This is a superbly insightful, and conclusively damning, article on Scott Frost at Nebraska.
The worst thing about the current state of Nebraska football in 2021 is the simplicity of what it takes to win a game against the Huskers. If you’re an opposing coach, you just wait.
You just wait for Nebraska to be Nebraska, and if you root for the Big Red that’s probably the most maddening part of it all.
If you coach the Big Red, it must be a million times worse because there can’t be anything more insulting than that.
It’s the death blow...
Just wait. If the opposing team does basic football things, that’s often enough. Purdue did and it won 28-23, putting Nebraska’s season on life support.
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As a touchdown-favorite who started on defense and got a stop, Nebraska’s win probability when it got the ball for the first time Saturday was 69%. When it scored a touchdown on the opening drive, it climbed to 77%.
It’s easy to make fun of win probability because it only ever comes up when it’s off, but these models are based on real results from real games. Thousands of them. Just wait.
When Adrian Martinez threw an interception, returned for a touchdown by Purdue’s Jalen Graham, that win probability dropped from 85.4% to 66.3%.
Nebraska answered quickly. OK, feeling good. Back up to nearly 80% after Martinez’s touchdown run to make it 14-7.
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A dominant drive to start the second half ...was...a chance to seize the game offered by the football gods. Instead, the Huskers’ three-and-out to start the third quarter drops their win probability by 3.2%.
Martinez’s second interception, on an improv shovel pass attempt, drops it 7% but it’s still 66.7% at that point. Two-thirds of the time, a nameless, faceless college football team wins that game.
...it’s not until Purdue takes a 21-17 lead that it is finally the favorite to win...
If you’re talking about predicting the future, all that matters is what’s replicable. The problem for Scott Frost and Nebraska is that losing, despite doing things that would most often result in a win, is the only replicable part so far. ...
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...As someone prone to probabilistic thinking, there’s a non-zero chance that this game was simply an individual event and not a further indictment of Nebraska’s current state, and I’ll always carve out room for that non-zero chance.
But his one doesn’t feel that way to me. ...Up to this point—given that Nebraska football has generally looked like a program on the wrong side of randomness—I was happy to do so.
...if Nebraska can’t [win] this sort of game as a favorite, at home, with an extra week to prepare, I finally have to ask: What are we waiting for?
If you took out the identifiers and just read this article and knew this generic team's record over the 3+ years of this generic coach's tenure at this generic school you would guess that this is a guy who has never been a head coach before, like a Gerry Faust, for this is coaching failure at bedrock level. But Frost was a head coach previously. He did not think himself *quite* ready for the Nebraska job, it is true, thought he needed to coach a couple of more years, but my God, we and Athletic Directors from coast to coast are forgiven for concluding to the contrary on the evidence. Frost only spent two years as head man at Central Florida. In his first year his team finished 6-7. Oh, that's a sign of a comer. But wait. The year before Frost took over UCF was 0-12. It really was a sign he was a comer. And the next year, goodness gracious, the guy led his team to an undefeated 13-0 season! The evidence was convincing that here was a prodigy. And where do prodigal sons go but home. And yet, 4-8, 5-7, 3-5, now four years, 3-6, on there is no improvement and he has the look, with the record to match, of a man who has never been a head coach before, who cannot coach, who is clearly in over his head and going under.
