Former Bombers coach Riley gets fresh start in familiar state

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This article was published 20/02/2018 (2256 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There have been frequent moves and just as many jobs.

Mike Riley, 64, has seen and experienced a lot in more than 40 years as a football lifer. He started a new chapter last month as the assistant head coach and tight ends assistant at Oregon State after a three-year stint as the head coach of the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers ended with his firing last November.

There was an undeniable comfort in the new job. Riley, one of the most celebrated coaches in the history of the CFL’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers, was going home — literally.

He was returning to Corvalis, Ore., his football perch for 14 years and two previous stints with the Beavers football program. This time, though, he wasn’t the man in charge — spurning other college offers to work for incoming head coach Jonathan Smith, a person who had played for him 20 years ago.

“It was a combination of things,” said Riley, explaining the move via telephone this week. “It was Jonathan Smith, a new head coach here, as a guy I have stayed in touch with since I recruited him and coached him. He was a guy after my own heart. He wanted to be a coach from the time he was playing in high school. I coached him and we worked together for a bit and then he went out into the world and got his coaching jobs and so we’ve stayed in touch.

“He called me at whatever that time was, telling me about Oregon State being interested in him. So we talked about that job and all that and then he called me the day he was going to take the job and we actually talked about other coaches for his staff and then a couple of days later it morphed into me after everything at Nebraska blew up. So it couldn’t have been anything that was a long-range plan… for me, at this moment, it was perfect timing.”

Riley and his wife Dee had a perfect landing spot. Their old home, which they still owned, was waiting.

“We kept the house,” said Riley, who has resumed his old routine of riding his bicycle to work. “My wife would never want to sell it. Both our kids were married in the backyard. Too many memories… This was a place we’d always be connected too as long as our daughter was here with our grandkids. And so we just kept our place and when I came back to start work, it was still almost completely furnished.

“We’ve spent a good part of our married life here, our kids grew up here. I spent 14 years coaching here, I grew up here, so it’s a good place. If it is a finish for me, it’s a good place for that. If it’s not, it’s a good place to be for the moment.”

It seems unlikely to be Riley’s swan song. But his early exit from Nebraska — he was fired after going 4-8 in 2017, the school’s worst record since 1961 — still stings.

“I probably made some mistakes in the foundation of the way we built it,” said Riley, who went 6-7 and 9-4 in his first two seasons in Lincoln. “We inherited a different style of quarterback so we adapted as best we could and actually won nine games in the second year which was a good year, not a great year. At one time we were in the top 10 and we were 7-0, undefeated for a long part of the season.”

A quarterback change and overhauling the squad’s defensive structure may have doomed the 2017 team.

“We were truly rebooting in the third year which isn’t a good thing to do when you have to win more games than you did,” said Riley. “l would tell you today that next year we would be much better. That’s easy to say, but I really believe that because the recruiting was starting to take shape. I’ve always felt you need four, five years to establish a culture in football you need to win. In this day and age, you don’t always get that if you don’t win enough early and we didn’t do well enough. I wasn’t surprised by it and I’m not bitter about it.”

Riley was under contract for three more seasons and owed US$6.6 million under the terms of a contract buyout. He was replaced by former Nebraska quarterback Scott Frost.

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @sawa14