THE TROLL OF NEBRASKA       

A Look at Dirk Chatelain's Toxic Behavior      

By Steven J. Smith  

For Nebraskans

The local headline cried doom: “The Fall of Nebraska and Michigan.”

In the paragraphs that followed, the Omaha World-Herald columnist lamented the “toil and turmoil” of the two blue-blood college football programs, sharply criticizing the then-current state of the Nebraska program. The team was winning “ugly,” he complained, barely avoiding a “disastrous season.” The offense? Merely “functional.” And its head coach? On the hot seat.

That column ran on September 24, 2014.

Nebraska was 4-0.

That week, the undefeated, ranked Cornhuskers were fresh off a win over Miami, and in the midst of a 9-1 stretch that also included a win over Georgia. Its only loss during that 10-game run would be a 27-22 thriller on the road against a Michigan State team that finished the season ranked fifth in the country.

While most college football programs would sell their souls for that level of success, in the eyes and keystrokes of the World-Herald’s notorious Dirk Chatelain only one thing really mattered: Nebraska’s head coach was Bo Pelini, a man the columnist openly loathed.

Over the course of four seasons, from late 2010 through 2014, Chatelain waged an aggressive campaign to make Pelini local Public Enemy No. 1. As sportswriter on the staff of the World-Herald, the state’s highest-circulation newspaper, Chatelain shares a platform that boasts two million “unique” readers of its website each month. Chatelain used that influential platform to wage a one-man crusade against Pelini.

From December, 2010, through December, 2014, Chatelain tweeted 1,377 times about the then-current Nebraska football program. Of those tweets, a staggering 44 percent, 612, were negative attacks. Chatelain’s attacks often took the form of criticizing Nebraska’s head coach, continually suggesting Pelini was about to quit or get fired, advocating for his firing, knocking/mocking the performances of NU’s student-athletes, perennially insisting that the quarterback should be benched in favor of that year’s backup, and drenching his feed with steady sarcastic ridicule of Pelini and the program.

Under Pelini, Chatelain told the public, Nebraska football was “a laughingstock,” an “embarrassing” program that had “lost all credibility and dignity.” Bo Pelini simply “isn’t good enough.”

Chatelain aggressively pushed his campaign across multiple venues: his weekly blog on the World-Herald website, bylined columns and articles, frequent appearances on local radio, and, as a review of his Twitter history shows, a deployment of social media as a tool to incessantly attack Pelini.

His obsessive campaign paid dividends. Chatelain’s crusade created a groundswell of negativity that increasingly surrounded the program despite its consistent success under Pelini. On the field, Pelini was the first coach in college football history to take over a team with a losing record yet win 9-or-more games in each of the ensuing seven seasons. Nebraska ranked among the top 10 in wins among all Power 5 conference teams over Pelini’s tenure – a feat made more remarkable by the program’s conference change in 2011, abruptly leaving the finesse, pass-happy Big 12 to join the physical, power-oriented Big 10, where NU would need to create new schemes and recruit a different type of athlete.

But even as Nebraska continued to win, posting a 10-2 regular-season mark in its final Big 12 campaign, then another 10-2 regular season in its second year in the Big Ten, Chatelain loudly advocated a public narrative that belied the Huskers’ on-field results.

Nebraska’s 23-20 loss to Oklahoma in the 2010 Big 12 Championship Game was, according to Chatelain’s tweets, a “debacle” and a “horrible weekend” that was, “above all, Bo Pelini’s fault.”

It was around this time that Chatelain began openly pining for Pelini’s departure, repeatedly linking the coach to other job openings and openly speculating about his job status.

“If Bo goes,” he tweeted in December, 2010, it’s “not the fans’ fault.”

From the same month: “POLL: How much has recent events (jabs at crowd, ATM tirade, OU loss, flirtin w Miami) lessened your opinion of Bo?”

Without ever naming sources, Chatelain continually claimed Pelini was trying to leave Nebraska. In 2010 he tweeted that Pelini was actively seeking the open job at Miami, a report both sides denied. Months later he tweeted that Pelini was pursuing the Penn State job. Then the Oregon job. Then Arkansas. Then Tennessee. Etc.

