Incoming coach Scott Frost is expected to quickly improve Nebraska football. He took Central Florida from 0-12 to 13-0 in two years, including a Peach Bowl win over Auburn. Here's what he had to say about how the Nebraska program fell from its years of unrivaled success. What he describes is nearly identical to the recent history of Notre Dame football. If Notre Dame could only find a leader like this and have the balls to hire him.
"There’s a formula that worked at Nebraska for 30 years,” he says. “If you were in any business and your company was the best-performing business in the sector or in the top two or three—and Nebraska was arguably the best program for 30 years—and then for the next 15 years you have average-to-poor performance, you’re stupid if you don’t look back and say, ‘What made our company the best in our sector?’ Well, the leadership on campus and in the AD office ruined this place because it was either guys who thought, I wanna do it my way, let’s go get a West Coast offense guy, or they didn’t understand what made Nebraska so good for all of those years.”
Frost called the departure from the formula that drove the teams he played on “alarming.” How exactly did things go so far off the rails, and what was lost in the process?
“Everything,” he says. “We used to have 160 guys on the football team, but it wasn’t just that. We took those 160 guys and developed them better than anybody else in college football. We had the best strength and conditioning program in the country. We had the best nutrition program in the country. We had the best academic support program in the country. We practiced in a way where everybody was getting reps, where you had four units—four teams going at once so the whole team was getting reps and you developed the roster from the top to the bottom.
“You took kids that were a cut below some of the five-star kids going other places, and by the time they left school here, they were bigger, faster and stronger than those other guys and they got 100 more reps a week than those other guys. There was a toughness here, a work ethic here, a unity of purpose at Nebraska that was better than everybody else. Everybody knew what we were, knew their role, was pulling in the same direction, supported each other, and they just took a 180-degree turn from that.
“People forget Frank Solich averaged almost 10 wins a year and that wasn’t good enough for them. Then they tried to go a different way with the West Coast offense and went 5–6 and seven-and-something.