Who can help Frost build upon his fire and passion? We need to find that person. I thought Coach Osborne would be a great resource for Frost when times got tough either Frost would reach out to Coach Osborne or Osborne would reach out to Frost and of course Frost would listen. Even Alberts himself could be a guy that maybe could be a resource to help Frost learn how to build upon his fire and passion, given that he too was a former Husker and is Frost's boss. If Frost doesn't listen to these guys for assistance, who in the hell would he listen to?
I don't think Frost is his true self since returning to Nebraska to take this job. Looking back now, I just don't think he was ready for this type of project. He was loose and having fun at UCF, I remember after UCF beat USF and UCF just won their conference the reporter post-game asked him about the Nebraska job and you could see the pain in Frost's face and hear it in his reply. The guy was torn. I think he loved UCF, I think he knew deep down it was better for him to stay at UCF to build himself more and prepare him more for a job like this. But at the same time I think he loved Nebraska and knew just how badly we needed him at the time and with a bit of arrogance, as any D1 coach should have, he thought he could turn it around but maybe deep down he knew it was a taunting task and in order to mask that daunting task he seemed to have changed his ways of how he ran things in UCF. He doesn't seem nearly as creative, loose and fun at Nebraska as he did at UCF. When he does try to get creative, loose and fun things they are situations and plays like the onside kick and they just backfire and come across was dumb.
Only now by looking back and knowing what we know now, I think ultimately we just took Frost a little too early. He needed more time to grow at UCF and learn some things. Mainly let him make mistakes there and let him learn from those mistakes. But at the same time we knew this when we hired him, that there would be growing pains because he was an inexperienced young head coach at a top program. We were willing to dump a veteran experienced coach who wasn't winning here for a younger homegrown Cornhusker and figured if we are going to go through dark times, let's go through those times with one of our own. These are those times, we are living it. The problem we find ourselves in now is, the same exact mistakes we saw yesterday are the same exact mistakes and outcomes we saw in year 1, 2, 3, and 4 and there hasn't been any growth or improvement to make us think that things change in year 5 or beyond.
I think on paper everything about this hire seemed like a grand slam and it seemed like the perfect timing. But I think now, going on 5 year later we all are seeing that the timing was actually not right at all.