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Bill Moos Book

HuskerInTexas said:
Maybe I'm in the minority on this but I don't really consider the way he was dressed/appearing to be this massive indictment on him. The meeting was supposed to be kept in secret, his team was absolutely rolling week in and week out so he was making a dozen appearances on TV a week, and that was sort of just how he went about his day to day during that stretch. It may have been one in a long list of things that came out of that meeting but if his appearance was what Moos was using to determine whether or not Frost would be successful, then I'd say that's just hindsight BS.
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Agreed.
Who knows how much time Frost was spending on travel considering UCF's success, multiple interviews, recruiting and flying all over the country.
 
ReasonablyRed said:
But, would it have changed the "mood" of the response, if Moos would have come clean about his concerns of Frost's maturity.
I lived in Florida for 29 years, including the Frost tenure.
He was "squeaky clean" at UCF.
If Moos, in his position of authority, stated that he was looking for more maturity in a coaching candidate, it may have changed the landscape of opinion.
I truly get why he was hired but, I'd rather go down in flames then sell out integrity for $$$$ and opinion.
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Personally, I do not think Moos could have changed the tenor of the fanbase by making those claims.. We were ravenous for success, and, the hometown hero became available. If Moos moved away from Frost due to " maturity issues," I believe it would have been viewed as an epic failure on his part. It's not like everyone was even convinced Moos was the right guy for the job in the first place.

With that said, I agree with your last statement but Moos was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He HAD to hire him.
 
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Getting into this thread pretty late, but I really could care less what Bill Moos has to say. Nothing he says will help us going forward. Bottom line is that most of our big sports programs are performing well. Football is the one area that really needs to get its act together.
 
Californication said:
1st, it wasn't the vast majority of fans decision. 2nd, they didn't sit on the interview. It was his freaking job to hire the right coach, and he chicken crapped out. Complete coward.

I can't understand why anyone would publish this and I can't describe how much I now despise Moos.
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The choice to hire Frost was made by his bosses.
 
Hville said:
I’m sorry but I disagree that any amount of injecting Moos into the program would have diverted this disaster. I was really high on SF the first two years. In spite of, and I’ll repeat in spite of a good friend of mine who was all big 8 tight end and nfler telling me SF was in over his head. This guy was still close to the program as he had two sons play there also. He had a chance to visit with SF 3 times prior to the first game and that was his conclusion. I didn’t want to believe it. Took me 2 1/2 years. I spent the next 4 years bitching because being local here in Lincoln it was easier to get first hand stories and in one case firsthand sight of him drunk on the golf course.

Now I’m not against drinking or even getting drunk but not when you are in that type of position and under performing. And then hearing his director of operations is holding off site practices during Covid and ending practices with coolers of Busch Light for everyone including the underage guys was the final straw for me.

Could Moos have stopped some of that? Possibly. But it was more reflective of the entirety of SF and Moos couldn’t have prevented that.
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Agree with you. I refused to believe the stories that surfaced after Scott left until my brother- in- law who is a big booster at UCF told me he could show me the bar on campus and the seat where he always sat. Looks like the behavior was already beginning here.
 
wcbsas said:
Without reading the book and getting more inside info … the vast majority of fans would have been extremely disappointed if Florida or Tennessee would have secured SF.

Now having said that I believe Moos’s failure was (1) Allowing SF to bring in all of his UCFs assistants and (2) Not managing SF once on board.
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And if Nebraska hadn't hired Frost, Tennessee would have done everything they could to hire him away. That was the disaster hiring cycle for Tennessee where they had Schiano inked to a deal and the fans mutinied and both parties backed out of it. They would have given Frost anything and everything to secure him before settling for Jeremy Pruitt.

Moos job wasn't to decide who to hire, it was to convince Frost to come to Nebraska over the other open jobs. Anyone else that got hired would have been a backup plan to hiring Frost.
 
Californication said:
1st, it wasn't the vast majority of fans decision. 2nd, they didn't sit on the interview. It was his freaking job to hire the right coach, and he chicken crapped out. Complete coward.

I can't understand why anyone would publish this and I can't describe how much I now despise Moos.
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It's the revisionist, "Don't blame me" story. If Frost had been successful, he wouldn't have written a story about him thinking he was too immature, it would have been claiming all the glory.
 
