Nebraska and the "hero-ball" trap
What's been going wrong for Scott Frost and Nebraska? Can they change things around?
One of my central thesis surrounding Nebraska football and their failure to even approach the magic of the Tom Osborne era is that they can’t recruit their way back to those heights.
Why? Because the 90s Nebraska machine wasn’t built with recruiting.
They did pretty well drawing in talent, about as well as they’ve tended to do since under their subsequent coaches.
The 2023 Scott Frost class was rated 34th nationally by On3’s rankings but it included only 13 high schoolers and a large number of transfers. Frost is coaching for his job this year, you see.
In 2022 they were 41st, 24th in 2021, 20th in 2020, 17th in 2019, etc. The program has the means to convince blue chip recruits from around the country to come out to the farm and play high level football in front of an enthusiastic fanbase. They can’t do it on the level of a Ohio State or Georgia, at least not without a level of winning that would build serious credibility with the bluest of blue chips.
Tom Osborne’s classes didn’t exist within the era of service rankings, but some of the people of the times who tried to build rankings tended to have them in the 10th-30th range nationally. It might have been generous, because their roster was routinely stocked up with Nebraskan kids.
This was where Osborne stood apart from his predecessors. The reason Nebraska competed at an elite level nationally despite being pretty far removed from big population centers and an easy recruiting base was because he could build elite offenses with his I-option system and some scrappy locals.
Without the ability to dominate the point of attack with well orchestrated blocking schemes, Nebraska under Scott Frost has instead had to rely on something me and my colleagues at Inside Texas once dubbed “hero-ball.”
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