BOWLING GREEN — It is easy to hire one of your best friends as your second-in-command.

Firing him?

“One of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my life,” Bowling Green football coach Mike Jinks said the other day.

But dire times demand unpleasant measures, and Jinks, to his credit, recognized as much. If he is going down, he will go down fighting.

After presiding over the worst two-year stretch in Falcons history, he canned the Baghdad Bob routine — “Our team, our fan base, they don’t deserve for me to sit back and say, ‘Hey, it will be OK,’ ” he said — and made the bet of his career. Jinks fired the confidant he’s known since high school — defensive coordinator and associate head coach Perry Eliano — then replaced him with a stranger from Youngstown State who resigned from his last head coaching job amid allegations he used cocaine and marijuana.

Crazy?

Or is Carl Pelini the like-a-fox answer to Bowling Green’s prayers?

My hunch leans toward answer man.

I’m not saying Pelini is the savior who will repair the defense, turn water into wins, and help spare Jinks a pink slip of his own. I’m not saying he isn’t, either.

As the Falcons wrap up spring practice this week, it’s clear Jinks and the 52-year-old Pelini — a respected defensive mind who has been around the Division I block — are just the match both needed, one offering a lifeline and a seductive challenge, the other a veteran sounding board.

“I wanted to see if we could help coach Jinks make it right,” Pelini said.

We’ll repeat: Former athletic director Chris Kingston’s mistake was not hiring Jinks, a good man, first-rate recruiter, and sharp offensive mind. It was not providing a longtime prep coach whose only college experience was three seasons as running backs coach at Texas Tech any guidance in hiring his staff.

A boss is only as good as his assistants, and where Jinks should have made it a point to hire a few been-there-done-that aides to help navigate unfamiliar ground, he brought in seven first-time Division I coaches, none with Ohio ties. As his No. 2, he chose Eliano, previously the safeties coach at Texas-San Antonio, where the pass defense ranked 117th in 2015. BG rated 113th in total defense in 2016 and 126th last season, winning six games along the way.

Jinks didn’t give himself a chance.

“This is a different game than high school,” he said. “You’re not allowed time to grow and learn from your mistakes. If I could do it over again, maybe I would have made some different choices because it is a different game. Looking at our situation when we did take this thing over, there were a lot of challenges, and maybe having that stability would have helped with that transition. There’s some validity there. There’s great validity there.”

Jinks called the hire of Pelini “huge,” his resume the last decade speaking for itself.

Working under his younger brother, Bo, he coordinated a pair of top-10 defenses in four seasons at Nebraska, then delivered the same helmet-on-fire results — defensively — on his own as the head coach at Florida Atlantic. The Owls averaged the 90th-rated D in the four years before Pelini arrived. By his second and final year, they were 11th.

The big hangup, of course, was his bizarre rumor-shrouded departure from FAU late in the 2013 season. One of his assistant coaches told the school — and signed a sworn affidavit — that he witnessed Pelini and another aide using cocaine and marijuana during the team’s bye week, leading to his resignation.

The university released a statement from Pelini, saying in part: “I apologize for exercising poor judgment.” But Pelini promptly retracted his resignation. FAU fired him, though it did not cite drug use as a reason. Pelini has since strongly denied using any illegal substances, going so far as to file a defamation lawsuit against the assistant who made the claim.

He spent the past three seasons as the defensive coordinator at his hometown alma mater, Youngstown State, where Bo landed as the head coach and former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel is the president. He reportedly passed several drug tests there.

I asked Pelini if he worried he’d never get another college job.

“No, I’m comfortable with who I am and what I’m about,” he said. “There are enough people in this business that know me and understand what I can bring to a program. I knew it would come.”

Jinks said Bowling Green asked the “tough questions.”

“We had to dive into that,” he said. “We had to contact FAU, and they told us he was cleared of the charges. I had a lengthy conversation with Bo and their AD and with coach Tressel, and they told us that if we didn’t hire him, he would be their next coach.”

I began to see why at a recent practice. Half expecting to find the lava-spitting, F-bombing caricature his brother became at Nebraska, I instead came upon a quietly intense teacher with a low-key sense of humor, eager to install his latest lesson plan. In fact, he spent his year away from football teaching English composition at a Nebraska community college.

“We have to take a step forward,” said Pelini, who will oversee an entirely new defensive staff. “There’s a sense of urgency among the coaches, and the players are starting to feel our urgency. There’s no magical cure as far as scheme goes. It’s not about what you do but how you do it. Right now, we’re still in that phase of teaching them to play with the correct fundamentals and doing the little things right, not giving up easy yards.

“We’re not there, and if we have to be very simple to execute, that’s where we’ll be. If we can get a little more advanced and give us a few more bullets in our gun, we’ll do that, too. But I’m not going to progress until I see that our guys are doing the fundamentals and the little things.”

Will big things follow?

For Jinks, it was a gamble worth taking.

Contact David Briggs at dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.

First Published April 17, 2018, 5:30 p.m.