That list gives me even more respect for Dan Mullen. How a larger school hasn't snapped him up is beyond me.
Let me tell you PART of what I know for a fact is going on with Mullen.
I attended high school at Caledonia, MS from 1984-1987. We were not a very good team, but we did have one or two players who it would have been VERY interesting to see how they turned out. Not one single time did we ever see ANY recruiter from Ole Miss, MSU, or Southern...or anywhere else in the state....at our little high school. But Mullen and his assistants are out on the recruiting trail on the Friday nights AT THE HIGH SCHOOLS IN PERSON, scouting players and signing autographs. (They obviously don't do this on nights before either a BIG game or a road game, but they are there - several of my high school classmates who still live there have seen them).
Mullen is out trying to find the diamonds in the rough - because he HAS to, he doesn't have any other choice. This is why I think he'd be the perfect guy to turn around Nebraska, maybe not to their Tom Osborne end of career level but certainly to that late 70s-early 80s one or two losses per year with the occasional bad year of three losses thrown in.
On a side note - across the river from us is Hamilton High School. There was a player some of you may have heard of out of there named Don Smith, who was an All-SEC quarterback for Miss State around 1985-86 or so. He was an option quarterback - so good, in fact, that Coach Bryant was trying to get him to come to Alabama. A reliable source of mine told me that in the fall of 1981 (when Smith would have been a junior) that there were some Alabama recruiters at the airport in Columbus trying to rent a car and figure out how to get to Hamilton, Mississippi (a hole in the wall on the map). Back then (unlike now so much) it was common for folks trying to recruit players to "hide" a particular player from other folks being able to see him. I don't know if our guys ever got a look at Smith, but I have heard he was 'hid out' in the fall of 1982 prior to heading to Miss State.
And if his name sounds vaguely familiar, not only did he play for Perkins in Tampa (second round draft pick) as an RB but he scored the first Buffalo TD in Super Bowl XXV. In 1994 - only four years after his final NFL carry, which was the Super Bowl TD - he was sentenced to a mandatory 15-year prison term for buying cocaine.