If history isn’t on Scott Frost’s side at Nebraska, is the math? Should schools embrace playing 2 QBs?: Dear Andy
If Thanos snapped his fingers in 2014, how many non-Alabama SEC teams would have national championships?
theathletic.com
Dear Andy,
Nebraska bucked the trend and brought Scott Frost back despite a 15-29 record. Athletic director Trev Alberts has said Frost needs to meet unspecified metrics to keep his job after this year. What do you think those metrics are? Can Frost turn things around? History is not on his side. — Ed
Math might be on Frost’s side, though. A team that scores 239 points in conference play and allows 239 points in conference play should not go 1-8 in conference play. A team that plays nine games with a one-score margin of victory/defeat should not go 3-9. Bottom line: Nebraska wasn’t as bad as its record last season — in a very extreme way — and that, plus Frost’s willingness to bet on himself, probably bought him another year.
Jason DeLoach at CFB Numbers did an amazing job earlier this month breaking down all the ways Nebraska’s 2021 season was a statistical outlier, but the most eye-popping stat came from simulating Nebraska’s season 5,000 times using the stats from last season.
How many times out of 5,000 did simulated 2021 Nebraska win only three games? Two.
The vast majority of the simulations had Nebraska winning seven or eight games. Add up the numbers for Nebraska’s postgame win probability and the most likely outcome is 7.6 wins. Play that season again, and it’s far more likely that the Cornhuskers win 10 games than three.
So why did Nebraska only win three? Usually because of some sort of crippling, game-altering mistake. Nebraska probably beats Illinois if not for a sack-strip-scoop-score of quarterback Adrian Martinez late in the first half. The Cornhuskers lost to Michigan State in large part because a mix-up on the direction of a fourth-quarter punt allowed Jayden Reed to return the kick 62 yards to set up a touchdown that forced overtime. Against Iowa, a blocked punt returned for a touchdown by the Hawkeyes early in the fourth quarter caused Frost to abandon an offensive game plan that had been working and resulted in a 28-21 loss.
We could go through every game, but Nebraska fans have had enough pain for now. The point is that some minor correction could result in a major difference in record. Frost has to make those corrections. He has revamped his staff. Martinez, who started for four seasons for Nebraska, is now a super senior at Kansas State. Texas transfer Casey Thompson and Florida State transfer Chubba Purdy have come to Lincoln to try to win the quarterback job, and they’ll compete this spring with Logan Smothers and Heinrich Haarberg.
Now let’s combine the analytical math with the financial math. Frost was willing to accept less money and substantially reduce his buyout should he fail, which probably made him a safer bet for Nebraska than paying $20 million to fire Frost after last season and then trying to land the right coach on the open market.
Frost agreed to have his salary reduced by $1 million a year, giving him a $4 million base salary that can go back up to his original number if he meets certain benchmarks. More important, he agreed to cut his buyout figure in half. Frost’s original deal called for a $15 million buyout if he was fired following the 2022 season. His new deal calls for a $7.5 million buyout if he’s fired after Oct. 1.
That October date helps provide part of the answer to Ed’s question. Alberts may not have specified what Frost has to do to keep his job, but the contract gives us a decent idea that Frost had better do it fast. Oct. 1 is the date of Nebraska’s sixth game (against Indiana in Lincoln). Frost will have had half a season at that point to show progress, and if the Cornhuskers have indeed progressed, it should be evident by then. If this team truly was on the cusp of vast improvement, it should be at least 4-2 and probably 5-1 after those first six games. The toughest matchup is Oklahoma in Lincoln on Sept. 17. The wild card is the Week Zero opener against Northwestern in Dublin. The other games? All winnable.
That doesn’t mean Frost is out of the woods if the Cornhuskers roll into their seventh game with a 5-1 record. If they fall apart during a second half that includes a brutal closing stretch of at Michigan-Wisconsin-at Iowa, then the administration still has the option to fire Frost for $7.5 million. But the way the schedule sets up, if Nebraska truly is better, it should be obvious and Frost should be safe. The inverse is true as well.
The Nebraska situation is one of the most fascinating in college football this season. Unlike Michigan cutting Jim Harbaugh’s pay between a horrific 2020 and an excellent 2021 because Harbaugh had no leverage and Michigan wasn’t sure it had a better option, Nebraska has some empirical evidence that the program was actually making progress even though the record didn’t reflect it. But was coaching creating improvement that just needed more time to take, or was coaching causing the problems that made a team that should have won seven or eight only win three? We should have the answer in 2022.
