To quote Al Pacino from his role as Coach Tony D’Amato in the film ‘Any Given Sunday’: “You’re a quarterback! You know what that means? It’s the top spot, kid. It’s the guy who takes the fall. It’s the guy everybody’s looking at first. The leader of a team who will support you when they understand you. Who will break their ribs and their noses and their necks for you, because they believe. ‘Cause you make them believe.’ That’s a quarterback.”
To me, this movie was not just about a football franchise, or a coach stuck in the old days, or even a team on the brink of self-destruction, but instead, it was about the evolution of the quarterback position. It was about the “out with the old” and “in with the new”. This movie shined a light on how the game of football was changing before our very eyes and we either needed to adapt to it or it will leave us behind.
At the University of Nebraska, we have seen this evolution taking place in Lincoln dating back to when Coach Tom Osborne stepped down and a new era began. Frank Solich was tasked to replace the coaching legend and take over the program by attempting to replicate what Osborne had done better than anyone else had done over the course of the past 20 years. However, after a handful of seasons, he couldn’t quite match that undeniable success and the University decided it was time to move on. When his time was cut short, we saw Bill Callahan step on to the scene with his West Coast Offense and bring a change that Nebraska had never quite seen before. As we know, that didn’t work out as planned and that era was gone just as quickly as it arrived. Next, we saw Bo Pelini try his luck as head man by bringing a balanced offensive attack along with a very stout defensive scheme. Although Pelini experienced some success in Lincoln, it was proving to be less and less sustainable as each year passed and he too was let go after a seven-year stint. The next Nebraska football head coaching chapter was extremely short-lived as Mike Riley was hired away from Oregon State and then fired after three years, two losing seasons, and very minimal success. Finally, we arrive at the current head coach, Scott Frost. Coach Frost brings arguably the most prolific and modern offensive attack that exists in college football today and typically, with that, comes extremely high levels of quarterback play.
As we already know, Scott Frost was a quarterback for Nebraska. A pretty damn good quarterback at that. He led the Cornhuskers to a National Championship in 1997 before heading to the NFL where he was able to make a very respectable career for himself as a defensive back for the New York Jets, Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. When his playing days finally ended in 2003, he wasn’t finished with football and football wasn’t finished with him.
In 2006, Scott Frost officially began his coaching career as a graduate assistant with the Kansas State Wildcats. From there, he didn’t waste any time climbing the coaching ranks by moving on from Kansas State to take over as linebackers coach at Northern Iowa. A year later, he was promoted to co-defensive coordinator where his defense led the Panthers to the top rushing defense and top scoring defense in the Missouri Valley Conference. Frost’s next stop would land him in Eugene, Oregon where he would serve as the wide receivers coach for the Oregon Ducks under Head Coach Chip Kelly. In 2013, Kelly would announce he was leaving for the NFL, which catapulted Frost up to the ranks of offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach for Oregon. Coach Frost served as Heisman Trophy Winner, Marcus Mariota’s, mentor and his offense ranked among the nation’s top six teams in scoring offense and total offense in his three years as the Ducks’ offensive coordinator.
Scott Frost had now inked his name as one of the top coaching candidates in all of college football and after an extremely successful stay in Oregon, he was on the move again. His next stop was in Orlando, Florida, where he would take his very first head coaching job at the University of Central Florida. To say that his time in Orlando went well would be the understatement of the century. He took the Knights from a winless season prior to his arrival to an undefeated season in just two years. After this dream season, he was back to where it all began.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, why does all of this even matter?
Leading up to him taking the Nebraska job, Scott Frost has experienced success on both sides of the ball from a player and coach’s perspective, and that matters. His parents were both athletes and they both coached Frost as he exploded onto the high school football scene by becoming a highly-touted recruit entering his time in college, and that matters. In addition, Scott Frost has played under or coached with some of the biggest names in football coaching history, and that really matters. What I’m getting at is that Scott Frost was being molded into the coach he is today before he even stepped foot onto a high school football field. Up to this point, he has been handed all of the tools to be a successful coach and lead a successful football program.
So what can we expect in the future?
Recent history will tell us that we can expect to see Nebraska football continue to evolve. It will also tell us that we can expect quarterback play to really start to take off in his third year as head coach for the Cornhuskers. Why? Because he has a proven track record of being a quarterback guru and has been able to maximize the output of almost every quarterback he has coached in the past. At Oregon, he was able to breed Marcus Mariota into the force he was for the Ducks. At UCF, he was able to teach McKenzie Milton how to be one of the most exciting players in all of college football. Now, at Nebraska, he has a very promising young quarterback in Adrian Martinez that has shown flashes of Scott Frost’s tutelage but still appears to be a bit raw at times. He has also started to build a quarterback room in Lincoln that Nebraska has never seen before. He has instilled an expectation of what the quarterback position is, what it should be, and most importantly, what it can be.
The quarterback position is the top spot, the guy who takes the fall, the guy that everyone looks at first. The quarterback is the leader of the team and the quarterback is the guy that is going to make us all believe.
Make us believe.
GBR
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