McKewon: Assessing Shawn Eichorst's surprising second chance in Big Ten after Nebraska debacle

Not a sentence a Nebraska fan would expect to read — even if Eichorst, NU’s Athletic Director for 4½ years, is headed to the one league school where such a thing is possible.

Wisconsin wants him back at the place where he was a quiet, diligent No. 2 to Barry Alvarez during Badger football’s heyday. Why UW didn’t hire him when Alvarez retired as A.D. before the 2021 season should be one of the first questions raised whenever the school introduces him.

The football program was in better shape then, and Wisconsin opted for Alvarez’s No. 2 at the time, Chris McIntosh who as the Steve Pederson of this story between NU and UW’s shared woes, fired Paul Chryst hastily and replaced him with a guy who changed the program’s successful offensive identity into some spread concoction that robbed the Badgers of what made them unique.

Luke Fickell is to Wisconsin as Bill Callahan was to Nebraska. Fickell is 17-21 in Madison. McIntosh leapt to a Big Ten job in April, ahead of an eventual pink slip.

More than two months later, here’s Eichorst, who, since being fired from Nebraska in 2017, has worked at Texas in such a quiet, diligent role that his staff directory listing has no biography or description of what he does. The man currently has no Wikipedia entry, either. 

His hiring strikes me as Door No. 3, an inexpensive pick at the end of a search, perhaps the result of Alvarez’s urging.

Eichorst left Wisconsin in 2011, had a cup of coffee at Miami’s A.D. and was handed a hornet’s nest when Nebraska named him A.D. two days before a 63-38 loss to Ohio State. He succeeded in a legend, Tom Osborne — who then-chancellor Harvey Perlman kept out of the interview process — and inherited one Bo Pelini as NU’s football coach.

“I asked him, ‘If you were here five years from now, how would you measure your success?’” Perlman said at the time. “His response was, ‘If the coaches and student athletes have been successful and nobody knows my name, it will be a success.’”

Nice thing to say. Just not the way it is, or was, at Nebraska. Probably not at Wisconsin, either.

Has he gotten over his allergy to press attention? The only college football show in town, NU’s spotlight is hotter than UW’s, but Badger fans want to know things, too.

Eichorst was more open with me than others but not available enough for a major, front-facing role. There were reasons for caution — the first of two surreptitiously-recorded, scandalous Pelini tapes leaked in 2013, plus a culture survey of the athletic department found staff was trying to sabotage his leadership — but his elusiveness was remarkable before he fired Pelini in late 2014.

In 2017, he bizarrely announced he was retaining basketball coach Tim Miles with a tweet just after a Big Ten tournament loss.

“He had told me, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry,’” Miles said at the time. “He said, ‘I’ll put out a statement at some point after the game, whenever we’re done, and we’ll be all good.’”

But athletic directors are often judged by their hires. Eichorst fired Pelini — who won nine games per year while wearing others and himself out — and, without a search firm or leaks, hired Mike Riley out of Oregon State. Perlman told me he had to look Riley up on Google.

Riley’s off-the-field persona was Pelini’s polar opposite and he did well with modest resources at Oregon State. Nebraska had a bigger kitchen, higher aspirations and more chefs who wanted their spoon in the pot. Riley, too accommodating by half, seemed to let them stir.

With a ton of seniors, Riley won nine games in 2016 but got blasted by Iowa and Tennessee to end that season. Eichorst declined to offer Riley’s defensive coordinator a new contract, and helped hire Bob Diaco, fresh off a head coaching meltdown at UConn, to run the defense.

The results were disastrous — and because of Diaco, comical. He had his coaches doing burpees after practice, grown men with creaky knees glistening with sweat. Diaco had a trunk with props, including a golden football. He preferred not to talk after games, but Riley made him. The postgame rants were legendary.

“The strain was spectacular, right?” Diaco said after one loss. “So we could just go back and look at the game. Do you see the strain? Do you see it, or no?”

Eichorst had been fired by then, back in September 2017, days after Nebraska’s 21-17 loss to Northern Illinois.

"Hang in there," he said in a rare postgame press scrum. "We have a good group of young men in that locker room who are working really hard to represent us and win ballgames, and I would say the same thing about our staff. But everybody's gotta take it up a notch. And we gotta get movin'."

NU got movin' — movin' on from Eichorst. So, he had a rocky tenure at Nebraska. Tough situation. Bad fit.

If he’s increased his media awareness and commits to accessibility — after years in the Texas shadows — Eichorst possesses qualities that could make it work well at Wisconsin.

»That culture survey? Student-athletes thought NU’s leadership, including Eichorst, was “awesome.” He talked often about the “student-athlete experience.” The sport’s balance of power has shifted toward athletes. Eichorst, ahead of the curve then, won’t be caught in the past on revenue sharing, NIL, any of that.

»He thought good players won games and, in the months after NU’s 62-3 loss to Ohio State, noted Nebraska’s need to recruit better defenders across the board. Easier said than done compared to Ohio State, but he got it.

»He was organized, efficient and had an eye for the bottom line. He got heat for being focused on policy, but Nebraska needed to get fully in line with being a Big Ten school, and he helped.

»He’ll have an ally in Alvarez, a vastly more popular figure with Wisconsin fans that NU’s chancellor was with Husker fans.

»Fickell is neither Pelini in self-destructiveness nor his ability to inspire loyalty.

““I would play for Bo Pelini against Satan himself and a team of demons at the gates of the underworld,” a former Husker once said. 

»If Eichorst must hire a football coach, Jason Eck — former Badger lineman, current New Mexico coach — looks like a slam dunk choice. More personable than Chryst. More attuned to Wisconsin’s rhythms than Fickell.

There’s a path, of course, to Fickell keeping his job. The Badgers draw what I consider to be the Big Ten’s four weakest teams — Michigan State, Maryland, Rutgers and Purdue — while avoiding Indiana, Oregon and Ohio State. They signed better transfers and Fickell readjusted — perhaps too late — to embrace Wisconsin physical roots on offense.

The pivot game may well be a Halloween trip to Kinnick Stadium, playing rival Iowa.

What Hawkeye fans think of Eichorst’s “final analysis” on Iowa is a whole different story.