Loyalty, ‘but not blind loyalty’: Frost retained for 2022, but has reduced salary, buyout | Football

When Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts turned his phone off at his eldest son’s wedding on a beautiful fall day in Iowa on Oct. 30, the Husker football team was leading Purdue at halftime back at Memorial Stadium and was set to start the second half with the ball.

The joy of the day took over, but eventually, an attendee asked Alberts if he had seen the final score. He hadn’t. He was informed he probably didn’t want to. The Huskers had lost 28-23 coming out of a bye week that was preceded by a 30-22 loss at Minnesota.

“The truth is, the Minnesota and Purdue games, they really shook me a little bit,” Alberts said. “Those results were challenging. I will say, in this state — and I include myself in this — we sometimes have a tendency to look at Big Ten teams through the prism of 1992 and the reality is that there isn’t a single team in the Big Ten that can’t beat another Big Ten team on any given Saturday. There’s parity.

“And that only exacerbates the laser focus on attention to detail and those types of things.”

The loss to the Boilermakers wasn’t a pinnacle or breaking point, but it escalated the situation and fast-tracked Alberts’ timeline.

Two weeks later, Alberts announced Monday that he had reached a renegotiated contract with coach Scott Frost, who will return to coach his alma mater in 2022.

Frost, in turn, announced he was firing four of his five offensive assistant coaches — his longtime colleague and offensive coordinator Matt Lubick, trusted quarterbacks coach Mario Verduzco and a pair of Husker alums: running backs coach Ryan Held and offensive line coach Greg Austin.

“I appreciate the confidence Trev Alberts has shown in me to continue to lead this program,” Frost, who was not made available for comment Monday said in a statement. “I love this state, this football program and am honored and humbled for the opportunity to serve as the head coach at my alma mater. Our immediate focus is on the two games ahead against Wisconsin and Iowa, and the opportunity in front of us to build momentum heading into the offseason and 2022. I understand we have not won at a high enough level, but I am confident our football program will continue to take steps forward.”

A seismic day at Memorial Stadium, and one that became reality now because of what’s happened over the past three weeks.

Alberts said that moving on from Frost was also on the table. He explained why ultimately he decided to retain the 46-year old.

“I don’t think it’s any secret that I’ve wanted this to work. It would be unfair to say I wasn’t looking for a way to keep Scott as our coach,” Alberts said. “I don’t think there’s a clear definition. There’s not a lot of empirical data to suggest that this will automatically be successful, but I also think, you know, if there’s a decision point, whether it’s football or any other of our programs, Scott’s a brother, he’s a Husker and he’s a Nebraskan.

“I don’t want to present this as blind loyalty, but every member of our staff has a (name plate) on their desk and one of our core values is loyalty. So I thought, all things being equal and there’s a decision to make and there’s some uncertainty, if we’re going to err while I’m here as the athletic director, we will probably err on the side of loyalty.

“But it won’t be blind loyalty.”

Frost convinced Alberts with a plan he laid out over the course of their regular Sunday meetings, which began this summer lasting roughly 20 minutes but in recent weeks extended to two and three hours.

“I had been keeping these notes and I didn’t intend on bringing them out until the end of the season, but two or three weeks ago the conversation started getting deeper and more detailed,” Alberts said.

So on Sunday, Frost and Alberts met twice following NU’s 26-17 loss to No. 6 Ohio State and again Monday morning.

Frost laid out his vision for the future and Alberts listened. Alberts maintains that he did not tell Frost he had to make coaching changes, though Frost did.

“Ultimately, Scott brought a plan to me that contemplated a lot of the things we had talked about over the last several weeks,” Alberts said. “I want to be very clear. I did not mandate that Scott fire any coaches at all. No coaches. That was not part of it. This is Scott Frost’s vision, and I believe that’s the role of the head coach and CEO of the football program.”

It’s one that going forward will look different in some ways. Alberts has confidence in Frost’s ability to grow, but intimated that the way Frost operated as the lead man in a program that has 150-plus players and about 200 people overall needed to change.

“When you look at a job like being the head coach at the University of Nebraska, the enormity of it, the varying nuances of it, it is much more complicated than people think. I don’t want to speak for Scott, but I think that some of that high-level thinking, those important details, having a pulse on every single component of your program — anything that touches football — I think it’s fairly difficult to do. That takes a certain amount of time and energy and resources that perhaps Scott didn’t have.

“Administratively, we’ve done a good job, I think, of eliminating some of that for him, too. There’s a lot to it.”

The first-year NU administrator is also aware that there’s no guarantee Frost will work out in Year 5 and beyond.

“I asked Scott this morning … I said, ‘Are you a little uncomfortable?’ and he said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘So am I,'” Alberts said. “That’s how I know we’ve got a great deal. Because both of us are a little bit (uncomfortable).”

That’s why he thought it important to ensure that Frost’s contract was reworked. The deal was most recently reworked in November 2019 and announced on the same day NU lost to Wisconsin to drop Frost’s overall record to 7-14. The way the guarantees worked, Frost would have been due $20.4 million had he been fired after this season and more than $15 million if he was fired after 2022.

That, Alberts said, was “a bad business deal,” though he did not want to get into why he thought former athletic director Bill Moos and current UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green thought it was a good idea at the time to extend Frost’s contract to 2026. Alberts was hired to replace Moos in July.

Under the restructured agreement, Frost took a reduction from his $5 million salary to $4 million in 2022. His buyout is also cut in half to $7.5 million should NU decide to fire him after the 2022 season. Alberts declined to give further details, and NU as of Monday night had not responded to a Journal Star request for the updated agreement, but the athletic director suggested that Frost’s salary in future years will be more dependent on hitting performance targets rather than being fully guaranteed dollars. 

“The university is taking risk in bringing Scott back, right? There’s risk,” Alberts said. “I thought it was important that we mitigate some of our risk with him taking some risk. At the end of the day, there’s no guarantee of success, but in my experience, if two parties have equal skin in the game — I’ve learned that from some of my business-leader mentors — and all hands are on deck, you’ve got a better and more reasonable chance for success. 

“I really want to credit him for that. Scott has talked very openly about how much this job means to him. He’s talked openly about how much he loves Nebraska. I’m not sure that there’s a better indicator of that reality than his willingness to help mitigate some of the risk. I think that’s important.”

Frost is 15-27 at Nebraska, including 3-7 this year. The Huskers’ only conference win is against Northwestern, and Frost is winless against the Huskers’ upcoming opponents — Wisconsin (Nov. 20) and Iowa (Nov. 26).

Alberts made it clear that the clock on Frost’s tenure does not reset just because he’s hiring at least four new assistant coaches going into the 2022 season.

“We intend to hit the ground running. This is not an effort to say, ‘Let’s buy three or four more years so that we can say, well, it will take this staff some time.’ Those are not part of the conversations.

“As we get into it, Scott and I will have very clearly defined expectations. I don’t know that those will be made public — I just don’t think that’s fair — but if some coach, any coach in the athletic department is separated from, he or she will not be surprised, let’s put it that way.”