• You do not need to register if you are not going to pay the yearly fee to post. If you register please click here or log in go to "settings" then "my account" then "User Upgrades" and you can renew.

HuskerMax readers can save 50% on  Omaha Steaks .

The roster flip

ShortSideOption said:
I don't think that's true at all, and certainly not at the skill positions. Again, Minnesota played 20 true freshmen last year. They are 9-0 currently. If our S&C needs 3 seasons to take hold, we are in massive trouble. I think the bigger issue at play is 2017 UCF had "zero injuries" (I still don't believe that but i'll pass it off as truth for right now) and 2019 Nebraska has had close to 50% of their 2018 and 2019 classes either have serious injuries or leave. It's only 2 seasons in, so my alarm isn't going off yet, but that has to be corrected for 2020. You can't have four star Nick Henrich come in and need to bolster your depth at ILB and blow out his shoulder. You can't have 4 star Noa Pola-Gates blow out his knee when we are already down a safety or two. You can't have 4 star Deontai Williams blow out his shoulder first game. You can't have Tate Wildeman, Casey Rogers, Chris Hickman, and others get lengthy injuries like that. IMO that's why it's taking longer for us to get guys ready, not because of the conference we are in. Kids get in here and basically lose a 1/2 year of development.

I do agree that many times a four or five star recruit is someone that matured quicker and is a college player playing against high school kids. I get that. A lot of those Florida kids were pretty raw.
Click to expand...

Good points.

I do wonder if Frost would have taken a different approach to playing his youngsters had he known he'd be starring down the barrel of another season without a bowl game. JMPO, but I don't think he thought he had a team capable of winning the Big Ten, but he probably thought 7-8 wins was certainly on the docket.

Had he seen 4-8, 5-7 coming, would he have played guys like Bryce Benhart, Ty Robinson, NPG, Rahmir Johnson, Darien Chase, Ethan Piper, Garrett Nelson, Quinton Newsome, Myles Farmer, Demariyon Houston and Jamie Nance more? Would he have just accepted he'd take some lumps and put them all either on special teams, the starting lineup or at least the two deep? I mean, 5-7 is 5-7. At least get your foundation class experience.

I don't think anyone would argue that redshirting is a bad strategy. It's an ideal scenario for every recruit, I don't care who it is. Getting bigger, stronger, faster and more familiar with the system is never a negative approach. But I think he thought he'd be able to put this class in an incubator and still get to a bowl game with the guys he's basically rolling with now. With the likely outcome being back to back seasons without bowl practices, I'd love to know if he's suffering from hindsight.

Last season Fleck was coming off a 5-7 team in 2017, basically the same previous season Frost was coming into this year with Nebraska. I suspect Fleck figured he would struggle to get to bowl eligibility and took the approach I talked about above. He ended up exceeding expectations and made a bowl on top of it.
 

N2FL said:
Good points.

I do wonder if Frost would have taken a different approach to playing his youngsters had he known he'd be starring down the barrel of another season without a bowl game. JMPO, but I don't think he thought he had a team capable of winning the Big Ten, but he probably thought 7-8 wins was certainly on the docket.
Click to expand...

I am pretty sure that is how he felt things were going to go. They could be sitting 7-2 right now if a few things go a bit differently. They really should have at least 1 more win. That Purdue game was completely blown.
 
Last edited:



CrabHusker said:
I agree we need to win football games, but I would think it would be a fairly easy sell to try to get a kid bought in on the idea that they could be part of making a new history for Nebraska. You'd think it could be a fairly easy sell job.
Click to expand...
I'd think it would be much easier to convince a kid that he could come in and be the difference between a team that has the talent to consistently win 9-10 games and a team that has the talent to win 11-12 games.
 
Sonny said:
I'd think it would be much easier to convince a kid that he could come in and be the difference between a team that has the talent to consistently win 9-10 games and a team that has the talent to win 11-12 games.
Click to expand...

True statement.

Kids are this level are usually big time competitors, but at some point it can be overwhelming to think a team needs a bus load of five stars to go to a howl.
 
I finally had a chance to read through the entire thread and it’s a good one. I want to jump in with the raw numbers:

1) 52 scholarship signees were recruited by Frost. Not all of them made it campus (e.g. Canty, Watt).

