Their plane landed at Silverhawk Aviation at around 8:45 p.m. They gave no indication of how they were progressing in their search for a new football coach.
BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON AND STEVEN M. SIPPLE / Lincoln Journal Star | Posted: Sunday, November 25, 2007 6:00 pm
Tom Osborne is looking for a coach. Everyone else seems to be looking for airplanes.
Husker fans’ favorite private airplane, tracked by Nebraskans since it ascended from a Lincoln runway on Sunday carrying Osborne and Harvey Perlman, touched down in the Star City around 8:45 p.m. Monday.
Stepping off the plane were Osborne and Perlman, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln chancellor. There was no smiling football coach with them.
Greeted by about 20 reporters while walking to his vehicle, Perlman said it had “been a long day.”
Osborne, when asked if he had anything to say about the search, said, “No, nothing,” then added, “Thanks for coming. I know you had nothing better to do.”
Osborne was asked about the number of candidates and the timetable — Bo Pelini interviewed for the position Sunday, followed by Turner Gill on Monday morning.
“I really don’t have anything to say until we finish this,” was his response. And then he drove away in his white Chevy Tahoe.
On Sunday afternoon, the same private plane, a Cessna Citation twin-jet, took the interim athletic director and Perlman to Baton Rouge, La.
That’s where Pelini, Louisiana State’s defensive coordinator, was interviewed, two sources told the Journal Star.
The plane remained on the ground for 2½ hours before taking off to Atlanta, likely with Osborne and Perlman aboard.
Atlanta is the site of Parker Executive Search, reported by the Journal Star on Saturday to be the search firm that is assisting Osborne in finding Nebraska’s next football coach.
Gill, the former Husker great and current University of Buffalo head coach, interviewed Monday. It’s not certain, however, that the interview took place in Atlanta.
As of late Monday night, Buffalo athletic director Warde Manuel had not spoken to Gill about the interview.
“He knows that if something happens to give me a heads-up before I hear it from others,” Manuel said.
But Manuel is sure of one thing concerning Gill.
“The guy’s a great coach. You can go back and forth all you want. We can talk about people getting people to believe in themselves, but if you’re not coaching, you’re not winning on this level,” Manuel said.
“There’s no way in Division I-A football that you can hide without coaching. You’re not going to do what he did if you can’t coach kids to get in the right position and do the right things and to prepare them to be successful.”
Buffalo won just five games in the four seasons before Gill’s arrival. This year, the Bulls went 5-7 under the second-year coach and tied for the Mid-American Conference East Division championship.
There were likely two other interviews conducted Sunday or Monday, though names of the candidates could not be confirmed.
Osborne said Saturday after announcing the firing of Bill Callahan that he wished to speak with four or five coaches.
Monday didn’t produce an end to the coaching search, but it sure did have speculation.
It started Monday morning when an airplane registered to Howard Hawks, NU regent and a substantial donor to the athletic program, left Omaha’s Eppley Airfield and landed in Atlanta just before noon.
It raised eyebrows. But when the airplane returned to Omaha around 10:30 p.m., it seemed to have no one aboard who was involved in the search for a football coach.
Many names always get thrown around in these coaching searches. The popular name on Monday seemed to be that of Wake Forest’s Jim Grobe.
Grobe, who last year guided the Demon Deacons to the ACC championship and this year lost to Nebraska 20-17, signed a 10-year contract extension in February.
Wake Forest’s assistant athletic director for football, Bill Faircloth, said Grobe was not in the office Monday morning. But Faircloth said that’s not unusual on a Monday with no game the following Saturday.
Grobe was scheduled to be at a 5 p.m. coaches meeting in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Faircloth said he’s not surprised that teams would come after Grobe.
“Nebraska’s a heckuva job,” Faircloth said. “But you had better win a lot of games to keep ’em happy.”
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7439 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com. Reach Steven M. Sipple at 473-7440 or ssipple@journalstar.com.