Frost may be top Nebraska pick if Riley fired.
All UCF fans obviously will be rooting for their Knights to beat Maryland on Saturday, but you know who else they need be pulling for with all of their hearts?
They better be cheering with every bit of black-and-gold fervor they can muster for the Nebraska Cornhuskers to beats Rutgers. If not, coach Mike Riley, whose team suffered a humiliating loss to Northern Illinois last week, might be fired on the spot and the campaign to hire UCF coach Scott Frost would officially begin.
It’s already unofficially began with the loss to Northern Illinois — the Huskers’ first defeat to a non-Power 5 team in 13 years. After the game, Nebraska AD Shawn Eichorst described his emotions as “angry, frustrated and disappointed” and made it clear the loss was “not acceptable.”
Meanwhile, former Nebraska star Jason Peter, an ex-teammate of Frost’s on Nebraska’s national championship teams of the mid-1990s, did an interview with WHBL radio in Wisconsin in which he said Nebraska football “has hit an all-time low” and called for Frost to become the next head coach. Frost is a Ne-
braska native who quarterbacked iconic coach Tom Osborne’s final national championship team in 1997.
Said Peter: “Scott would be the first (head coach hired) in the last 15 years that has been part of a championship team at Nebraska; who knows something about the mentality and the work ethic you have to have at Nebraska; what is acceptable and what’s not acceptable. It’s part of the culture thing. Who else knows about the championship culture?”
I’m going to say something now that probably sounds ridiculous on the surface, but deep down it’s really not: Other than Nebraska being his alma mater, why would Frost even want the job?
Nebraska is simply not the program it once was when Osborne and Osborne’s legendary predecessor — Bob Devaney — were stalking the sidelines and steamrolling the competition with their wishbone and triple-option offenses. If the Nebraska job were such a great job then why are the last three coaches hired named Bill Callahan, Bo Pelini and Mike Riley? This sounds like a pool of candidates for N.C. State, not Nebraska.
The problem is college football has changed and so have college football recruits. Unlike Ohio State, Nebraska isn’t in the middle of a fertile recruiting area and the Huskers no longer have the national cache to lure five-star recruits from across the country. In the minds of many top prospects, Nebraska is simply a bitterly cold place in the middle of nowhere.
Remember when the Oregon job opened up last year and the natural assumption was that Frost — the Ducks’ former offensive coordinator — would become a candidate? He quickly pulled himself out of contention because, as he said, “UCF is where I want to be. When you recruit kids to come play for you and you agree to do something for a program; when you give your word to people, I think it’s your responsibility to see those things through. I started something here and I want to see it through.”
Even more telling, though, was Frost saying it was actually easier recruiting to UCF than it was when he was an assistant at Oregon. Frost admitted it was a tough sell to convince recruits to travel hundreds, even thousands of miles, to play football in the Pacific Northwest.
“I’ve been recruiting all week,” Frost said last year upon taking his name out of the running at Oregon. “(One day), I drove to a (nearby) town in Florida, recruited and was back in Orlando that night. (The next day), I drove to another town in Florida and was back at home that night. That’s a lot different than flying all over the country and sleeping in a different state every night.”
This is why I’m betting Frost is rooting harder than anyone for Riley to succeed and keep his job. Let’s face it, if his beloved ’Huskers came after him, it would be hard for him to turn them down. As Alabama alumnus Bear Bryant replied when asked why he left Texas A&M for the Crimson Tide in 1958, “Momma called. And when Momma calls, you just have to come runnin’.”
But Frost is one of the smartest coaches I know. If he takes the job at Nebraska, a passionate fan base that has sold out every home game the past 55 years will expect him to duplicate the success of Osborne — his mentor. This, of course, will be impossible. After all, there’s a reason Nebraska hasn’t won a conference title in nearly 20 years.
Frost’s best career move would be to stay at UCF, continue to implement his explosive offense and build the program into a consistently big winner. If he does that then he could leave UCF for a much better job than Nebraska.
The question will be if Momma calls, will Frost make a decision based on his heart or his head?