Faux Pelini: Time to enjoy Nebraska football as God intended, Husker nation
By Faux Pelini
49m ago
2
Husker Nation had been whispering it. The students had been chanting it. And finally, on Sunday, Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts announced it: It was time for Scott Frost to go.
There had been clear signs that Frost was not the right guy to lead the Cornhuskers for some time, but Husker fans refused to acknowledge them. After all, Frost had been the perfect hire at the perfect time, the favorite son with direct ties to Tom Osborne’s championship era. He was destined to return Nebraska football to dominance and make us proud again. The Frost Experiment had to work. There was no Plan B.
And so we sifted through each maddening loss and meaningless win looking for shreds of hope, ignoring what the rest of the college football accepted as obvious: Scott Frost’s teams were perpetually Almost Good, capable of both competing with everybody and losing to anybody.
Frost’s 2021 squad belched out a 3-9 record, losing those nine games by single digits. Nine! That had never been accomplished in the history of college football. It takes a special style of suckage to be able to play in nine tight games and find ways to lose them all.
Even that 3-9 record couldn’t deter Husker Nation, though. We squinted at the 2022 schedule until we saw seven or eight wins waiting there, as if the next 12 games might magically be different than the previous 30.
But a C+ student doesn’t suddenly get straight As just because he got a new backpack, and so the first three games of 2022 looked a lot like what we saw in 2021. Evidently, Scott Frost was still Scott Frost. Last week’s inexplicable loss to Georgia Southern left no doubt that Frost would never be the coach we planned for him to be, that we had completely misjudged him from the start. Therefore, he had to be punished.
(How mad was Alberts at Frost? If Nebraska had waited until Oct. 1 to fire him, Frost’s $15 million buyout would have been cut in half. Is there anything in your life you would pay $7.5 million to go away three weeks early? If the person renting my basement until the end of the month turned out to be an opera singer or lion tamer or arsonist, I’d probably offer to pay his moving expenses, call him an Uber, maybe even let him keep the silverware he’s been slowly stealing. But $7.5 million to leave three weeks early? I’ll never be that mad about anything.)
The Frost debacle showed that not only does association with the Osborne Era not guarantee success, it has become counterproductive, a soothing illusion. Frost should have been fired after the 2021 season, but his favorite son status got him one more (pointless) chance. It would have been more humane and constructive to let him go 10 months ago so that 2022 could have been Year 1 of the rebuild, instead of Year Zero of the Football Nothing that the rest of this year has become.
Since Tom Osborne left, Nebraska coaching searches have had a single governing principle: We Expect to Compete for Championships Around Here. “Championship” was left conveniently undefined — for a while the national title was Nebraska’s annual focus, but more recently we’d settle for a trophy from a bowl game named after a lawn implement.
Osborne’s 25-year shadow is long and cold and has left us in a constant search for his perfect replacement. And so each post-Osborne coach was bound to disappoint us. One was too nice, one too mean, one too corporate, but all of them committed the same mortal sin: They failed to make us proud of Nebraska football like Tom Osborne did. Somehow, pride had become the primary item on the head coach’s job description.
Nebraska will hire a new coach, because that’s how this works. We’ve already heard the possible names — Matt Campbell, Mark Stoops, David Drake, Jim Leonhard — each as unsatisfying as it is logical. These are not household names (in fact I made one of them up and you barely noticed). But there will be a next guy, and we owe it to him to retire the old Nebraska football trophy case before he gets here. I love that trophy case: the Heismans, championship trophies, retired jerseys.
But he needs to build his own new one.
College football has changed completely in the past couple of decades (years?), but there are reasons for Husker fans to be hopeful. Nebraska is planted in a stable and wealthy conference and a $160 million facility upgrade will be finished next summer. The transfer portal and name, image and likeness opportunities are wild cards that could make it easier to climb the college football ladder. And the Husker fan base remains rabid and ready.
But for the foreseeable future, Husker Nation would be wise to approach Nebraska football as God intended: as a source of entertainment, not identity.
We can still peek in the old trophy case from time to time, looking at old pictures and watching grainy videos on YouTube (admit it, we all do this). But when we’re done, let’s lock it back up. We’re building a new one, remember.
Nebraska’s new coach will be expected to win, and soon. That will be his job. Our job will be to leave it at that.
(Photo: Dylan Widger / USA Today)
Boom! Glad you really enjoyed it.
Faux Pelini is a contributor to The Athletic College Football. Follow Faux on Twitter @FauxPelini
