Red Man Walking

LINCOLN, Neb. —  The three glass footballs are teed up on pedestals, and they stand guard in front of the glass wall on the second floor in South Stadium.

Blinds are closed on the other side of the wall because all of the recruits have signed letters of intent and the only visitor on this day is a guy from Los Angeles who can’t help Nebraska win football games.

During recruiting season, kids as big as silos and as fast as Amtrak trains streaking across the prairie see the glass footballs, which are national championship trophies, and the glass wall, behind which is a desk where, for a quarter of a century, they could see Tom Osborne hard at work.

Around him were reminders of Nebraska’s storied football past--pictures, plaques, awards, which weren’t hard to come by, because Osborne never lost more than two games in any of his 25 seasons.

It’s all a picture, a sales pitch.

Now part of it’s a memory.

Frank Solich is the new coach, but with 19 years as a Cornhusker assistant and four years as a player, Solich isn’t so new. Kids are still routed past the footballs, still sold on national championships, but now they’re the ones that Solich will win.

He will win.

“The support of the fans has been overwhelming, but in their support they always seem to congratulate me and then they tell me how things are going to go, rather than ask me how things are going to go,” says Solich, a 5-foot-8 Mutt to Osborne’s 6-4 Jeff, laughing softly as he sits in a bare office waiting for memorabilia to be generated by this year’s team . . . and next year’s . . . and the next. . . .

He knows what he has gotten himself into, in part because he wanted to get himself into it.

“Winning isn’t everything here,” says Johnny Rodgers, Nebraska’s first Heisman Trophy winner, in 1972, who now makes a living selling Nebraska T-shirts in Omaha.

“But we do rate it up there with oxygen. We’re serious about it.”

So serious that the billboards coming into Lincoln still laud the Cornhuskers for their 1997 national title, which doesn’t acknowledge that the Cornhuskers, No. 1 in the coaches’ poll, shared the honor with Michigan, No. 1 in the Associated Press poll.

“You think they’ve got Nebraska billboards in Ann Arbor?” sniffed a student, when asked about the omission.

Probably not, and they don’t have the billboard addition either: “Thanks Coach Osborne, Congratulations Coach Solich.”

Unsaid is “this space available for next season’s title.”

It doesn’t have to be said.

Solich knows.

“I think it would be foolish to come in and make a lot of changes,” he says. “I think that’s one of the reasons Coach [Osborne] wanted me to take over, because he knew that I would not--nor would anyone else on the staff--make any tremendous changes because we knew that we were doing the right things to get football games won.”

He speaks slowly, as though still trying on the job for size, and you have an idea that if you have a secret and tell Solich, it’s still a secret.

About this time last year, Osborne had one.

“He stopped by my office and said that he thought this was going to be it,” Solich says. “He was planning on retiring this [past] season, or actually after the season. He just didn’t know when to make the announcement. He was going to give that a bit more thought.”

He waited until Dec. 10. In all that time, Solich told only wife Pam.

Their children were told just before the announcement.

Pam had to know, as she has known his every move since they met on a blind date when he was a Cornhusker fullback who was good enough to run for 204 yards against Air Force--a school record for 10 years--and in 1966 set an Orange Bowl record of 166 return yards that still stands.

He was also small enough to tape a five-pound weight to his back before weigh-ins in an effort to avoid being the lightest player on the team.

It didn’t work.

“I had come in from a hard summer of lifting and would weigh about 162, 163,” he says. “Then after two-a-days, I would be about 157. It took its toll on me, and I was still the lightest.”

A devotee of running and lifting, he’s no heavier now. He is 53, but looks at least 10 years younger.

He’s Nebraska’s coach now, and he shudders to think about how it almost didn’t happen, even after those years of good and faithful service.

If Glen Mason hadn’t come along, Solich would be at Minnesota, where an 8-3 season would get him elected governor, rather than at Lincoln, where it might get him fired.

Solich had reached 51 with an idea that, even though he was first among equals on Osborne’s staff, the coach was never going anyplace and the years were marching by.

“It wasn’t like I was going out and beating down people’s doors to try to get interviews for jobs, because I really felt I could finish my career here,” Solich says. “But I wanted an opportunity to be a head coach, I was hoping for it. At my age, I felt like Coach was going strong and I thought he was going to continue for who knows how long. At some point in time there was going to have to be a decision made as to whether I was going to ride this out or look for another job.”

He interviewed in Minneapolis in December 1996, believed he was about to be offered the job, then got the call that Mason had taken it.

“I had mixed feelings, because I certainly didn’t want to leave here and then have Coach step down, and yet I was prepared to do that,” Solich says.

Nine months later, Osborne came by to tell him a secret.

Still. . . .

“I knew I would have Coach’s support for several years now, but there was a change in our athletic director, of course, when Bill [Byrne] came [in 1992],” Solich says. “At that point in time, Tom had indicated that when he would want to retire that he would support me for the job. But any time an athletic director comes in, you never know how it’s going to play out.”

There was never any question.

“Frank is so enthusiastic and such a good coach, it was an easy choice,” Byrne says. “Nobody wanted to see Tom resign, but Frank made replacing him easier than it might have been.”

And now the transition is complete, with a walkover game Saturday against Louisiana Tech to be coached, this time from the sideline after years of being in the press box. A perk of the job is that Solich can be his own offensive coordinator, as Osborne had been.

That’s the fun part.

So is doing it with Osborne’s staff in place, the only addition being Dave Gillespie, hired to replace Solich as running backs coach.

Doing it with Bobby Newcombe, a diminutive quarterback who has never taken a college snap, who was actually a great wide receiver last season as a freshman, is something else.

So is doing it without No. 1 I-back D’Angelo Evans, out for two games because of an injury.

All that is eased by knowledge that the two games are against Louisiana Tech and Alabama Birmingham. Again, nothing has changed in Lincoln, where nonconference patsies go to die and pick up a big guarantee check after being run over by option football, hammered by an aggressive defense.

But Solich is the coach now, and the coach has to worry. It’s part of being the coach.

“As we approach the start of the season, it seems more challenging every day,” he says.

The challenge is to add to the glass footballs, to turn three into four, and into more. He will do it.

Everybody in Nebraska has told him so.