Why Scott Frost's Nebraska rebuild might take longer than expected

It almost feels too perfect to be true: 22 years after Scott Frost quarterbacked Nebraska to its last national championship -- half of Frost’s lifetime ago -- the Cornhuskers, long buried amid the chaff in the Big Ten West, are poised for a renaissance. But I’m guessing you may have heard this already, because this is the consensus of everyone whose job it is to opine on college football. 

College football preview completist Phil Steele has Nebraska winning the Big Ten West over Iowa and Wisconsin. Nebraska’s electric sophomore quarterback, Adrian Martinez, is one of the favorites in preseason Heisman Trophy wagering, even if, as FiveThirtyEight recently noted, preseason Heisman odds are pretty much a hype-based crapshoot. 

After starting last season 0-6, the Huskers won four of their last six games, upping their points per game from 23.3 to 36.6 in the process. This has led some to note that Frost went 6-7 in his first season as head coach at Central Florida before going 13-0 in his second season, which was a completely different situation in a completely different conference, but whatever, man. 

Frost’s even drawing attention for his still-chiseled physique, which was not something that was ever said about Frost’s successor, Mike Riley. The moribund decade of Nebraska football, marked by Bo Pelini’s contentious relationship with his own fan base and Riley’s genial ineptitude, has been subsumed by a feeling of freshness. 

Frost is a prodigal son, a direct link to the glory years of the 1990s under Tom Osborne. Frost must make this work. 

But here’s a question for you before you lay down your lunch money on the Huskers: What if the problems in Nebraska aren’t as easily solvable as many seem to think? Here’s one of the most remarkable stats I’ve read recently, courtesy of Dirk Chatelain’s excellent 2018 deep-dive on Nebraska’s recruiting woes: In 1997, the year Frost led the Huskers to the national title as a dual-threat quarterback, there were 110 players from Nebraska on the Huskers’ roster. (Tennessee had 97 from in-state that year.)

This was how Osborne built his dynasty. Find a few dynamic talents from out of state and supplement them with players from virtually every small town in a sparsely populated state. Every so often, a homegrown talent like Frost would bust out and become a star; the rest of those players provided the backbone and physicality that toughened up the Huskers on both sides of the line.  The formula worked for decades, but then small-town football -- in Nebraska and other states like it -- became an increasingly endangered species.

By 2017, according to Chatelain’s analysis, the Huskers were down to 47 in-state players, only five of whom were regular starters. The number of scholarship players from in-state has declined from 29 percent in the 1980s and 1990s to 11 percent today. That decline has occurred in small pockets of the state where eight-man football has long been prevalent, and in cities like Omaha, where the Huskers used to be able to stockpile talent.

None of this means that Frost can’t build Nebraska into a national power again. It just means he’ll like have to do it a bit differently, to find a way to thread the needle by bringing in national recruits and by pleasing the in-state coaches and boosters that the program depends on for support.

Frost's 2019 recruiting class was considered a top-20 haul by most experts. It included five in-state players -- not exactly Osborne-esque numbers, but he’s also loaded his roster with in-state walk-ons. Still, in the glory days of Osborne, Nebraska used that in-state talent to overwhelm opponents with depth. 

Even with those walk-ons, Frost can’t be sure if he’ll have the luxury of depth yet, and he may not have that luxury for several more seasons. And so perhaps the sleeper hype is premature. It feels kind of unfathomable that Frost won’t get there eventually, but he must build Nebraska in a way that both pays homage to the past and acknowledges the new demographic realities. And that may take a little longer than the hive mind seems to think.