Over the last several months, Dean Smith and Eddie Robinson said it was time to walk away from college sports. Then earlier this week, Marv Levy retired from the Buffalo Bills.
Here comes another void.Tom Osborne, Nebraska's 25-year symbol of success and stability at a time of one-term coaching contracts, leaves college football tonight after the second-ranked Cornhuskers (12-0) play No. 3 Tennessee (11-1) in the Orange Bowl.
"I'm concerned with playing well and staying focused, but obviously I'm aware of the fact that this will be the last one," Osborne said Thursday.
Top-ranked Michigan's 21-16 victory over Washington State in the Rose Bowl on Thursday didn't help Nebraska's chances of sending Osborne out with a third national title, but he said he and his team are going out winners.
"We set a number of goals at the start of the season and I don't think any of those are eliminated at this point," Osborne said late Thursday after watching the Rose Bowl.
If Osborne needed pointers on what to do with all the time that will soon be on his hands, Smith might have had a word of advice. North Carolina's longtime basketball coach left before the start of the season with the most wins in NCAA history.
Likewise, Robinson retired from Grambling last month as the winningest college football coach.
"I know Dean and Eddie but it isn't like we take vacations together," Osborne said. "I probably talk to both of them two or three times a year."
Osborne is one of the last successful coaches to devote himself to one school at a time when winners hop from job to job and losers are shrugged off and often forgotten.
Robinson coached Grambling an astonishing 55 years and Smith left Chapel Hill after 36 seasons. Osborne is departing two days after Levy retired after 12 years with the Bills, and, at 72, as the NFL's oldest coach.
But the rarity of the long-term, one-school coach isn't the only change in college sports. The players, Osborne notes, have changed, too.
Osborne said recruits today often carry the burden of coming from broken families. He recalled that in the early to mid-60s when a player came from a single-parent home it was invariably because of a death in the family.
"Now probably 50 percent of the players we recruit are from single-parent homes," he said. "Often it's the mother only and they have an absence of a father figure in their lives. As a result, young people are a little bit more insecure, a little more troubled."
Osborne also cited a drug culture that barely existed in the early '60s and an increasingly violent society.
"Football players are people, so they live in a culture and they're affected by it," he said.
But, Osborne says, today's players are more gifted athletes and better suited to deal with the pressures of college sports.
"It takes an exceptional human being now to be all that you're supposed to be as a college athlete," he said.
"You're supposed to be good as a student. You're supposed to be able to pass a drug test every week if necessary. You're supposed to excel on the football field and you're supposed to be a great role model. You're supposed to give time to the community.
"To balance all those things is very difficult, and the expectations are very high."