep accumulating talent, it has to keep showing faith in Riley until the moment he’s cut loose. Is that extremely warped and unfair to recruits? Absolutely. Do coaching staffs use promises of their own job security to woo players who they’ll never actually coach? It happens all over the country, every year.
But it’s how the game’s played. Nebraska’s not going to sit on the sidelines.
