Will Nebraska Ever Be Good Again
Editor'south note: This story on Nebraska football game coach Scott Frost was originally published on Nov. thirteen, 2019. Watch the 1997 "Flea Kicker" game Sunday at vii ET, office of a National Nebraska Day special on ESPNU.
SCOTT FROST DROPS back at the 30-thou line in Memorial Stadium. It's hot outside -- belatedly September hasn't surrendered yet to fall temperatures in Lincoln, Nebraska -- and though information technology's climbing into the 80s by 10 this morning, Frost has opted for a long-sleeved black T-shirt to go with his blackness gym shorts and backward red Nebraska hat. He steps back, whips to confront the correct sideline, and then fires a bullet in the management of a broad receiver. Dem Franchize Boyz blares from speakers -- Lean wit it, rock wit information technology -- and, oh right, this isn't 1997 at all.
Frost does this on Fridays, jumps into the fray of bodily drills. Even from far abroad on the sideline, it'south easy to catch that black shirt straining, like shooting fish in a barrel to catch that Frost still lifts weights and does things like traverse the Thou Canyon to keep in playing shape. Which is why the Huskers' onetime quarterback and 44-twelvemonth-former current head coach is able to tangle with freshman Myles Farmer on a kickoff, and sprint to the line of scrimmage to enhance his right arm back similar he'due south a defensive terminate refining his swim move, and accuse at No. 99, pulling upwardly but short of tackling him to the ground.
Frost's parents, Carol and Larry, watch the whole affair unfold from upwardly high, on the stadium'southward third flooring. Larry started coaching loftier school football in 1969 and spent much of his career in the state of Nebraska; Ballad came on board not long afterwards and coached receivers and defensive ends for her son's teams for 25 years; and they both withal plough around to find out who needs them when a Nebraska player calls out for "Jitney Frost." His parents started timing Frost'southward 40-chiliad dashes when their son was 2. Most parents scratch marks into the walls to chart a child's growth; they logged xl times to memorialize speed progression. "It'south in his baby book," Carol says. "I have a record of him from 2 through xviii. He went from 13.8 to 4.5."
They're sports junkies, is the betoken, and since they live exactly viii minutes from campus, they try to make it to practice at to the lowest degree two or iii days a week.
Tom Osborne does too. He stewarded Nebraska football for 25 years, won national championships in three of them, and at present returns to campus twice a week himself -- unremarkably on Mondays, to see how the team is recovering from that weekend's game, and Wednesdays, to take hold of the heaviest workday. He patrols the sideline and keeps to himself, while Frost, the quarterback Osborne coached to the school'southward last national championship 22 years ago, does the coaching. It'due south at present Frost's job -- birthright? -- to steer Nebraska dorsum to Osborne'southward heights.
Frost is the redeemer come to rescue Nebraska from itself -- the (literal) prodigal son returning home; the wunderkind unleashing the prowess that turned his previous charges at Central Florida from winless to undefeated in two years' time. There's a perfect storm of gauzy nostalgia and mod-day hype, and Frost lives in its epicenter. That's why this 2019 season, with its blowout losses and alarming regression -- from the quarterback to the team's ability to even feign competitiveness with the Big Ten'southward all-time -- feels like something worse, more than foreboding, than but a lost twelvemonth.
"I think he feels the weight of the thing," Osborne says.
After exercise one day that week, Osborne is sitting in a balcony that, peradventure appropriately, looms large over the indoor football field. He looks like the statesman he became -- he represented the state's tertiary congressional district in the House of Representatives back in the early 2000s -- later on retiring from coaching: pressed khakis, a light blue dress shirt, gold watch and a ring on his left hand showing an "N." Frost will confirm every bit much -- that he does, in fact, feel the weight of this thing -- in his office later.
"Doing this in my habitation state with all the hopes and aspirations of all Nebraskans on our shoulders adds a little bit of force per unit area," he says. "You lot have that everywhere. Information technology's simply a trivial different when it'due south home."
He says he enjoys it, though, the fact that this rebuilding projection of his is happening here, in Nebraska, where he grew upwards, and at the University of Nebraska, where he played and won. "It's merely great to take the people who are closest to me so close to this," he says.
Then his parents come by. And Osborne. And sometimes Nebraska's women'due south volleyball coach, John Cook, who has known Frost since the early on 2000s. And occasionally teammates from the onetime days like Jason Peter, Nebraska's former All-American defensive tackle captain and iii-fourth dimension national champion.
