America at LargeUnlike many of his fellow Republican congressmen in last November's elections, Tom Osborne was not a direct victim of the nationwide backlash against those who had steadfastly supported George W Bush's misbegotten adventures in Iraq. He was, rather, a victim of his own ambition.
If the former University of Nebraska football coach believed himself to be bulletproof, it was with good reason. In each of three elections he had carried Nebraska's 3rd Congressional District with approximately 80 per cent of the vote - a majority that essentially mirrored the winning percentage of the Cornhusker football teams over the quarter-century Osborne was at the helm of the programme.
The fervour with which Nebraskans support their collegiate franchise can be mind-boggling to non-midwesterners. It has been pointed out, accurately, on Saturday afternoons in autumn, football attendance renders Memorial Stadium the third-largest "city" in the state.
One might suppose such allegiance would be difficult for the NFL to ignore, but whenever the subject of expansion has come up over the years, Nebraskans have reacted with sublime indifference; witness the classic, if apocryphal, response of a Cornhusker diehard: "If we got a pro team here, Chicago and Denver would want one, too."
Between 1973, when he took over from the legendary Bob Devaney, until his retirement in 1997, Osborne's football teams won 255 games. That's an average of better than 10 a year in what was usually a 12-game season. During that span Nebraska won three national championships and 13 conference titles. If that doesn't qualify a man to go to Washington, what does?
Last year, Osborne decided to challenge the incumbent governor, Dan Heineman. It wasn't a great year for Republicans with Beltway associations to be running for anything. How much Osborne was handicapped by his unflinching support for an increasingly unpopular president remains unlearned.
He did carry the metropolitan areas of Omaha and Lincoln (as well as, presumably, Memorial Stadium), but was beaten badly in rural Nebraska, wound up with just 45 per cent of the vote (Heineman got 49 per cent), and was suddenly unemployed.
Over the past couple of years things hadn't been going much better for the Cornhuskers. Three years ago, for the first time in 42 seasons, Nebraska had a losing record. Going 5-6 mightn't be a firing offence in some quarters, but in Nebraska, where college football is a religion and playing in post-season bowls a veritable birthright, it immediately put new coach Bill Callahan on thin ice.
Callahan, the former Oakland Raiders coach, rebounded to guide his teams to 8-win seasons over the past two years. In some parts of the country that would be considered a commendable achievement. In Nebraska it got Callahan hung in effigy.
Callahan's Cornhuskers seemed to get off to a decent start this fall, winning four of their first five games, losing only to Southern California, at the time the number one-ranked college team in the nation.
Then they dropped two straight conference games, to Missouri and Oklahoma State.
Nebraska had celebrated its annual homecoming game last Saturday by inviting back Osborne and his 1995 national champions - a collection that had been determined in a nationwide poll to have been the greatest college team of the 20th century - to be feted at half-time.
The ex-congressman was thus among 84,344 eyewitnesses to the embarrassing, 45-14 home loss to Oklahoma State.
Three days later the university chancellor, Harvey Perlman, convened a press conference, at which he solemnly pronounced the football programme at his institution of higher learning to be in a state of "disarray".
No, Perlman didn't fire Bill Callahan. Instead, he fired the man who had hired Bill Callahan: athletic director Steve Pederson. In his place, the chancellor named Tom Osborne "interim" athletic director.
Buying out the remainder of Pederson's contract cost the university $2.2 million. Buying out Callahan's would have been even more expensive, but the new "interim" athletic director made it clear that that remains an option.
"Bill Callahan is in charge of the football staff," said Osborne, in what was hardly a resounding vote of confidence. Callahan's future, he added on Tuesday, is "something that will play itself out over the next five games".
Since Nebraska's remaining schedule includes three top-20 teams, that doesn't bode well for the current coach.
The widespread assumption, then, is that in accepting the role Osborne has become a one-man search committee to determine the identity of Callahan's successor.
And while he is at this point 70 years of age and a decade removed from his last game on the sidelines, there is one school of thought holding that the interim athletic director could do worse than replace Callahan with a football coach who is already enshrined in the Hall of Fame: namely, Tom Osborne.
The principal impediment to that back-to-the-future move might be Mrs Osborne. When he was asked about the possibility, Tom Osborne said, probably correctly, "at that point, Nancy would get a gun and shoot me".
