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Published: 9/22/2012 - Updated: 17 hours ago

BY RYAN AUTULLO BLADE SPORTS WRITER

Tom Osborne, the legendary Nebraska football coach turned athletic director, was skeptical when a wealthy businessman in his late 50s invited him to lunch four years ago to discuss a position on the Cornhuskers coaching staff.

"I thought this was probably a little bit of a passing fancy and he'll get over it," Osborne recalls thinking.

Osborne soon realized he had misjudged the man, who had recently resigned from his post as CEO of a successful online brokerage and began showing up to every practice. He sat in on every staff meeting, taking copious notes. Weary from an hour commute, he moved his personal effects into a hotel room near campus.

This was no fleeting fantasy, no means to scribbling a check mark next to an entry on a bucket list. Joe Moglia, who cashed zero paychecks in his role as executive advisor to Cornhuskers coach Bo Pelini, was determined to apply the principles he culled from laboring nearly 30 years in the business sector to engineering his own Division I program.

"I knew he was serious," Osborne said this week by phone.

The University of Toledo's Glass Bowl, where first-year Coastal Carolina coach Moglia will lead his Chanticleers today for a 7 p.m. tilt against the Rockets, is 565 miles and 10 driving hours away from Wall Street in New York.

It was there, in 1984, where Moglia made the most difficult decision of his life and exchanged his coaching career to enter a training program with Merrill Lynch.

Continued here:
Chanticleers coach knows success