2) There are 4 transfers/grad transfers: Daniels (Oklahoma St), Vainuku (Utah), Vedral (UCF) and Vokolek (Rutgers).

3) 30 scholarship players have left the team since Frost took over.

4) Included in the 30: Hunt, LeGrone, and Washington.

5) 14 scholarship players remain from the 2018 recruiting class of 25 signees.

6) Of those 14 players from the 2018 class, 7 have been injured since being listed on the roster.

7) The entire recruiting class of 2019 signees (27) remains intact (thus far).

8) 7 players from the 2019 class have been injured since being listed on the roster.

9) 81 +/- players remain on scholarship.

10) 47 of the 81 scholarship players are directly attributed to Frost (34 to Riley).

11) The majority of “Frost” players are walk-ons… by a large margin.

12) Of the 34 scholarship players directly attributed to Riley, 22 are starters or have/had significant playing time.

13) Of those 22 players there are 2 starters at DL, 4 starters at OL; 3 starters at LB, 4 starters at DB (Domann included here) and then throw in your best WR (Spielman) and TE (Stoll).

14) Of the 30 players that left the team 17 of them were: 5 WRs, 4 TEs and 8 LBs.

If memory serves me correctly, Frost lost 11 or 13 scholarship players (total) when he was at UCF.
 
Last edited:
One Hit Wonder said:
I finally had a chance to read through the entire thread and it’s a good one. I want to jump in with the raw numbers:

1) 52 scholarship signees were recruited by Frost. Not all of them made it campus (e.g. Canty, Watt).

2) There are 4 transfers/grad transfers: Daniels (Oklahoma St), Vainuku (Utah), Vedral (UCF) and Vokolek (Rutgers).

3) 30 scholarship players have left the team since Frost took over.

4) Included in the 30: Hunt, LeGrone, and Washington.

5) 14 scholarship players remain from the 2018 recruiting class of 25 signees.

6) Of those 14 players from the 2018 class, 7 have been injured since being listed on the roster.

7) The entire recruiting class of 2019 signees (27) remains intact (thus far).

8) 7 players from the 2019 class have been injured since being listed on the roster.

9) 81 +/- players remain on scholarship.

10) 47 of the 81 scholarship players are directly attributed to Frost (34 to Riley).

11) The majority of “Frost” players are walk-ons… by a large margin.

12) Of the 34 scholarship players directly attributed to Riley, 22 are starters or have/had significant playing time.

13) Of those 22 players there are 2 starters at DL, 4 starters at OL; 3 starters at LB, 4 starters at DB (Domann included here) and then throw in your best WR (Spielman) and TE (Stoll).

14) Of the 30 players that left the team 17 of them were: 5 WRs, 4 TEs and 8 LBs.

If memory serves me correctly, Frost lost 11 or 13 scholarship players (total) when he was at UCF.
Click to expand...

Wow.

Designed or not, that’s a ton of turnover.
 




Sonny said:
I'd think it would be much easier to convince a kid that he could come in and be the difference between a team that has the talent to consistently win 9-10 games and a team that has the talent to win 11-12 games.
Click to expand...

But the 3-4 losssesssssssssss.....

32669
 



ShortSideOption said:
Had a great conversation this weekend with some people that have some great tradition within the Nebraska football family. We started talking about things, and the "roster flip" that gets brought up so much here was brought up. I will leave some of what was said to privacy, but i'm curious the thoughts here now that over 70% of the roster is Frost guys.

For me, I think we flipped the heck out of the roster, and we are so young that a lot of these guys are learning how to be college student-athletes. I do think that's part of our issues, and guys like Cam Jurgens, Ethan Piper, Garrett Nelson, Nick Henrich, they will all be studs for us eventually. But you look around the country and see other schools not have the same issues. In fact, one of the big reasons we were so excited about Coach Frost was that he took an 0-12 team to an 13-0 team, ending the season beating Auburn. So much has to go right for you that you can't just luck into things like that, you have to be an outstanding coach. But it got me thinking when we were hashing this out this weekend, we have heard things like "UCF actually had more talent than us when they got there" or other things like that. It had me look into something....