Chatelain pushed these rumors while fully aware that such constant speculation would hurt both Pelini’s effort on the recruiting trail and his standing with Nebraska’s passionate fan base.

A review of Chatelain’s tweet history supports the notion that these damaging consequences were, in fact, precisely what he desired.

Toxic on Twitter: Chatelain’s One-Man Crusade

Beginning in December, 2010, Chatelain’s attacks on Pelini increased at an astounding rate.

He joined Twitter in August of 2010, and until December 4th, the date of the Big 12 Championship game, tweeted nothing but positives when it came to Pelini. Under the coach, Chatelain tweeted, the Huskers played with a “swagger” and “confidence.” He praised the team’s “offensive resurgence” and “amazing pass defense.”

Of his 56 Nebraska-football tweets during those first four months, not one was an attack on Pelini or the program. (For these purposes, an “attack” is any insult, disparagement, or the type of derisive snark with which Chatelain’s readers are all too familiar.)

Then things changed. In December, 2010, nearly half of his Nebraska-football tweets were negative attacks. By all appearances, he had found his purpose.

Of his NU-football tweets throughout the 2010 year, 81 percent were positive or neutral, only 19 percent negative. That was about to change.

In 2011, the percentage of attack tweets jumped from 19 percent to 30 percent (113 of 380). Throughout that year Chatelain aggressively tried to create a quarterback controversy, calling for Brion Carnes to unseat Taylor Martinez, and complaining that Pelini “made a mistake” by not benching Martinez for backup Cody Green the previous fall. He lampooned Pelini’s personality (“grumpy,” “strange,” etc.) and sideline demeanor, publicly mocked his staff hires, and belittled his “weird” recruiting misses.

From there it only escalated.

In 2012, as Nebraska went 10-2 in the regular season and won its third conference division in four years, Chatelain was busy tweeting about whether Pelini should be “fired.” Of his 288 tweets about NU football in 2012, 115, roughly 40 percent, were attacks on the program and/or its coach.

The next season was more of the same. For the third straight fall, Chatelain published a steady stream of negative comments about Nebraska football, criticized Pelini and the players, and pushed for the backup quarterback to replace Taylor Martinez. Almost exactly 50 percent – 163 of 325 – of Chatelain’s Husker football tweets in 2013 were negative.

By now the trajectory was undeniable: the annual rate of negative tweets in Chatelain’s twitter feed had jumped from 19 percent to 30 percent to 40 percent to 50 percent. Chatelain was a man on a mission.

Chatelain’s constant speculation about Pelini’s job status – which he pushed on a near-daily basis across multiple forums – set a narrative, forcing the topic into the public dialogue. Players and coaches alike openly spoke of the pressure such toxic discourse creates. And in recruiting, it’s elementary that other programs use such negativity, the constant drumbeat that a competing coach is “on the hot seat,” to steer players away from such programs.

Despite the increasingly toxic atmosphere Chatelain had aggressively shaped for three years, Nebraska’s 2014 season was another success. The Cornhuskers went 9-3 and finished the regular season ranked No. 22, just ahead of traditional powers Oklahoma and LSU. Two of its three losses were down-to-the wire nailbiters against good teams. The third was a Wisconsin runaway in Madison. Since moving to the rugged Big Ten in 2011, Nebraska had struggled to find the answer for Wisconsin’s power attack.

It was the type of football challenge the candid Pelini welcomed.

"I’m working to get over the hump, I can tell you that,” he said shortly after the Wisconsin loss. “I turn over every stone and I’m looking to try to get over the proverbial hump. I know this and I think it’s one of the great things about being here. People aren’t going to be happy here till you win ‘em all. You know what, neither am I. I’m really not. That’s how I’m wired, too.

"So to think that I’m not working my butt off to make that happen, that’s what I want to have happen. I want to win ‘em all and I want to win a national championship here.”

