Nebraska Hires Trev Alberts as AD
From the broadcasting booth straight to AD. Wow. Is there anything this man can't do?
He’s been the AD at Nebraska Omaha for 12 years.
Agree to disagree.
Alberts, not Albert. Perhaps you were thinking or being sarcastic? Marv, perhaps?
I guess Trev was a commentator for a couple of years after all.
YES!... Marv and THE KNOWLEDGE. ....YES!
Broadcast booth to AD? You sure your not talking about Matt Millen?
He's actually Marv's son.
And Fat's cousin.
Wow. This is ... um ... interesting.
FLOL
Dude sucked on TV, but has been AD at UNO for over a decade so might be vaguely competent?
He ended the UNO football program in 2010 so he’s never handled a football program. I think this is going to end up being a beautiful train wreck to watch.
I think this is going to end up being a beautiful train wreck to watch.
As has all of Nebraska football for a generation
Wait, are you talking about Michigan football for a generation?
Nebraska football can't be much more of a train wreck than it is right now. I don't think they've made a bowl game since the 2016 season, haven't won ten games since 2012, haven't won a conference title or been to a BCS/NY6 game in nearly two decades, are about as far from being a title contender as possible, and are probably regretting their decision every day to have fired Bo Pelini (hey, at least he won them 9-10 games a year and made them respectable) so I don't know how much worse Alberts can really make it if he can't make it better.
As long as he doesn't preside over a massive scandal within the football program, he really can't be much worse than those who came before him.
I still can't believe they fired Frank Solich!
At this point, he just has to be in Nebraska and he would be an improvement over the last AD. Bill Moos (the just departed AD) got shown the door because he had decamped to his eastern Washington ranch and delegated all of his job to various assistant ADs.
I guess Trev Alberts put down his UNO card to Draw +4 and choose NU.
Good for him. He made his bed and is thriving in it.
Can anyone give a little background on him to explain why this is funny or likely a train wreck?
It's kind of like hiring Matt Millen as the Lions' GM. Alberts was a star linebacker for Nebraska in the 90s and had a short NFL career before becoming a broadcaster. However, he might be competent, since has also been the AD at Nebraska-Omaha since 2009. Even then, the highlight of his tenure was eliminating the football and wrestling programs in 2011.
Even then, the highlight of his tenure was eliminating the football and wrestling programs in 2011.
I'd be fine if he replicated that performance at his new job.
Well Scott Frost has already started down the path....
A pretty good analogy here.
It's hard to say that Alberts did a great job at UNO in his tenure there.
He eliminated the wrestling team right after they won a D-2 national championship. Sure, he argued eliminating wrestling and football was necessary for UNO to make the transition to D-1. But if one compares UNO to the 4 Dakota schools that are conference-mates and can fairly be called their peers (each of the 4 Dakota schools transitioned to D-1 right around the same time):
(1) NDSU and SDSU have been to multiple NCAA tourneys in basketball as Summit Conference champs. UNO has not been to the NCAA once.
(2) NDSU and SDSU field D-1 wrestling programs, and SDSU had a recent individual National Champion. UNO doesn't even have a team.
(3) All of NDSU, SDSU, UND and USD field football teams --- and they range from "the top of the FCS" (NDSU) to, at worst, "average but still competitive within the division" (USD). UNO doesn't even have a team.
(4) UND has hockey AND football --- showing that that combination is possible. Their hockey team has been better than UNO's this past decade.
To Alberts' credit, he had a large hand in UNO getting a new basketball arena built just south of the campus. But despite UNO being in a bigger city than any of their "4 peer Dakota schools", they've been the least successful of any of them. That's a net negative for him.
To me this seems like another program that wants to live in yesteryear - not sure if the phrase “Nebraska Man” exists but this hire gives off that vibe to me.
"Yesteryear" was pretty damn good to Nebraska. 5 national titles in 28 years between 1970 and 1998. The problem is that world is never coming back. NU football was a decade ahead of every other program in the country in terms of strength and conditioning and the old Big 8 took Prop 48 kids. They had an advantage that they leveraged and that culminated in the mid-90s right as the Big 12 formed and the rest of the country discovered the weight room.
