Nebraska fires athletic director

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 that 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.

“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, hired to replace retiring athletic director Tom Osborne in October 2012, has about $1.7 million remaining on a contract that runs through June 2019.

Bounds and Chancellor Ronnie Green said that 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 has not won a Big Ten championship in football or men’s or women’s basketball since joining the conference in 2011.

General manager Jim Johannson ruled out the possibility of the U.S. men’s hockey team having NHL draft-eligible prospects competing at the Winter Olympics in February. Johannson told the Associated Press that he doesn’t view anyone from the 18-and-younger pool of prospects capable of cracking the projected lineup of nonNHL players, many of whom are opening this season on teams in Europe. “We’re going to be too good,” said Johannson, who is also USA Hockey’s assistant executive director.