He wouldn’t get the chance.

Thirteen days after the Wisconsin loss, Nebraska went on the road and beat rival Iowa.

The next day, Nebraska fired Pelini. NU became the first major conference program in modern history to fire a coach who had never won fewer than nine games.

Chatelain celebrated Pelini’s firing across his forums, praising NU Athletic Director Shawn Eichorst for being “bold” and having the “guts” to fire a successful coach. Days later, when Eichorst announced the hiring of Oregon State’s Mike Riley to replace Pelini, an excited Chatelain proclaimed: “I have zero doubt that Mike Riley can win division championships.”

Chatelain’s Twitter tally for Pelini’s final 9-3 run: in 349 tweets about the Nebraska football season, 204 were attacks, a stunning 58-percent negativity rate.

With many Nebraska fans and pundits openly questioning the wisdom of hiring Riley, given his poor career win-loss record, Chatelain went to bizarre lengths to justify the coaching change, arguing that Riley’s long record of mediocrity actually made him the ideal candidate to replace a coach who won nearly three quarters of his games as NU’s head man.

Argued Chatelain:

Bo Pelini was on the coaching fast track from the moment he entered the business. Good grief, at 27 years old, he was defensive backs coach for the Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers.

Pelini spent nine years in the NFL and never endured a losing season. He spent five years at Nebraska, Oklahoma and LSU and never endured a losing season.

He was ALWAYS ahead of his peers, ALWAYS considered an up-and-comer, ALWAYS working with blue-chip talent in luxurious facilities surrounded by incredible support. There’s nothing wrong with that; Pelini earned those jobs. But until he became head coach at Nebraska, he never endured real adversity. He never struggled.

Struggle cultivates humility and thick skin, resilience and open-mindedness. Struggle forces a man to seek people smarter than him to solve problems. Struggle forces a man to study the details AND the big picture.

Pelini never had to step back after a terrible season, look inward, assess his weaknesses and start over. He never had to search his soul and find another way. His response to questions about his foundational principles — like his defensive scheme — was defiance: Stay the course. The process works. I know what I’m doing.

It’s hard to fault a man for his success. You or I probably wouldn’t be any different. The point is, Bo never got his tail kicked over and over and over. He might’ve been better for it.

… Through losing, you learn the difference between a philosophy and a system.

You heard Riley in the press conference, [NU basketball coach Tim] Miles said. Somebody asked about his pro-style offense. Riley kind of smiled and said you have to fit the system to your personnel.

“It’s almost like those guys that have had those difficult jobs are more like high school coaches,” Miles said. “You become a players’ coach, not a system coach.”

That doesn’t mean you let players do whatever they want, Miles said. It means you mold your system constantly. You give them a chance to win every night. One game you play one way, one game you play another way. You adapt.

Coaches who haven’t endured losing are more often rigid in their systems.

… But maybe — just maybe — all that losing has prepared Mike Riley to win.

Or maybe – just maybe – Dirk Chatelain was full of it the entire time. Nebraskans would soon find out.

He Can’t Quit You

Any attempt Chatelain had made to pretend to be a journalist covering Pelini, rather than an advocate on a personal crusade against one man, crumbled the moment the coach was fired.

While Chatelain showed no continuing interest in tweeting about fired NU coaches Frank Solich, Bill Callahan, or Mike Riley, his obsessive fixation on Pelini continued unabated in the years following the coach’s 2014 departure.

In 2015, Mike Riley’s first on the job, Nebraska followed Pelini’s 9-3 regular season with a 5-7 comedy of errors. Yet from his Twitter pulpit, Chatelain’s four-year pattern of increased negativity in his Nebraska football tweets not only came to a sudden end, but drastically reversed into a campaign of praise and positivity. He urged fans to have "patience" with Riley, and raved about the new coach's demeanor.

While Pelini’s final season had garnered a 58-percent negativity ratio in Chatelain’s tweet count, only 13 percent of his tweets about Riley’s 2015 season (45 of 335) were negative – the largest one-year change in Chatelain’s Twitter history.