They all come up to conduct witness. Nebraska was and then monolithic for so long and so, poof, it wasn't, so they come to see whether this is the time and this is the person to really, finally, restore the program'southward good name. Peter called his onetime linemate Grant Wistrom after one practice to tell him there was a brawl that day. That never happened under Frost's predecessors, Bo Pelini or Mike Riley, but it happened all the time when Peter and Wistrom and Frost played nether Osborne, and Peter loved that. It looked like the '90s out there.
Before Frost took the chore, Melt called another of Frost's old teammates and told him: Y'all've got to practice this. You've got to get your boy back. Well, he's back, and at present they concord their commonage breath. Watching him. Waiting on him to make this right.
Dorsum on the balcony, Osborne is so soft-spoken you lot take to lean in to actually hear him say it, to speak out loud the unease that gnaws at the people who beloved this state and its football game team. "A lot of people feel that if this doesn't work with Scott," Osborne says, "it's probably not going to work, period, you know?"
IF NOT SCOTT Frost, and then who?
It'due south a jarring notion, even a quarter-century removed from the days when the Huskers ruled as giants, that they might non fifty-fifty be sleeping giants at this indicate. That this -- 4-eight seasons ad nauseam and briefing championship wastelands and national irrelevance -- just might be what Nebraska has to offering now. That so many, whether Nebraska athletics brass or one-time Huskers themselves or Joe and Jane Nebraska, recollect if this one person can't rev this sputtering jalopy, and then maybe, at this point, no i can.
Frost balks at the thought of himself as some sort of Midwestern savior. "I wouldn't use that give-and-take," he says.
Maybe he hesitates because he hasn't done any saving yet. Quite the contrary, in fact. Afterwards some seriously unwarranted expectations, in retrospect, for Nebraska heading into the 2019 flavor, the Huskers have flatlined. They got mauled by Ohio State 48-7 (not shocking); they got mauled by Minnesota 34-7 (less shocking in hindsight, but still ...); they fell to Indiana at dwelling and Purdue on the road, Big Ten teams Nebraska true-blue volition have you know they should always crush whateverwhere. And they even so take Wisconsin and Iowa -- the prototypes for what Nebraska wishes information technology could exist in the 21st century -- threatening alee. It's all enough to brand you want to scream-plead for their mercy. Cease! They're already dead!
"Everybody in Nebraska wants the same thing we want," Frost says. "They desire this program to represent the state of Nebraska well."
Information technology's a goes-downwards-smooth euphemism. Because hither's what they really want: They'd similar to become dorsum to winning, delight and thank you, and put a rush on that social club.
If you were a freshman in 1994 and stuck around for iv seasons as a Husker, you experienced fewer losses (two) than national championships (three). If you played in Lincoln someday from 1962 to 2001, you didn't suffer a losing season once -- not in one case in 40 straight years. And if you lot were an Osborne-era Husker, if you played during his 25-yr reign, from 1973 until 1997, there was a practiced chance yous were on i of his 18 teams that finished in the AP top 10. Gravity existed; Nebraska was peachy at football game.
The question now is whether gravity matters anymore. When it volition stop mattering. Every day that ticks by is one more day between now and so, when Nebraska was something special, when its place among the sport's powers felt less well-oiled-motorcar and more manifest destiny. Jason Peter likens the Nebraska conundrum to Army. (To Regular army!) The Black Knights were good besides once. They had Heisman winners and championship runs as well. Those days are as well far gone to help today. Nebraska's fall from prominence is singled-out from Army's, of course, and far more recent -- the Huskers' plummet due to irresolute NCAA scholarship rules and irresolute cablevision landscapes and irresolute conference alignments and the drip-drip-drip of those changes rusting the program's sheen. But are Nebraska's days too far gone also? Has likewise much time passed since all those teams that pockmark the best-of register -- 1971 and 1983 and 1994 and 1995 and 1997? Non now. Non nevertheless. But here'due south the simply.
"If Scott isn't able to get it stock-still here," Peter says, "I don't know if we're also far removed from those glory years that it tin be of any use."
A FEW MONTHS subsequently Frost came dwelling from Orlando, he sat in a tent thirty miles outside of Lincoln in the wee hours of the morning time, talking in hushful tones to Tom Osborne. The 2 were turkey hunting, had been in that location since 5:thirty, before it was even light outside, waiting with their turkey phone call. They whispered about football and politics and Osborne growing upwardly in St. Paul and Hastings. They could hear a few turkeys come shut, only never close enough. Osborne was disappointed ("I felt so bad because I always become a turkey," he says), and Frost wasn't. He likes talking to Osborne, likes being the listener.
