Tad Stryker: Saving a Season?

Alberts fires Frost earlier than anticipated, bringing star-crossed Husker career to end

Steven Branscombe/Getty Images via Wibbitz

Does this football season still matter? That was the crux of the decision Trev Alberts came to after watching Nebraska suffer its latest in a seemingly unending parade of crushing losses.

With only three weeks left before Scott Frost’s buyout would be reduced by $7.5 million, Alberts surprisingly jumped his own self-imposed Oct. 1 deadline when he announced Sunday morning that Frost had been fired. At that point, Alberts apparently decided that in this case, time is more valuable than money.

Alberts is betting at least $7.5 million that Mickey Joseph, who Alberts named as acting head coach, can significantly change the trajectory of the 2022 season, which appears to be headed into the ditch after a pair of three-point losses to Northwestern and Georgia Southern. He pointed to the team members — in particular, the seniors — who he said deserved a better experience than they would have had under Frost.

If Joseph can indeed light a fire under the Huskers, the expenditure (rumored to be bankrolled by an anonymous Husker booster) will have been worth it. That decision, and his eventual choice of a new head coach later this fall, will mark Alberts’s tenure as Husker athletic director.

I think the move was justified, but I hated to see the day come. The demise of Frost’s coaching career in Nebraska is astounding and disappointing — some might say tragic — on many levels. As we listened Sunday to Alberts lay out his case for firing Frost, all the unfulfilled promise of his return to Lincoln came washing over an entire state.

As I wrote more than once in the past couple of years, the best possible scenario would have been Frost figuring out how to succeed in the Big Ten, and getting the Huskers back to contention in the West Division. I think almost everyone agrees with this, including the dozens of Nebraska lettermen from years past who gathered in Memorial Stadium to welcome Frost on Dec. 3, 2017, the day he was announced as head coach. That day was a symbol of how much emotional energy was invested in Frost by Husker Nation.

Frost was an obvious, popular link to the Tom Osborne era, as the quarterback of Osborne’s final national championship team. When former Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany famously said, “Nebraska just needs to get back to being Nebraska,” I’ve got to believe he was thinking of TO and his relentless, pounding offense and defense.

The favorite son who made good in Florida and came home to coach the Huskers, Frost had a fatal flaw, and it was overconfidence. Almost all successful major college coaches have big egos, but Frost seemed to lack teachability, especially early in his tenure in Lincoln. Maybe his coronation by a united fan base (and the media) contributed to that problem. He read too much into his 13-0 season in the American Athletic Conference (and his national coach of the year award), but then again, we all were guilty of that. One thing became clear quite soon, though: he and his staff were not ready to coach in the Big Ten.

His main problem? Amazingly, he never prioritized being a physical team. In particular, he neglected the power run game that it would take to win in the Big Ten. Frost and his staff seemed to think they could out-finesse, outrun and outscore the Iowas, Wisconsins and Minnesotas that they would face each year. They were wrong, of course, but that ground has been covered countless times.

In Frost’s defense, the crazy and confounding six-game losing streak that began his tenure in Lincoln was star-crossed to say the least, beginning with the scheduled 2018 opener with Akron, which was canceled by a lightning storm after the opening kickoff. An untimely injury to his freshman quarterback, Adrian Martinez, against Colorado the following week set up a disappointing loss to the Buffs in the final seconds and left Martinez unable to play against Troy the following week. Both those games became one-score losses, which established a frustrating theme for the Frost years.

Throughout his tenure, Frost and the Huskers found new and incredibly unlikely ways to lose close games. It was like watching a modern-day Sisyphus rolling a boulder uphill. Each week, it seemed that one last good push in the final two minutes could break the curse, but it never materialized.

Adding to the impact of the Greek tragedy was the fact that Alberts presented Carol Frost an award during the Georgia Southern football game, less than 24 hours before he fired her son. I couldn’t help but wonder how awkward that moment was for both of them.

Having said all that, Frost was not mistreated. He was given much more administrative support than Bo Pelini had, and adequate time to build a winning program. His staff rarely developed players well.

Who should replace him? That will be much debated between now and Thanksgiving. The best part of the search is that there’s no slam-dunk candidate. There have been two in the last two decades, and both fell on their faces. In fact, you could blame one of those slam dunks — athletic director Steve Pederson — for much of the turmoil in Nebraska’s football program ever since.

Delany was right, of course. Ideally, the new hire will be someone who gets Nebraska back to its old physical self. Joseph has a nine-game audition for the job. We’ll soon find out if another former Husker quarterback can get traction in the Big Ten. What a story it would be if he wins enough to make it hard for Alberts to look elsewhere.

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