And incredibly, throughout 2015 Chatelain tweeted almost the same number of putdowns about NU football as he did about…

You guessed it. Former coach Bo Pelini.

Despite Pelini having returned to his Ohio hometown to take over the Youngstown State program, Chatelain just couldn’t quit him, continuing his Pelini tantrum in dozens of tweets and blogs.

In a shocking breach of journalism ethics that angered the Youngstown State Athletic Department, Chatelain even traveled to Youngstown and physically snuck up on Pelini by surprise, in the middle of a football field during practice. The unsettling personal ambush was a violation of basic sports journalism norms: reporters are to arrange interviews with a school’s sports information department. Given Chatelain’s years of online harassment of Pelini, the behavior bordered on criminal stalking.

For anyone who had followed Chatelain’s years-long obsession with Pelini, his motive for the ambush was as plain as the buck teeth on a beaver. This was Chatelain seeking his moment of victory, an act of pure gloating, a face-to-face moment he certainly fantasized about for months. But ultimately, lost on Chatelain, the ambush only revealed his own smallness.

“Not interested,” Pelini said to him, his only two words, though not the two words untold Nebraskans would have chosen. Pelini turned away and focused on his job.

Chatelain still won’t.

Two months later, Chatelain gleefully tweeted, retweeted, then retweeted again, a video clip of Pelini – now on the Youngstown State sideline – giving an earful to a referee.

Chatelain’s fixation on Pelini continued through 2016, Riley’s second year at Nebraska. He tweeted that Pelini’s career at Nebraska was “misery” for NU fans, nothing but “high-strung teams that frequently cracked under pressure” and lacked any “accomplishments.” It was “comical” to ever praise Pelini’s teams, Chatelain tweeted. He continued to be consumed by Pelini’s personality, mocking him as “insane,” a “fire-breathing” maniac, a “Mr. Rage.”

In 2016.

Richly, Chatelain even lamented “how about a 10-2 season?” during a series of 2016 whine-tweets about Pelini’s NU record. Pelini in fact produced multiple 10-2 regular seasons at Nebraska.

Tellingly, though Chatelain continued to bombard Nebraskans with his multi-forum attacks on Pelini throughout the 2015 and 2016 seasons, he failed to even once tweet about the most newsworthy Pelini accomplishment during that same stretch. As Pelini guided his Youngstown State team on a stunning run through the 2016 FCS playoffs, reaching the national championship game in just his second year at his new job, Chatelain tweeted about that remarkable success exactly zero times. He did, however, find time to tweet about Pelini's physical appearance.

While his rabid personal criticisms of a man now living in Ohio continued unchecked, there was a topic in 2016 that actually was on Chatelain’s World-Herald beat: Nebraska football. On that one, Chatelain tweeted 246 times in 2016, only four percent (11 tweets) of which were negative.

In two years, Chatelain’s negativity rate in Nebraska football tweets had plummeted from 58 percent to 4 percent.

But unfortunately for Chatelain, not even his glowing approval of Mike Riley could hide the obvious truth about the man’s coaching abilities. In 2017, the Riley mistake came to its swift and merciful end in the form of a 4-8 season, half-empty stadiums, and a series of blowout losses.

Chatelain seemed to sense the inevitable before the season started, advocating on Twitter that the person really to blame for Riley’s failures was… Bo Pelini. And as more fans spoke out in regret about the Pelini firing, Chatelain tweeted this pushback in June of 2017: “I think Bo even liked Nebraska fans in June. Ehh, probably not.”

On the day new athletic director Bill Moos fired Riley, Chatelain showered the departing coach with fawning praise (“grace under pressure,” “the classiest man alive”) while saving his criticism for, well… by now you know:

“3 years ago, Bo Pelini held a players meeting at a Lincoln high school & scorched the place that employed him. Mike Riley just held a press conference 5 hours after he got fired and said, ‘I'm just sorry I didn't do better.’ As Tom Osborne once said, there's ‘more than winning.’”

