Five things we learned from NU’s weekly press conference

Here are five of our biggest takeaways from Nebraska’s first weekly press conference of the season on Monday as the Huskers gear up for Illinois…

As if there wasn’t enough riding on Saturday’s season-opener at Illinois for Nebraska, the Huskers will be featured on college football’s first big stage of 2021 in the process.

Playing in Week 0 on as FOX’s Big Noon Saturday feature matchup, NU vs. Illini will be the nation’s marquee matchup in the season’s first weekend of games.

Nebraska is well aware of what a road win over a Big Ten West foe would mean to kick off a critical year for head coach Scott Frost’s program.

To do it in the national spotlight makes it an even more valuable opportunity.

The Blackshirt tradition continued on Monday, as Nebraska held a ceremony of sorts to award 12 defensive players with the coveted black practice jerseys to open the first game week.

A handful of former NU players were on hand to help hand out the jerseys, including athletic director Trev Alberts, Jason Peter, Chris Kelsay, Chad Kelsay, Danny Noonan, and Kenny Wilhite.

Of the 12 recipients, four were defensive linemen, five were linebackers, and three were defensive backs.

The new Blackshirts are defensive linemen Ben Stille, Damion Daniels, Ty Robinson, and Deontre Thomas; linebackers JoJo Domann, Luke Reimer, Nick Henrich, Garrett Nelson, and Caleb Tannor; and defensive backs Cam Taylor-Britt, Marquel Dismuke, and Deontai Williams.

The Big Ten Conference finally clarified some of its COVID-19 protocols on Monday, five days before the season’s first game.

The league announced that if a team cannot play a Big Ten game due to COVID-19 issues, it would be ruled a forfeit and would not be rescheduled. If both teams couldn’t play because of COVID, it would be deemed a “no-contest.”

That news again spotlighted Nebraska’s current team vaccination rate, which has not been made public outside of Frost saying he felt “a lot better” about when NU stood earlier this month.

Frost said Monday that any unvaccinated Huskers would be subject to weekly COVID testing beginning this week.

He added that more information regarding Nebraska’s team vaccination rate would be soon announced from someone other than him but declined to provide further details.

“If I wanted to tell you, I would,” Frost said.

It should be noted that Illinois head coach Bret Bielema said that only three players on his team were not fully vaccinated as of Monday and that neither player was on the Fighting Illini’s two-deep roster.

It wasn’t a total surprise, but Nebraska kept its depth chart for Illinois in-house this week.

There were only a few positions left to be publicly settled at this point. Still, Frost clearly wanted to maintain any competitive advantage over Bielema and the Illini that he could.

Based on Frost’s comments on the radio last Thursday, the team already had a pretty good idea of where things stood with the projected depth chart going into game week.

But fans, media, Illinois, and everyone else will have to keep guessing as to what some positions will look like when NU takes the field on Saturday.

Less than a week away from arguably the most crucial game of his Nebraska career, Frost was in no mood to go above and beyond with his answers during Monday’s press conference.

Frost seemed to take a page out of the Bill Belichick playbook, giving short and to-the-point answers without revealing much detail at all during his interview.

In all, Frost’s presser lasted just 5 minutes, 3 seconds, despite being asked 21 questions.

If anything, it shows how dialed in Frost is this week in preparing for such a critical opener on Saturday.