Hville said:
Except, when they offered him the job they told him hiring frost was a high priority job. He interviewed Chip Kelly and went to some high level donars and regents and was pretty much shot down. He knew the expectations of his contract was based on hiring Frost. He fulfilled that expectation in spite of his feelings. Have any of you had to meet work or contract expectations you didn’t agree with?
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You're right, at the end of the day you do what you are paid to do, not always what you think is the best decision. I've gone along with plenty of bad ideas in my career, obviously after speaking my peace.

That said, it's easy to come out after it all went wrong and deflect the blame.
 
SWVAHusker said:
I disagree that there was much Nebraska could have done to essentially "get out" of hiring Frost.

Frost was the NC winning former QB, apparently still friends with Osborne, and had just completed an undefeated season at UCF. Husker fans had wanted Frost back in Lincoln since Bo Pelini talked to him about leaving Oregon to be the Husker OC. You're right that the internal pressure on Moos would have ended, but he'd have needed a security detail to get to back and forth to work every day. Never mind ever appearing at any games, Moos would have gotten the loudest boos of anybody in Husker athletics history. Moos wasn't the golden boy and home town hero, Frost was, and very few people knew about Frost's "issues." There's no way Moos and UNL leadership win that PR mess by being nice and taking the high road.

The only way Nebraska gets out of the PR disaster of not hiring Frost is to "play dirty" and leak negative, but factual, stuff about Frost. (Not to mention hire somebody who won, and hope Frost fell on his face at Florida or back at UCF.)

Even at that point I don't know if it would have worked, absent the Huskers winning and Frost failing elsewhere, that is. Look at what happened after Frost finally got fired. There was a flood of negative stories about his time as HC. Everybody in the local media and around the program knew about those things when they happened, yet nobody wanted to report them. IMO, that's at least in part because their readers/viewers wouldn't have believed them, because until the end many fans didn't want to believe anything bad about Scott Frost.

EDIT: If Frost wasn't the hire, who do they go get? IMO, whoever they hired would have started with at least "1 strike" against him from the fan base. I don't think you get a Chip Kelly or another top coach to take the job in the midst of the PR fallout. I think it would have been Bill Callahan all over again, just for different reasons.
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Also worth noting that there was quite a bit of grumbling about Frost not getting a look after Pelini got canned. He didn't have head coaching experience at that point, which helped be a reason to bypass him. With where our program was at the end of 2017, plus the success he had that year, it would have been tough to hire someone else unless they were a clear slam dunk name. I seriously question if any great coach would have said yes to a hire at that point, including Chip Kelly.
 
Captkenny said:
It would have been extraordinarily “easy” to not hire Frost. Just say no and hire someone else.

But I don’t think that was the issue in Moos’s mind. It was the firestorm that he understood would have ensued from the vast majority of people who wanted SF to be the next head coach at Nebraska. Moos was no dummy. He knew that failing to hire SF would be seen as him bungling the hiring. We can pretend in 2026 that fans were ambivalent regarding the issue. But that would be a rewrite of history.

Moos certainly could have gone against the mood of the state. But why would he at a time when SF just took UCF to an undefeated season? I suppose, to your point, Moos could have given SF terms that SF wouldn’t accept and then try to claim he was being unreasonable and the program would not be held hostage. But that would have been a risky game as well for someone who was essentially an outsider.
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The easy thing would have been to make it easy for Frost to say no. Even at the time, it sounded like Frost didn't really want to come to Nebraska, but after enough arm twisting he finally gave in. They definitely could have left no at no, but they would have still had to pull out someone good.

I don't think anyone could have expected Frost would turn out as poorly as he did. And, as AD it is a lot easier to hire the person everyone thinks you should hire and it end up being a miss, then to hire someone you think is better and end up being wrong about it. Say he hired a different coach and Frost kept winning at UCF, that other coach would constantly be held up to "what could have been".
 
Cornhuskers7 said:
And if Nebraska hadn't hired Frost, Tennessee would have done everything they could to hire him away. That was the disaster hiring cycle for Tennessee where they had Schiano inked to a deal and the fans mutinied and both parties backed out of it. They would have given Frost anything and everything to secure him before settling for Jeremy Pruitt.

Moos job wasn't to decide who to hire, it was to convince Frost to come to Nebraska over the other open jobs. Anyone else that got hired would have been a backup plan to hiring Frost.
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Not disagreeing at all with your sentiments.

I know, I as a fan, would have been disappointed if SF went elsewhere but that is looking at the situation from a distance and up close Moos knew more and knew better.

Additionally I fault Moos, not for hiring SF, but for not monitoring and managing him better AFTER he hired him.
 
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