From the Coach’s Bookshelf – Tom Osborne’s “Beyond the Final Score”

Very few coaches have epitomized success on and off the field more than Tom Osborne. In his 25 years as Head Coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, his teams compiled a record of 255-49-3 and captured 13 conference championships and three national championships. In an ESPN online poll, he was voted “greatest college football coach of all time”. Since retiring as a coach following the 1997 national championship season, Osborne served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and is currently Nebraska’s Athletic Director. In his latest book, Beyond the Final Score, he talks about what really matters in his legacy as a coach.

Let’s face it: In Nebraska we were spoiled. Over a 42-year span, going back to 1962 and ending in 2003, the Cornhuskers had won 82 percent of our games—by far the highest percentage of any program in the country for that same period of time. We had no losing seasons during those 42 years, went on to 40 bowl games, and won 25 conference championships and five national championships.
Bob Devaney, who turned the program around, coached for 11 years. I coached for 25 years. Frank Solich coached the last 6 years of that 42-year period. During Frank’s tenure, his record was 9-4, 12-1, 10-2, 11-2, 7-7, and 9-3 (10-3 if you count the bowl win after he was fired). He won a Big 12 Championship, played for a national championship in the Rose Bowl, played in 2 BCS bowl games, and went to 6 straight bowls. This is an excellent record by any standard. The circumstance that made Frank’s job so difficult was that we had gone 60-3 with 3 national championships in the 5 seasons prior to his taking over as coach. While others might have had a different perspective, in my view the expectations had become totally unrealistic. Frank’s record was very much in line with Bob’s first 8 years and my first 20 years. The odds of a confluence of talent and team chemistry occurring during my last 5 seasons were just about zero no matter who was coaching, yet that was the standard to which many held him.
Some fans came to believe that the best high school players in the nation would always come to Nebraska – because, after all, it’s Nebraska – and that we would always win. They believed that there was something magical about Lincoln and football, and forgot about how fragile success in athletics is.
Then, all of the sudden, those same people realized that winning football games isn’t automatic. Long-standing success is more precarious than they ever imagined. And that realization was difficult for fans to deal with, just as it was difficult for UCLA basketball fans after head coach John Wooden retired in 1975 and the Bruins no longer won their way to the NCAA finals every year. It was difficult for me to watch Nebraska fans struggle through several very long winters, even though I knew that football, like other sports, is cyclical. My sadness was not a matter of ‘What happened to the program we had built?’ Rather, it was painful for me to see Nebraska fans experience such disappointment. Two losing seasons out of four was a rude awakening.
It seems to be that some people are very conscious about leaving a legacy. You sometimes hear about a president’s concern over how history will remember him, and about his efforts to get things done the last year or two he is in office in order to make his mark in a particular way. Or you hear about an actor who wants to be seen as creative, or expressive or shocking, and chooses to work on a film based on how it might affect how he or she is remembered. For a politician, his or her legislative initiatives, peace accords and economic proposals all play a part in the quest for a legacy. I guess for authors, it’s the number of books sold or the number of times on the bestseller lists. In the same way, coaches concerned with legacy often focus on their won-loss records.
I never thought too much about leaving a legacy as it related to wins and losses. I remember talking years ago to Ron Brown, one of our coaches at Nebraska and host of Sharing the Victory, the national radio show produced by the fellowship of Christian Athletes. Ron told me, “Your legacy is not going to be about championships and wins and losses. It’s going to be about things that have to do with the development of players – spiritual matters – how players are treated, whether they grow personally or not.”
I believe Ron spoke the truth. I’ve had many former players who are now successful in a variety of professions, say, “You know, some of the most important years of my life were the years I spent as a football player at Nebraska learning about perseverance and discipline and character.” If there is a legacy, that is it. It isn’t how many games or championships we won, even though we all cherish those milestones. Those former players influence their children, the kids they coach, and the people they work with on a daily basis. If their years in the Cornhusker football program equipped them to pass on the values they learned here, that’s all the legacy I could ever ask for.
A lot of coaches might view Nebraska’s long streak of winning seasons as a legacy worth claiming, but I don’t see it quite that way. Don’t get me wrong – winning is great, and I will always be proud of the players and coaches who worked together with me to forge those championship teams.
But whatever legacy I leave is written on the hearts of the players I coached, through the way we treated them and in the values we promoted. I hope it is also written on some of the hearts of the people with whom I served on Capitol Hill, the people in my congressional district and the people who now work with me in Nebraska’s athletic department. And I pray it will be written on the hearts of the children who are a part of the mentoring process, TeamMates. There is no way to calculate a win-loss record when it comes to them. There is only a determination to make a difference, one child at a time,
The best legacy any person can leave is an intact family with solid values and good character. I am very proud of my three children, my wife Nancy, our four grandchildren, and our two sons-in-law and daughter-in-law. They are what make life worthwhile. u

Excerpted from Beyond the Final Score – There’s More to Life than the Game by Tom Osborne. Copyright © 2009 by Tom Osborne. Excerpted with permission by Regal Books.