Bill Callahan Might Have Been Bad... but "Worst. Coach. Ever."???
by Husker Mike on Jul 31, 2009 11:32 PM CDT
in Nebraska Husker Football
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PrintThe Sporting Blog from The Sporting News decided to followup on their "Top 50 Coaches" with their "Mount Failmore: Worst. Coaches. Ever." And guess who led off the list: none other than our own beloved Billy C. Yes, Bill Callahan got a nomination for massive suckage at both Nebraska and Oakland. No question that he was a failure as a head coach, but I got to thinking: was he THAT bad?
And frankly, no. In fact, I started to think about bad Big XII coaches, and I don't even think he's at the top of that list.
Looking around the Big XII, I can come up with several other coaches that I'd rate as even bigger failures than Bill Callahan. Leading the list would have to be John Blake at Oklahoma. Yes, he does deserve a little credit for recruiting much of the talent that Bob Stoops molded into a national championship team, but the Sooner program was in disarray during his tenure. My favorite memory was musical offenses in 1997 as he desperately tried to rearrange the deck chairs on his Titanic each week.
Not to be forgotten is John Mackovic at Texas. Yes, he did manage to win the inaugural Big XII championship, but all that did was buy him a year before being shown the door. Texas A&M might end up with two entries on this list with Dennis Franchione being a solid lock on the list, and Mike Sherman campaigning hard to join this group. Iowa State's Gene Chizek might have ended up on this list, but Auburn inexplicably hired him away before he could do any further damage in Ames.
Ron Prince at Kansas State is another name I'd put on the list ahead of Callahan. He followed the Callahan plan of alienating everybody around him, leaving no goodwill around him to balance out a lack of production on the football field.
Besides Mike Sherman, one has to wonder if Dan "Ten Wins" Hawkins might yet earn a spot on this list. (His opening loss to Montana State seemed to be a foreteller of future suckage.) Oklahoma's Howard Schnellenberger came to mind right away, but his results at Miami, Louisville, and Florida Atlantic more than make up for that. (I then also remembered that Schnellenberger's OU tenure was in the last season of the Big 8, making him ineligible anyway.)
But if we expand this list beyond football, there is no question which coach should rate as the worst coach in the Big XII: Baylor's Dave Bliss. It wasn't so much the suckage on the court; the Bears only made post-season play once, and even that was in the NIT. It wasn't even the rampant cheating by paying players and covered up positive drug tests. No, it was the outrageous coverup of the murder of Patrick Dennehy by teammate Carlton Dotson. Bliss received a ten year ban from the NCAA from ever coaching again (not that any school would dare hire him again), and Baylor ended up having to play a skeleton schedule with no non-conference games in the 2005-06 season.
Yes, Bill Callahan was bad at Nebraska. But no where near THAT bad. My take is that Callahan's name appears here not because of suckage, but rather for the high profile visibility of his suckage. (The man did win one Big XII North title in four years at Nebraska.)
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Callahan was the Worst Ever
As a lifelong Husker fan (is there any other kind?) following the team from outside Nebraska, I have to say, yeah, Bill Callahan was that bad.
The reason I give him the edge over those other coaches is the context of his tenure. When I was growing up, two things were assumed of Nebraska football every year, 1. They would win at least nine games and 2. they would do it with a top-notch running game and defense. Then along comes Callahan, with his 3,000 page West Coast playbook, and the Huskers finesse their way to historic mediocrity.
Add to that how he got the job (by the AD getting rid of Frank Solich), and you don’t just have a program going through an isolated rough patch, you have the scrapping of an entire tradition for one guy. It’s one thing to lead a middling team to yet another lousy record. It’s another to make one of the all-time greatest programs in the country irrelevant. That’s why Callahan is the worst Big 12 coach ever.
Blake
The story I hear from a lot of people who were around OU at the time is this:
When Joe C. became OU’s AD, he spent five minutes watching John Blake run a practice, turned to one of his assistants and said, “this isn’t going to work.”
A bullhorn, a bottle of whiskey and a dream. GobblerCountry.com
What about
Howard Schnellenberger at OU what a disaster that was. I live in Oklahoma and they say Blake was bad but Howard was worse than him.
Helicopter Howie...
…was a man out of place in Norman. In many respects, he was like Callahan at Nebraska. But unlike Callahan, he does have a record of success elsewhere.
Besides that, Schnellenberger’s year at Oklahoma was the last year of the Big Eight…so he’s not eligible for this list anyway.
Not to defend Mackovic...
because there was so much wrong with his time in Austin. Texans basically hated the guy, but overall his record was not that abysmal. He took over the program after a UT beloved son and former player, David McWilliams, had not revived the program after the Fred Akers era. He went 6-5 with McWilliams players the first year, then 5-5-1, and then had three winning seasons. His last was 4-7. I doubt he would have had a job even if he went 11-0 that last year because the fans were sick of the guy at that point.
Callahan's problem
is that he’s not the sort of leader or communicator necessary to be a good head coach. He’s a solid offensive coordinator, but that’s about it.
greg robinson blows callahan out of the water
<a href=“http:// ”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS5pJeY4dys" >" target="new">
can you say 10 and frickin 37?
much love to nebraska and good luck this season
Benjamin Ottman
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