That program and fanbase still thinks they are a few tweaks away from being a top 5/top 10 program. They aren't.
I've never read nor heard this argument/explanation for Nebraska's success. Interesting notion/theory.
I wonder what Mel Kiper thinks of this hire
Or Jim Irsay...
Maybe, just maybe, having a prominent former player as AD will make it easier to part company with their tarnished golden boy coach if this year doesn't show improvement.
....so to use that analogy, is Warde a "prominent former player as AD"???
Yep DBisaSTR
I figured it would be more tolerable for a NU man to fire the football NU man....
This is exactly the Chancellor's thinking.
Because managing a backwater athletic department without football and wrestling programs in Omaha is very similar to managing the flagship campus and nationally known (if not revered) football and wrestling programs in Lincoln. I mean, at least he has more experience than Matt Millan did.
No pressure, Trev...
LMAO!!!!
I don't really see this as a bad hire. Sure, he might be a disaster (as could any other hire), but he's got connections with the school and he's been working as an AD for a smaller school in the same state for over a decade at this point. Even if he did eliminate their football program.
The comparison with Matt Millen is completely unfair. Millen was a good color guy and as an administrator should have been shot into the sun. Alberts was a bad color guy and we'll see if he can do a decent job of administrating.
I agree except I think you are being kind to Millen.
Shooting him into the sun would have been way too quick. Firing him out of the solar system while playing a never-ending loop of the last Bill and Ted movie is closer to what he deserved as an administrator.
The more I see places like Nebraska and Michigan consistently make incestuous hires, the more I think it's a really provincial way of thinking. I know: Juwan Howard blah blah. And I know it arguably helps to have some sense of the institution. But it's all too inward-thinking. The best places hire the best candidates, period.
Between Juwan and Red, you could say Michigan struck gold. And Harbaugh could've taken any P5 job outside of Columbus and Tuscaloosa in 2015.
Now if we fire Harbaugh and replace him with Marcus Ray, then you can officially throw us into the incestuous deep end.
While I don't think it'll actually happen, it's VERY telling that most of us could easily envision a world where we do, in fact, hire a Marcus Ray as head coach, because Michigan Man somethingsomething.
"Michigan Man" needs to be shot into the sun and never mentioned again. Ever.
You can play your part in this by never mentioning it again. Ever.
"A Michigan Man will shoot a Michigan Man into the sun, thank you"
Analogies aside, it seems to me that this hire rests on 2 major unknowns, which tend in opposite directions:
Positive: the administrators & athletic department in Lincoln have had the opportunity to closely observe his work for 12 years, so they have a good sense of his strengths and weaknesses as an administrator.
Negative: since back in the day, when Bob Devaney (a guy from Michigan, btw) turned Nebraska into a national powerhouse, the University keeps doubling down on the virtue of Nebraska connections. That made sense as the only major university in the state, with every football player in the state wanting to play for you, and you have coaches like Devaney, Osborne, and Pelini. It makes little-to-no sense when your recruiting base has withered and a Nebraska-football connection no longer has any magic.
Honestly, I have become convinced Athletic Director is the most overrated position in sports. Maybe it wasn't 30 years ago, but now all you do is fundraising and pick whatever consulting firm is going to do your actual job for you. You might as well hire someone who is alumnus and actually seems to love the place for that gig. I see no evidence that hiring someone from the Professional Athletic Director class yields any better results than "Some guy or gal who went here who loves the place."
I especially don't blame Nebraska for making this hire because their program basically got burned to the ground by two dipshit "professional, serious" athletic directors with "big time experience" who turned out to be chuckling dipshits.
Supreme douchebag. But at least he’s not qualified!
This simply cannot end well for Nebraska
Who?
The 1993 Butkus award winner. That's who!
What could go wrong? Who would have thought in 1997 neb looking up to iowa Wisconsin and northwestern in 2021?
His assignment: get Nebraska out of the Big Ten without a dire financial penalty and back into a league where it might have a chance to compete for at least a division title. We can all get behind that.