Spring ball is finished, but not much downtime ahead for Huskers in ‘pushed-up’ offseason | Football

Nebraska’s spring football session closed out Saturday the way it normally does around here, with walk-ons making plays at the tail end of the Red-White Spring Game at Memorial Stadium.

The next phase of the offseason arrived earlier than normal, though, in part because crews will begin ripping up the Memorial Stadium turf very shortly in order to replace it for the first time in nearly a decade and also because, well, the offseason is going to come to an end early once again for the Huskers, who open a critical 2022 campaign Aug. 27, the first day of the college football season, in Ireland against Northwestern.

Finals don’t begin for nearly a month at UNL, so NU’s football players will get a couple more weeks of weight-room work before the semester’s over, but coach Scott Frost and players that spoke after the spring game sounded anxious to get onto the next phase of the offseason as quickly as possible.

“We’re going to give our kids a little time off right after this from workouts, make sure academics are in line,” Frost said. “Most of the team is doing a really good job with that. Then we’re going to get back to work. We are going to push everything up a little bit. The season’s pushed up. We’re going to push up summer conditioning a little bit. We need more work on Xs and Os and stuff on the field, particularly on offense where there’s new stuff. We didn’t show any of it today, but new stuff that we’re doing that kids just need more reps at and we need to be a little tighter with everything we are doing.”

There is a limited amount of contact allowed between coaches and players during the summer conditioning time, and players can spend as much time as they want on their own in the facility watching film, but much of the development time in the coming months will be about the players doing work on their own, a conversation quarterback Casey Thompson said he and offensive coordinator Mark Whipple had this week.

“As spring ball progressed, we’ve had some of our best practices the last few weeks,” Thompson said. “Routes on air have improved every day. One-on-ones, we’ve done a really good job at the wide receiver position. As you know we had a lot of young guys step up at tight end with some older guys being out. So, I think we have seen a lot of improvement across the board.”

Frost all spring said the offense was up and down and he understood why because of all the changes happening and all of the learning being asked of the players, in particular the quarterbacks.

“They say offenses are behind defenses usually when you are doing new things and quarterbacks take the worst of that,” Frost said. “There’s pieces of two different systems that those guys are all learning. … That’s why I think at times we’ve looked like a million bucks and other times looked a little lost, but I’ve seen good progress from that position from multiple guys and we’ve got to make a lot more ground up in the summer.”

While the players get back to work in the weight room, the coaching staff will hit the road for one of the busiest stretches of the year later this week.

The first live, spring recruiting evaluation period since 2019 opens Thursday and runs through May, meaning coaches will be flung across the country for most of the next six weeks. Particularly on offense, the staff will continue trying to marry up systems between Frost and Whipple and will begin a deep dive into all of the situational details — red zone, third down, preferred calls, the finer points of the depth chart — that come after a spring chock full of installing the meat and potatoes of the playbook.

“This spring very little and part of that is because we had short winter conditioning,” Frost said when asked about the amount of situational football the revamped offensive staff has talked so far. “By the time we got all the coaches here and got done with recruiting, spring ball was right around the corner. So, despite meeting a lot, situational stuff and exactly where this is going to land hasn’t really been settled yet.

“The good thing is we get more time in the summer now, so situational stuff, red zone stuff, things like that, we haven’t hit to the degree that we will by the time fall camp comes around.”