Over Mike Riley’s entire three-year reign of incompetence, Chatelain tweeted about the program 865 times. Only 98 tweets, or 11 percent, were negative.

During the same three years, he published tweets disparaging Bo Pelini 77 times.

Even in 2018, Scott Frost’s first year as Nebraska coach, Chatelain continued his direct and indirect attacks on Bo Pelini – harping on Pelini’s recruiting misses and repeatedly engaging in his misleading tactic of grouping Pelini, Riley, and Bill Callahan together when reciting past statistics to lament Nebraska’s “demise” as a football program. Frost vocally rejected that tactic, openly complimenting the work Pelini did at Nebraska and asking fans to move past negativity and come together in “unity.”

Moving on, though, is seemingly not an option for the obsessed Chatelain.

In a national poll asking college football fans to name the program it hated most, Nebraska finished ninth. Chatelain saw that as an opportunity to revisit his favorite passion. He posted the results with his own snark about the voting: “The Pelini family is bigger than you thought.”

It was August 31, 2018, the eve of Scott Frost’s first game. Bo Pelini had been gone from Nebraska for 1,370 days.

Why a Troll?

There is no dispute that Dirk Chatelain fits the definition of an “Internet troll.”

Merriam-Webster defines a troll as a “person who intentionally antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content,” or who acts “to harass, criticize, or antagonize (someone) especially by provocatively disparaging or mocking public statements, postings, or acts.”

What brought Chatelain to these depths is a question perhaps not even he can answer.

Some speculate that when Chatelain began his attacks in late 2010, he was simply a disappointed fanboy, one whose formative years coincided with Nebraska’s mid-1990s heyday, lashing out in anger after near-misses in two consecutive Big 12 Championship games. In reactionary sarcasm and criticism, Chatelain developed an online persona that gained traction and followers, and in doing so may have found a tactic he felt suited his career.  

Others believe his campaign motive was more personal, pointing to confrontations in 2010 and 2011 when Pelini dressed down Chatelain in front of colleagues after the columnist had repeatedly bashed young quarterback Taylor Martinez. Emasculated in person, the theory goes, Chatelain used his keyboard as a tool for revenge.

Or perhaps the roots of a troll run even deeper.

In 2018, the New York Times published an examination of Internet trolls, asking experts to weigh in on the “toxicity” and “real-life consequences” of their harassing discourse.

Zizi Papacharissi, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago who teaches social media courses and published a book on social media behavior, offered her theory as to what motivates a troll. In “her 20 years of researching and interviewing people about online behavior,” the Times reported, “one conclusion has remained consistent: people use the internet to get more of what they do not get enough of in everyday life.”

With his World-Herald platform, Chatelain, who grew up in small-town Nebraska and never found success as an athlete, suddenly found himself thrust into an influential role in a world with which he had grown up enamored: Nebraska sports. A physically awkward, unimposing man, perhaps Chatelain reveled in becoming a part of the Nebraska sports dialogue. Being the voice of pointed, sarcastic criticism gave him a seat at the table, a reason to be noticed, a role that made him feel important, which, applying Professori Papacharissi's theory, may have filled a void in the columnist’s life.

So perhaps it was telling, then, when just weeks after joining Twitter in 2010, Dirk Chatelain made an observation that aptly foreshadowed his next decade.

“Is there anything better than Twitter during a dreadful sports performance?” Chatelain asked in a tweet. “It's a contest in sarcasm. Cracks me up.”

DIRK CHATELAIN'S TWEETS ABOUT NEBRASKA FOOTBALL

        

YEAR              TOTAL         NEGATIVE     NEG. %           COACH

2010                91                   17                 19%                 PELINI

2011                380               113                 30%                 PELINI

2012                288               115                 40%                 PELINI

2013                325               163                 50%                 PELINI

2014                349               204                 58%                 PELINI

2015                335                 45                 13%                 RILEY

2016                246                 11                   4%                 RILEY

2017                284                 42                 15%                  RILEY

2018                256                 14                   5%                 FROST