Pelini comes home to lead YSU's football team

By Joe Scalzo | December 17, 2014 at 12:01a.m.

By JOE SCALZO

scalzo@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

The Youngstown State football team got one of its biggest wins in history Tuesday morning.

And like so many of the previous ones, Jim Tressel was involved.

Former Nebraska coach Bo Pelini, a Cardinal Mooney High graduate, agreed to become the seventh coach in school history, a move that invigorates a program that has made the playoffs just once since Tressel left for Ohio State after the 2000 season.

“It is with great passion and enthusiasm that I become the head football coach at Youngstown State University,” Pelini said in a statement released by the university. “This is an exciting time for my family and me as we return to the Mahoning Valley. [Wife] Mary Pat and our children are anxious to get involved in the Youngstown State and local communities. I am looking forward to getting to know a tremendous group of football student-athletes who are currently part of the program. YSU football has a rich hampionship tradition and a standard of excellence which our staff and players will work to uphold both on and off of the field.”

Pelini went 67-27 in seven years at Nebraska, winning at least nine games each season. He was fired Nov. 30 with four seasons left on his contract after failing to return the Cornhuskers to the heights enjoyed under Tom Osborne in the 1990s.

A similar fate befell Tressel’s successors, Jon Heacock and Eric Wolford. Heacock went 60-44 in nine seasons, advancing to the I-AA national semifinals in 2006, but missed the playoffs eight other times. Wolford was fired last month after going 31-26 in five seasons at YSU, including 18-22 in the Missouri Valley Football Conference. Wolford missed the playoffs all five years.

Don Bucci, Cardinal Mooney athletic director who coached Pelini in high school and hired him as quarterbacks coach in 1993, said he was “surprised, but pleasantly surprised” by Pelini’s hiring.

“I think it’s going to be great for Youngstown to have a coach of that caliber at Youngstown State,” Bucci said. “He’s an aggressive coach, and I think that’s what’s needed up there. I think he’ll do very well.”

Pelini, who played safety at Ohio State from 1987 to 1990, has never coached at the Football Championship Subdivision level, spending nine years as a NFL assistant with the 49ers, Patriots and Packers from 1994 to 2002 before returning to the college ranks as Nebraska’s defensive coordinator in 2003.

After one year at Oklahoma with fellow Mooney graduate Bob Stoops, he spent the next three seasons as Louisiana State University’s defensive coordinator, helping the Tigers beat Tressel’s Buckeyes in the 2008 national championship game.

Nearly seven years later, Tressel — now YSU’s president — helped bring Pelini back home.

“I don’t think they [YSU] could have done any better,” said YSU radio analyst Chris Sammarone, a former All-America center with the Penguins from 1992 10 1994. “That’s a great hire for the university. I think he’s not only an accomplished football coach and leader, but he’s also someone who has roots in the city of Youngstown, so you get the best of both worlds.”