What Happens If Mike Riley Isn't So Nice After All?

Before entering into a discussion about Mike Riley, the former Oregon State and current Nebraska football coach who is being sued (along with OSU) for creating a "sexually violent culture," it is important to understand that Riley is purportedly an extremely nice person.

'Nice' is not a quality that's essential to his job—it might be an outright hindrance—but Riley possesses it anyways. In fact, he has so much of it on tap that his wholesome mythos has made people forget about the mediocre tactician underneath. Riley was a pedestrian 93-80 at Oregon State, and 56-63 against Pac-12 competition. He closed out his 14 years in Corvallis with a 5-7 season and a fifth-place finish in the Pac-12 North. Some of this has less to do with Riley than the nature of college football geopolitics: Schools located in places like Oregon don't punch above their weight class for very long unless a financial titan like Phil Knight ritually loads the gloves with coffers. Still, this is a man whose only 10-win season came back in 2006, who has never lost fewer than four games in a season, and whose record over the last half-decade is 29-33. Under no circumstance would one consider this great. Much of the time, he struggled to be good.

This isn't spoken of very often—at least not so starkly—because, well, he's just so nice. Riley is the doting grandfather who leads his players in earnest rounds of "Hip Hip Hooray!" after big wins, whom the media fawns over for his eagerness to make their jobs easier. His players and assistants swear by him; rival coaches are inspired. It is worth noting that Riley isn't out there telling the world how nice he is—the world is telling him. "I don't know about all that with the 'nice guy' thing," he said at Big 10 media day. "I think that I always tell people I just hope they see a guy that loves what he does." But that modesty only holds so much weight when people like Texas coach Mack Brown believe Riley borders on divinity. "I've always said if I get to heaven and Mike's not there, I know I'm in the wrong place," Brown said in an interview earlier this summer.

So, this is not the coach one would expect to stand accused of turning a blind or indifferent eye to a culture of sexual assault within his program. The standard caveats apply here: it is way too early to know the veracity of these claims, and for all we know, Mike Riley truly is the benevolent soul he's tirelessly proclaimed to be by others. It may also be worth noting that Brenda Tracy, whose own story of being raped at Oregon State inspired the unnamed plaintiff of the lawsuit to come forward, believes that Riley shouldn't be named a party in the suit.

But because of Riley's image, bad press like this has the power to alter his reputation more severely than any other coach. It isn't just that Riley doubles as college football's Mr. Rogers, but that an inordinate amount of his substance is tied into those "aw, shucks" stylings. Riley's far from the only overly conscientious head coach in the college football landscape; on his best day, he's something of a Bill Snyder starter kit. The difference is that Snyder actually piloted an even worse-off Kansas State program to two Big 12 titles, and garnered a truckload more Coach of the Year honors along the way. Snyder's the furthest thing from an asshole but, practically speaking, it wouldn't matter if he were. For better or (mostly) worse, this is a bottom-line profession and his coaching invoice has him well in the black.

That is why people tolerate or outright romanticize Jim Harbaugh for being some brand of high-functioning sociopath, and Les Miles for flagrantly disregarding his players' off-field transgressions, and Urban Meyer for squeezing into the role of devoted family man only when it aligns with his coaching ambitions. College football's revenues are too far gone for anyone to have the luxury of caring about a head coach's behavior for its own sake. It only matters in a certain light, and winning is the most forgiving filter. Stack up enough bowl wins, and the rough edges blur and soften accordingly.

Mike Riley is the great exception to this sordid rule. That's how he got his Nebraska job in the first place: by being everything Bo Pelini wasn't. Pelini, remember, is the former Miles underboss who lives to lace into his players and who wouldn't piss on his team's fanbase if it were on fire. His interpretation of "parting on good terms" was to call Nebraska AD Shawn Eichorst vulgar synonyms for female genitalia. Pelini inflicted too much psychic damage for a coach who could "only" deliver a steady stream of nine-and ten-win seasons, poisoning the well so thoroughly that Eichorst promoted character to its own deciding mechanism.

The AD has been quoted as saying that "I was just thinking about qualities in people" in his hiring process, and few coaches match Riley's intangibles. The party line is that Riley can also finish the job Pelini started and bring the Cornhuskers back to national prominence, but those Oregon State numbers tell everything about how this can't really be about on-field results. He is the beneficiary of the very best kind of nepotism, an overly decent man rewarded simply for remaining uncorrupted by a thoroughly indecent world.

Now, for the first time ever, we're left to question just how true that underlying premise is. Which, by extension, forces everyone to consider what Mike Riley's resume looks like stripped of that veneer of decency. Winning could change that, but Riley as a soulless winner is the antithesis of everything that makes him significant, let alone interesting. If this lawsuit progresses, there may come a time when there will no longer be cause to say nice things about Mike Riley. If that day comes, there may not be anything worth saying about him at all.