Nebraska fires athletic director after poor start to football season
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 of 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.
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.
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.
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. Since opening 2016 with seven straight wins, the Cornhuskers have lost six of nine, a stretch that included losses of 59 points to Ohio State and 30 points to Iowa. Eichorst had nonetheless quietly extended Riley’s contract by one year, through the 2020 season.