Nebraska fires AD; tipping point loss to N. Illinois
LINCOLN, Neb. — For the second time in 10 years, Nebraska has ousted an athletic director during a football season that was failing to meet expectations.
The school’s top administrators said the Cornhuskers’ embarrassing loss to Northern Illinois last weekend wasn’t the sole reason for firing Shawn Eichorst on Thursday. But the loss that dropped the Cornhuskers to 1-2 for the second time in three years under Coach Mike Riley certainly was the tipping point.
“It’s never good to lose to a team that you should (beat). At least that’s the theory,” President Hank Bounds told The Associated Press. “At the end of the day, one sporting event doesn’t cause you to make a decision. It certainly was something we had been thinking about and concerned about when we were thinking about what the future looked like.”
Eichorst was hired to replace retiring athletic director Tom Osborne in October 2012, and has about $1.7 million remaining on a contract that runs through June 2019.
Bounds and Chancellor Ronnie Green said Eichorst was a champion of student-athlete welfare and had done a good job keeping the athletic department fiscally sound.
“Husker fans deserve winning teams, and while we made much progress across many dimensions of Husker athletics, we expect more,” Green said.
Nebraska — which spent $101 million on athletics in 2015-16, the most recent year for which data is available — has not won a Big Ten championship in football or basketball (men’s or women’s) since joining the conference in 2011.
In 2007, athletic director Steve Pederson was fired days after a humiliating loss to Oklahoma State. Osborne was brought in to replace him, and he fired coach Bill Callahan after the season.
Eichorst and Riley have been under increased scrutiny with the continued mediocrity of the program. Eichorst hired Riley away from Oregon State in 2014, replacing the successful but volatile Bo Pelini.
Riley is just 16-13 at Nebraska, a school that has won five national championships, went to bowl games every year from 1969-2003 but has not won a conference title since 1999.