Ed Puskas: YSU aimed high, got it done

Youngstown State needed a Hail Mary and Ron Strollo and Jim Tressel pulled it off Tuesday.

As improbable as it may have sounded a month ago, Youngstown native and former Nebraska coach Bo Pelini will be introduced today as the seventh coach in Penguins football history.

And aside from Dwight “Dike” Beede, who created the program, and Tressel, who molded it into a championship outfit, Pelini is YSU’s most important hire.

Don’t misunderstand. Football here wasn’t about to go sideways and run off the road the way it did at UAB, which is dropping the sport.

But think about the state of the Penguins at the moment YSU pulled the plug on the Eric Wolford era:

No Football Championship Subdivision playoff appearances since 2006.

One postseason berth since 2000, when Tressel left to take the Ohio State coaching job after an unprecedented 15-year run at YSU.

Dwindling attendance at Stambaugh Stadium, even when the best teams in the Missouri Valley Football Conference visited.

And as Joe Scalzo, The Vindicator’s YSU beat writer put it, cricket-like responses to some stories about the Penguins. People in the Mahoning Valley couldn’t get enough news about YSU 15-20 years ago.

This football program — which once was the envy of coaches, players and fans just about everywhere — wasn’t on life support, but it was a shadow of its old self.

Tressel’s teams of the 1990s won four Division I-AA national championships and played for two others. They set a near-impossible standard at YSU and made the program the blueprint for what became the FCS.

That may never be duplicated. But it won’t be for lack of trying.

Strollo, YSU’s athletic director, and Tressel, the university’s president, had to go deep with this hire.

They needed a coach who would bring instant cachet and credibility. They needed a coach who would energize players and fans. They needed a coach who would provided adrenaline and electricity to a program that needed a jolt.

They needed Bo Pelini.

And they got him.

Strollo and Tressel deserve credit for aiming high, thinking big and selling Pelini on their vision for making YSU football relevant again.

That said, of course, it helped that Pelini and his wife, Mary Pat, are Youngstown natives. It helped that Bo played for Don Bucci at Cardinal Mooney High School and that he may want to send his own children there.

And it helped that Nebraska — which will be paying him for years to come — fired Pelini a few days after YSU fired Wolford.

The Cornhuskers replaced Pelini with Mike Riley. The Penguins replaced Wolford with Pelini.

Win, YSU.

Now all Pelini has to do is win. Strollo and Tressel are betting Bo still knows how to do that.

It’s not exactly a stretch.

Write Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas at epuskas@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @EdPuskas_Vindy.