I took a look at UCF 2016 and 2017 recruiting classes, and calculated how many starts those recruiting classes accounted for in the 2017 13-0 run:
2016 class:
Snelson - 10 starts
Johnson - 13 starts
Moore - 7 starts
Killins - 12 starts
Hill - 13 starts
2017 class:
Luyanda - 1 start
Davis - 13 starts
Anderson - 1 start
Hughes - 12 starts
Total 2017 starts from Frost recruiting classes - 82

It got me thinking, if UCF truly had more talent than what Frost saw when he was here, we had to be close to the 100s for starts from his 2018 and 2019 class, right?
2018 class:
Taylor-Britt - 7 starts
DWilliams - 1 start
Jurgens - 9 starts
2019 class:
Robinson - 9 starts
Total 2019 starts from Frost recruiting classes - 21

Disclaimer - I left Milton and Martinez out because Frost got his QB first year at both places, didn't need that skewing things one way or the other. Secondly, I realize i'm doing this experiment with 3 games left, so guys like Robinson, Jurgens, and Taylor-Britt probably gonna bring another 9 starts to things. I also know DWilliams would have been starting every game if not for getting hurt (but I didn't take that into account for UCF guys either).

So they had over 3 times the amount of starts, but let's just call it double since our season isn't over and someone could end up starting for us. Why is that? If UCF had more talent, why could more recruits come in and play right away for Frost? Are we not recruiting as well as they were at UCF? This list also doesn't include guys like Gabriel Davis who in his true freshman campaign in 2017 had 27 catches for 391 yards and 4 touchdowns.

I just found this fascinating because there's a lot of narratives out there, and they are all starting to overlap and cancel each other out. If UCF was that much better than Nebraska, why could he get twice as many starts out of his first recruiting classes? What did he say down there that resonated and got the team going that isn't working here?

Anyways, just found these stats interesting.
Click to expand...
***, always appreciate you providing details to support your topics for discussion and not just ranting, bitching, complaining or whatever so many seem to like to do on the boards.
 
One Hit Wonder said:
I finally had a chance to read through the entire thread and it’s a good one. I want to jump in with the raw numbers:

1) 52 scholarship signees were recruited by Frost. Not all of them made it campus (e.g. Canty, Watt).

2) There are 4 transfers/grad transfers: Daniels (Oklahoma St), Vainuku (Utah), Vedral (UCF) and Vokolek (Rutgers).

3) 30 scholarship players have left the team since Frost took over.

4) Included in the 30: Hunt, LeGrone, and Washington.

5) 14 scholarship players remain from the 2018 recruiting class of 25 signees.

6) Of those 14 players from the 2018 class, 7 have been injured since being listed on the roster.

7) The entire recruiting class of 2019 signees (27) remains intact (thus far).

8) 7 players from the 2019 class have been injured since being listed on the roster.

9) 81 +/- players remain on scholarship.

10) 47 of the 81 scholarship players are directly attributed to Frost (34 to Riley).

11) The majority of “Frost” players are walk-ons… by a large margin.

12) Of the 34 scholarship players directly attributed to Riley, 22 are starters or have/had significant playing time.

13) Of those 22 players there are 2 starters at DL, 4 starters at OL; 3 starters at LB, 4 starters at DB (Domann included here) and then throw in your best WR (Spielman) and TE (Stoll).

14) Of the 30 players that left the team 17 of them were: 5 WRs, 4 TEs and 8 LBs.

If memory serves me correctly, Frost lost 11 or 13 scholarship players (total) when he was at UCF.
Click to expand...
This is opinion based and not factual. I basically am coming up with this knowing some of the thoughts of some kids. Again, some kids, not all.

I think the staff came in swinging their logs. "Look what we did at UCF, you're either in or you're out." Then they told the players "you aren't working close to hard enough" and other things that rubbed guys the wrong way. I think all the things they were saying were true, but it wasn't received well. In turn, it created massive turnover that wasn't expected, and we are now extremely young despite starting 17 upperclassmen.

It's tough to get on board with the "we are young" train when you have 17/22 upperclassmen starting. It would be easier to be 4-5 right now if Ethan Piper, Bryce Benhart, Nick Henrich, Jamie Nance, Darien Chase, and others were starting and taking their lumps. But I also get it from Frost's perspective that he already lost a ton of guys. What happens if you just don't start Boe Wilson, Matt Farniok, Mo Barry, or other upperclassmen. There's no way you can get enough scholarship guys on campus.
 

You must log in or register to reply here.

GET TICKETS


Get 50% off on Omaha Steaks

Back
Top