Reporter Points Out Bo Pelini And His ‘History With The Truth’ After Joining LSU
Former Nebraska football head coach Bo Pelini is back at the FBS level. On Monday afternoon, news broke Pelini was officially hired at LSU as the school’s defensive coordinator.
The news comes just over a week after rumors first started flying the coach was about to start his second stint in Baton Rouge. Likewise, this was just a few days after Pelini himself strenuously denied the claims and claimed he was going to be staying put at his current school, Youngstown State.
The news of the hire led one reporter, Zach Barnett of FootballScoop, to illustrate Pelini’s “history with the truth,” meaning to show the well-traveled coach doesn’t always tend to be truthful when it comes to questions about his impending moves. Barnett tweeted a collection of four different screenshots to illustrate his point.
The first image showed an excerpt of an article from shortly after Pelini was relieved of his duties with the Nebraska football team. Back then, FootballScoop was among the first to report he was taking the head coaching job with Youngstown State. In that excerpt, he called those rumors a “complete fabrication of the truth.”
The second image in Barnett’s tweet was simply a picture of the announcement that Pelini was hired at Youngstown. The third screenshot was that of a tweet where a reporter said he texted the coach and asked him if there were any truth to the reports LSU was about to hire him. In that instance, he simply answered “no.”
The final picture showed the official announcement of Pelini’s hire at LSU. The tweet drew a range of reactions from various Twitter users but opinions fell into two camps.
Some people claimed that most coaches lie about their next job “all the time” and this was nothing special. Others talked about how dishonest he’s been at several different stops in his coaching career. Barnett didn’t engage with many responses though at one point, he did reply to one user who claimed that “they all lie.”
I do this for a living. They don’t all lie.
— Zach Barnett (@zach_barnett) January 27, 2020
Pelini will now officially being his second stint as defensive coordinator with the Tigers. His first go-round ended in 2007 when he helped the team to their last National Championship prior to this season.
After that season, he was hired to be the head coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. It was also his second stint with the Huskers, having previously served as the defensive coordinator under Frank Solich and then, for one game as the interim head coach when Solich was fired before the team’s bowl game in 2003.