"If I'm not, I'k foolish," he says.
Like pretty much the whole swath of Nebraska, Frost is an Osborne acolyte -- which is why the Nebraska football plan isn't trying to reinvent the wheel in 2019. It'south trying to bring back the wheel it invented in the start place. Since taking over the Huskers in December 2017, Frost has repeated himself so much it's practically become a daily affidavit. "There was a formula that worked here for a long time. And I think there was an intentional departure from that formula," he says in his office, and not for the first fourth dimension.
"A lot of people feel that if this doesn't work with Scott, it's probably not going to work, period, y'all know?" Tom Osborne
He wants up-tempo, no-ane-standing-around, players-can't-wait-for-this-to-exist-over practices. Were at that place practices from his playing days that he just. wanted. to. end? "Every 24-hour interval. It was every day."
He wants local kids who desire to be here with renewed fervor, an enthusiasm he inherited from Osborne, and which Osborne proselytizes still. "Coach Osborne came and spoke to our team in Orlando," says Barrett Ruud, Nebraska's inside linebackers coach. "He said, 'The guys that we really had to beg to come here usually weren't our best players.'"
He wants a walk-on program to push this team like it pushed the teams he was a part of all those years ago. "We've got to become the kids and nosotros've got to develop, develop, develop, develop," says defensive coordinator Erik Chinander, reciting the mantra.
These are Osborne-era reduxes that make sense considering Frost himself is something of an Osborne redux. Simply how much of Frost the passenger vehicle is pulled from Osborne the coach?
"I don't know," his mother says. "Everything, maybe."
Frost provides his ain spin, naturally. It's tough to picture Osborne, for instance, stashing a guitar in the corner of his office, only a few feet from where a bust of Paul "Bear" Bryant sits, a coach of the year award Frost keeps out on display. "I take a video of Zac Chocolate-brown playing that guitar right in that location," Frost says. "He jammed out, then he told me I had to get a proper guitar. This 1's not expensive enough. It'south a piece of crap."
Mostly, though, the resemblance is impossible to miss. Frost, like Osborne, is so quiet, you lot have to inch forrad to not miss his indicate. Frost, like Osborne, is even-keeled enough that you want to check for a pulse at times. "I don't remember I've seen Scott lose his s---," says Peter, who tried to make Frost lose said s--- when Frost transferred from Stanford to Nebraska and was, in the optics of his new teammates, jumping back on a bandwagon he had opted to abdicate. Peter and the rest of the defensive line, iv future NFL players, went head-to-head in do with Frost when he was on the lookout man team the year he transferred and "tried to make him quit every day" via extracurricular shoves and exact parting shots.
That Scott Frost evokes Tom Osborne is inappreciably an accident. Osborne was his coach. He nonetheless is his omnibus in ways that matter. "I'm going to run whatever tough decision past Motorcoach Osborne," Frost says, sitting in his caput coach suite in the football complex.
He doesn't say whether 1 of those tough decisions was what to practise about Maurice Washington -- his sophomore running back who shows flashes of brilliance; his top-ranked recruit from the 2018 grade; his histrion who is facing two charges, one of which is a felony, for allegedly sending his ex-girlfriend a video that depicted her performing what she says were not-consensual sexual acts. She was 15 years old when the video was recorded. The example is pending adjudication in the California legal system, and a preliminary hearing is fix for Dec. 12.
Washington sat out the first half of Nebraska's 2019 opening game, just Frost, along with the athletic director and chancellor, initially opted to allow Washington to play otherwise, salvage for i other half-game pause imposed for infractions that were unrelated to his ongoing legal issues. Sitting in his office in September, Frost bristles a bit at the idea of handling Washington any other way. "Our players know there's some unbreakable rules, some things they tin can't do if they desire to be part of this football squad," Frost says. "Anything curt of that, it's our task to try to assistance them."
Osborne tried to assistance his players whatsoever way he could too, Frost says, and he loved Osborne for that. All the players loved him for that. "I always felt that information technology was important not to sacrifice a thespian on the chantry of public opinion," Osborne says. "I may have been wrong, I may have been right. I took some heat for it on occasion."
He doesn't mention Lawrence Phillips past name, but he doesn't demand to. In 1995, Phillips, who was the Huskers' star running back, was arrested on assault charges and defendant of throwing his ex-girlfriend to the bathroom floor, then dragging her down iii flights of stairs. Although Osborne initially dismissed Phillips from the team, he was reinstated afterward a six-game suspension, and then played out the 1995 season, including the victorious title game. (Information technology was Frost'south apartment that Phillips allegedly bankrupt into to get to his ex-girlfriend.)
