5 quick reasons coaching the Cornhuskers is still a really good job, no matter what year it is

It’s mid-September, and Nebraska has fired athletic director Shawn Eichorst over “on-field performance.” Such a move assuredly turns the temperature of head football coach Mike Riley’s seat to blazing hot, as the Cornhuskers are just 1-2 after being upset by Northern Illinois.

Typically, whenever it looks like Nebraska needs to make a coaching search, it ignites debates over how good a coaching job Nebraska actually is. On one hand, you have a fan base that badly wants its team to dominate college football like it did in the 1990s. On the other hand, it isn’t the 1990s anymore.

Perhaps the backlash has gotten a bit too strong. Let’s be clear about something. Nebraska is still a pretty good head coaching job! Consider a few things.

Some college football jobs are hard because they lack the resources to really invest. Nebraska is not one of those programs. According to the USA Today head coaching salary database, Mike Riley was paid $2.8 million dollars last season. They paid five assistant coaches at least $400,000 dollars last year. If Nebraska hires a candidate with FBS head coaching experience, it’s pretty reasonable to assume that person is making about $3 million a year, if not more.

And hey, thanks to the Big Ten’s new TV deal, Nebraska is going to have plenty of money for the foreseeable future. You’re going to make a lot of money coaching at Nebraska!

Sure, sometimes those people have high expectations or say rude things on Twitter, but having fans who care a little too much is still a better problem than not having fans at all, something many college football programs struggle with.

And no matter what you say about Nebraska, you can’t accuse the program of not having fan support. In case you forgot (and if you did, a Nebraska fan will happily remind you), Nebraska has sold out every dang football game since 1962. And it’s not like the Cornhuskers play in some glorified high school stadium. Memorial Stadium has a capacity of almost 90,000 people.

Much has been made of Nebraska’s geographic situation and how it hurts in recruiting. And it’s true: Not being within 500 miles of many elite recruits makes it difficult for some kids to visit campus on unofficial visits.

But it’s not like it’s impossible to recruit good players to Nebraska. Right now, the Cornhuskers have six blue-chip commits in the class of 2018 and have the 37th class overall. They signed top-30 classes in the previous two years. They’ve had only one class outside the top 40 since 2012.

Thanks to their powerful brand, conference affiliation, historical ability to sign kids from California, and more, they’ve still brought in enough to win a lot of games.

Speaking of which ...

Since the 2004 season (the first after Frank Solich left), the Huskers have had just three losing seasons. (And in one of those, 2015, they still won a bowl game.) They’ve finished in the AP Poll five times and have been ranked at least one week in 10 of those seasons.

While they haven’t won as much as some of their fans would like and while the program has clearly struggled over the last three seasons or so, even post-Solich history shows it’s possible to win quite a few games each year. There are lots of schools that would be thrilled with that level of consistency.

Nebraska plays in the Big Ten West, where it doesn’t need to battle the conference’s biggest recruiting powerhouses — Ohio State, Michigan, or Penn State — for a division crown. While Nebraska does have geographic disadvantages, so do Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. If the Huskers keep recruiting at a top-30 clip, more often than not, they’ll have better players and deeper rosters than most of the teams they will face, as long as they are developed properly. That’s a recipe for a lot of wins.

And if Wisconsin and Iowa can come close to being Playoff contenders, so can Nebraska.

The Huskers can’t rely on a lack of roster limits, which helped during their successful run under Bob Devaney. Tougher academic requirements have limited the recruiting pool they enjoyed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so much so that in 1996, Sports Illustrated predicted the end of Nebraska’s era. Their identity is different without being in the same conference as Oklahoma and Texas.

So that makes it a harder job. But this is still a job that can pay an awful lot of money to play in one of the biggest conferences, where a good coach can win 10 games on a regular basis.

That’s not a bad job.

That’s a pretty great job.