Facing a critical offseason, Scott Frost is betting on tailoring rather than tearing down | Football

In a lot of ways, Nebraska’s offensive outing on Dec. 18 against Rutgers is emblematic of the problems and, depending on your point of view, promise that the Huskers carry into the offseason.

Junior quarterback Adrian Martinez rolled up 400-plus yards of offense and Nebraska finished with a season-best 620 yards. Martinez also turned the ball over four times and the Huskers finished with a modest 28 points despite all the yardage and game clock they chewed through.

This is a major part of the tug and pull that leaves head coach Scott Frost feeling again this month like his group is on the verge of taking off and many fans wondering how much longer the plane will sit on the tarmac.

The finishing kick against Rutgers vaulted Nebraska to fourth in the Big Ten in total offense (sixth on a per-play basis), but the Huskers finished 11th in scoring offense. That’s the third straight year under Frost that offensive production hasn’t turned efficiently into points. In 2018, NU was second in total offense and fifth in scoring in Big Ten games. In 2019, fifth and seventh, respectively.

The gap only widened in 2020 in a league that will pounce on your mistakes and pulverize you for them.

“There’s just fewer plays that you’re able to throw away. (In some conferences) it’s really easy to run some fast plays and they don’t work and you still get a first down, or run some fast plays and punt and get the ball back and get a lot of series,” Frost said this week. “The way this league is set up, you’ve got to be efficient. That’s what I’ve talked a lot about is discipline and detail and efficiency.

“I don’t think necessarily we need to change who we are. I think we’ve got a lot more talent that is going to allow us to be more of who we are, but we definitely need to be smart about it, too.”

As the head coach debriefed his third season at the helm here with a small group of reporters and laid out his offseason plan on Friday morning, it became clear that he thinks about his entire football operation much the same way he thinks about his offense.

It doesn’t need rebuilding, but it does need fine-tuning.

* Frost is “100% confident” that with the right special-teams analyst and the right communication structure, NU can eliminate its long-running issues in that phase of the game without hiring a full-time coach.

* He thinks a new director of player development who provides enhanced boots-on-the-ground support for players — especially young players — might help retention a year after five freshmen transferred out. So, too, will continuing to increase the premium put on identifying recruits who are not only talented, but who the staff thinks will thrive in Lincoln.

* Even though Frost insists that quarterbacks coach Mario Verduzco does an “unbelievable” job with the NU quarterbacks, he’s going to be more hands-on going forward, an attempt to help hone what he calls the “instinctual” part of the game.

* He’ll have that time in part because he ceded some control over play-calling to offensive coordinator Matt Lubick. Frost said he wants to spend less time on Saturdays in “the minutiae of the call sheet and play-calling” and more time managing his sideline and the game.

These changes are each notable in their own right, particularly on the play-calling front, but none of them are the kind of wholesale change some head coaches and programs would make in the wake of a third straight losing season. In Sporting News’ rankings of the 2017-18 offseason head coaching hires, the top four (including Frost at No. 2) still have the same job. Five through nine? All fired. Kevin Sumlin (Arizona), Willie Taggart (Florida State), Jeremy Pruitt (Tennessee), Chad Morris (Arkansas) and Joe Moorhead (Mississippi State). 

That has never been the plan in Lincoln. Athletic director Bill Moos hired Frost with a long runway in mind and extended him in the midst of a 5-7 2019 campaign. Frost on Friday called the overhaul of Nebraska’s wide receiving corps a “long build,” another phrase that could describe the entire operation. 

It is fair to consider the unique challenge the coronavirus pandemic posed to the pursuit of progress and also dangerous to use it as a catch-all explanation for shortcomings. 

“I think some of that inconsistency had to do with being disconnected to some degree,” he said. “We couldn’t have team meetings, a lot of the speakers that we have come speak to the team and the life lessons we teach our kids that every one of our players need to know, we weren’t able to do any of that. And a lot of the kids that needed that stuff more were on the offensive side of the football.

“But it was a challenging year for everybody. There were some teams in our league that are perennially dominant teams that probably underperformed a little bit because of the same reasons.”

More than at any point during his tenure at NU, though, Frost talked about needed operational improvements more than the caliber of his roster.

Defensive coordinator Erik Chinander seemingly hit a breaking point on the talent conversation during the season.

“Do we always want to recruit more guys and more talent? Absolutely,” Chinander said in November. “But we need to get this done with the people we have in the program right now.”

Four weeks removed from the season, Frost stood on the same hill.

“I think everybody can see we’re close, but close isn’t good enough,” he said. “A lot of what can get over the top for us is more details, a little more discipline, not making a mistake here and there, a penalty here and there. That’s going to be the focus of our offseason. We’ve got the guys right now and the attitudes and the buy-in that if we ask them to do it, it’s our jobs as coaches and my job as the head coach to make sure the details are just a little bit better so that those mistakes don’t happen.

“The teams that win in this league don’t beat themselves, and we’ve done a little bit too much of that.”

Frost is betting that this staff is the one to reverse those trends. In the aftermath of the weirdest college football season he or anybody else has been through, he sat on a beach in Mexico with his wife, Ashley. Just about the time they started to get anxious about getting back to Lincoln to see their kids, Alli and RJ — Frost said it was their first time away from their young children — he started to get the work itch, too.

He knows the stakes. Tinkering instead of tearing down eventually will look like an executive who knew just what his business needed, or it will look like inaction. 

“I definitely think it’s time for us to start threatening for, competing for or winning our half,” he said. “That should always be the goal. I’m not sure if I felt like we had a team that was willing to do that in years past. I do now.”