Afterward Phillips died in 2016 -- he took his own life while serving a 31-year prison sentence for offenses including choking his girlfriend and driving a car into three teenagers -- Osborne spoke once again of how and why he navigated his troubled former player'due south actions. "I felt the only thing I could put in place that would proceed him on track was football because that was probably the only consequent organizing gene in his life," he said.
In a new time and nether different circumstances, Frost offers an awfully similar philosophy. "I'm non going to crumple a kid upward and throw him abroad and turn my back on him," he says.
It's a refrain he'll repeat just a few weeks later, in belatedly Oct, fifty-fifty as he announces that Washington is no longer on the team'southward depth chart and is not a part of the team'due south "immediate future." His removal, Frost says, is related not to his felony charge but to some other red line that Washington crossed. He says that although he and his staff tried to practise everything they could for Washington and wish "things would be a fiddling different," he wouldn't have done anything differently.
If that sounds familiar, well, that'southward considering information technology is.
HERE'South A STORY often told among Nebraska true-blue. They were close, thisclose, to giving up. The losing was too difficult and too insidious. Similar one Nebraska alumna who told her husband toward the end of the Mike Riley era in 2017, "Get rid of them." She was fix to give up the season tickets they'd had for decades. A few weeks later, when Nebraska officially brought Scott Frost back into the fold, she called her hubby: "Don't exercise information technology! Don't get rid of the tickets!"
They are fabricated of resilient stock, these fans. Or oasis't you heard of the 373-games-and-counting sellout streak at Memorial Stadium that began in 1962, thrived in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, and has weathered this 21st-century crisis?
Every bit much as there can be unanimity amongst the capricious hearts of college football fans, Scott Frost is a pretty universal hit in Nebraska. Though, to be certain, he is testing the premises of goodwill as the squad's stalled progress stalls further. For comparison'southward sake, Willie Taggart, who was named Florida State's head double-decker three days afterward Frost was hired at Nebraska, went nine-12 in Tallahassee before getting fired. Frost is 8-13. Information technology sure does help that he'south as shut to getting Tom Osborne back on the sideline as just ... getting Tom Osborne back on the sideline. And fans and administrators and young man coaches have bought into Frost considering Frost buys into them. For hither's another oft-told tale. More than his undefeated second twelvemonth at Primal Florida, more than the offensive wizardry he helped uncork with talent such equally Marcus Mariota and McKenzie Milton nether his tutelage, in that location is a deep, overriding belief: Scott Frost is one of the best coaches in college football, merely he is the best autobus for Nebraska football.
"As swell as at that place are coaches that are out at that place in this state," says Ryan Held, the Huskers' running backs coach, "not all of them would be great at Nebraska."
Frost is of Nebraska more than than he is from Nebraska, every bit though the land and the cornfields and perchance even the Runzas, those strange sandwiches native to this region, course through his bloodstream. (At ane point, a Nebraska banana coach finishes his dejeuner at the athletic circuitous's grooming table, then whispers his confession like information technology's a sin. "Runza," he starts, then shakes his caput. He tin can't bring himself to keep because it's sacrilege effectually hither. He's just not a fan of Runza, the 70-year-former purveyor of ground beef, onions and cabbage stuffed into a breadstuff pocket. It's fast food that Nebraskans at dwelling and Nebraskans displaced evangelize similar it's manna.)
Frost'due south father is from Malcolm and starred on the high school's eight-man football team; his mother "grew upwards milking cows, walking to school, pulling rats out of the side befouled silo by their tails" in Cedar Rapids. They both wound upward as coaches and teachers, substitute-instruction for some of the players, similar Ben Stille, who play for Frost at present at Nebraska. Osborne coached Larry when he was withal an assistant in Lincoln and Larry was a wingback for the Huskers; he knew Scott Frost when he was young, the then-blond-he-was-about-white-haired kid he'd meet running around the able-bodied complex considering Carol coached track at the university for a spell dorsum and so. Frost's roots here are deep, and they are sprawling. And he has brought with him coaches and staff whose roots are deep and sprawling too. Barrett Ruud, who can count the number of Huskers home games he missed as a child on two hands and who went on to rack upward more tackles than anyone else in program history. Matt Davison, who grew upward in pocket-size-town Nebraska and hauled in that Flea Kicker. Ryan Held, who joined Osborne's vaunted walk-on program.
That's why, equally the athletic department was cleaning house in 2017, John Cook said landing an athletic director who could in turn land Scott Frost was not just role of the calculus, information technology was the calculus. Davison, who came on as associate Ad in Lincoln when Frost returned, called Frost every day back then, sometimes at 5 in the morn, to persuade his old teammate to leave UCF and come up home. And that'southward why Tom Osborne told anyone who would heed -- Frost'south parents and Frost himself -- that he was positive Frost would accept a longer rail in Lincoln, afforded more patience and fourth dimension to run into this through. If he went to, say, Florida and lit the higher world on burn down? Great. If he didn't? "Then he'due south just another guy."
"If Scott isn't able to get information technology fixed here, I don't know if nosotros're also far removed from those glory years that information technology can be of whatsoever use." Jason Peter
Hither, he's not. Never that. He'll go a longer ternion, and what'southward more, he'll need one (see: this doomed 2019 flavour). Simply to harp on the obvious, the state of Nebraska is not the state of Florida. Or California. Or Mississippi. In 2019, Frost'south first and only full recruiting cycle in Lincoln to date, the average distance from domicile for the 25 high school players who committed to Nebraska was 731 miles. Only ane role player from the ESPN 300 that year was a Nebraska native. There will be no sugar rush via injection of lawn blue-chip recruits. Frost and his coaches know that.
"Nosotros're never probably going to be the No. 1 recruiting class in the country," Held says. The 2019 recruiting class was ranked No. eighteen; the 2020 class currently sits at No. 34.
Out of necessity, true belief or some combination of both, Frost isn't cowed by the reality -- and ceiling -- of recruiting at Nebraska. It'due south not as if he wants to forsake a national footprint in recruiting, after all. Example in indicate: In December 2017, he was already named Nebraska's coach but was nevertheless coaching UCF for its bowl game. The Knights had a practise in the morning, Frost held a news conference at apex, he got on a plane at 1 in the afternoon, stopped in Lincoln to refuel, continued on to Fresno, California, to sell a four-star quarterback named Adrian Martinez on joining him at Nebraska, secured the commitment, flew back to Lincoln, landing at 2 or 3 in the morning time to refuel once more, flew to Orlando, went home, showered and changed, threw up from the strain on his body, so went to captain do at UCF. He just wants that footprint while besides reclaiming the Nebraska of lore, with its unique walk-on program and obsessive eye on evolution.
That kind of approach speaks to the ethos of this place. ("What we don't demand is somebody who'due south going to finesse this matter dorsum to the winning means," Jason Peter says at one indicate, spitting out finesse like it's a dirty word.) Does that arroyo speak to the demands of playing -- and winning -- now, as opposed to in 1997? Frost, his coaches, his players, his neighbors in Nebraska, are all on that rail Osborne promised, waiting to find out. It's a precarious limbo.
Gerrod Lambrecht has been friends with Frost pretty much since the day the Frost family unit showed upwardly in Wood River. He was Frost'south chief of staff at Central Florida and followed him back abode to assume the same role at Nebraska, and he's blunt near the reality of Frost's homecoming experiment.
"Think well-nigh failing when Nebraska is your dwelling house," he says. "Where's domicile now?"
SCOTT FROST SNEAKS into a mostly full auditorium on a Sunday afternoon in late September. Hundreds of Nebraskans have gathered at Lincoln East Loftier to laurels the 2019 inductees for the Nebraska Loftier School Sports Hall of Fame, including Frost and his male parent, but Frost is late for the festivities. He had been in Illinois the night before, overseeing an uncomfortably shut win over the Illini. Another day in 2019, another dicey affair.
The Huskers survived that particular scare in Champaign, but perhaps the truth of what this season would be was evident then. They had non nonetheless gotten demolished by Ohio State or Minnesota, had not however been embarrassed at dwelling house by Indiana. The signs were articulate for those who wanted to read them. "I know nosotros're bad. Merely are nosotros Illinois bad?" 1 fan wailed that night.
Just before those downfalls, there's this: Frost on a phase, taking his place among the land's greats. He accepts the honour, then honors his home land. He tells of the double-broad trailer he lived in with his family for a few years when they first moved to Wood River. He talks nigh watching his mother motorbus track and field at Nebraska in the 1970s, pushing the bounds of what was deemed socially acceptable and so; of his begetter coming up on tough times as the football coach in McCook, Nebraska.
"I watched him get fired. If you're a passenger vehicle, it'southward going to happen sooner or later," Frost says, then pauses. He smiles just a bit. "Hope it doesn't happen to me."
Source: https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/28021916/is-nebraska-football-too-far-gone-even-scott-frost
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