2022 September Blog by Chuck and Nancy Peek, stadium seat-mates
I had another blog planned for September, but minor news such as the death of England’s longest-reigning monarch, an upcoming election in the USA, war in Ukraine and the peril of its nuclear power plant, and severe drought and fires stateside all were bumped by the truly important news of the firing of the Cornhusker football head coach, Scott Frost.
We are known for nothing if not our sense of priorities!
The football boosters, mostly wealthier folks in Lincoln and Omaha and the Channel 13 Sinclair News sports caster who came to Kearney’s Blue and Gold game in Husker red, played a huge role in this. Clearly the University and its Athletic Director Trev Albert were under a lot of pressure and from pretty much the same people whose wisdom just six years ago was to hire Scott Frost in the first place.
The ruling wisdom then was that the hero of the 1997 National Champion Cornhuskers, quarterback Scott Frost, could revive our “storied” football program. It didn’t hurt that Scott was then on the way to winning a National Championship as head coach at Central Florida.
And it apparently didn’t matter that Scott was bringing with him most of his Central Florida coaching staff, or that, before he had become Nebraska’s QB, he had first left the state he loves so much to play for Stanford. When he transferred back to Nebraska, his welcome was anything but cordial. All of which would suggest it was not clear just whose “storied” program we were intent on reviving.
The prevailing wisdom now is how important it is to win games. We haven’t won very many these last six years…only half as many as we’ve lost. And as a lead in the once intelligently written Lincoln Journal put it: we “has bore” with defeat too long! (Full disclosure, we are friends with one of its former and most distinguished managing editors and I served on a board with one of its best-known publishers, both of whom must have shuddered more than did I when another friend emailed me bemoaning the illiteracy of the lead in—an illiteracy that I doubted the booster club even noticed.)
But even that—the idea of winning, not the wincing at sloppy writing—is an oversimplification. The same booster-driven administration that now wants back in the win column had fired Frank Solich in a season with 10 wins—Solich also a part of the “storied” past—and Bo Pelini in a season with 9 wins. Well, the feeling of the fans is mercurial, is it not! As variable as Pelini’s moods. All the more reason to ask if that should guide University policy?
While NU cast blame for our failure on Frost—where surely some of the blame has to lie—they exposed themselves to some blame themselves, first for the most mismanaged part of their portfolio for the last several years under more than one system president and campus chancellor, and second for the sorry sight of Trev Albert making a mish-mash of trying to make the decision to fire Frost seem legitimate and inevitable.
And in all the hoopla over the losing seasons and the firing, no one noted some real plus and minus points in the Frost record.
On the plus side, we’ve seen some of the best football games of the last 50 years from Frost’s teams. Admittedly, we lost most of them; but that didn’t detract from getting to see great football. We celebrated my birthday a year ago by going to the Nebraska-Michigan game. We get to go about every other year to a home game, usually on tickets given us by friends. Season tickets are now exorbitant. And that game was probably one of the two or three best games played in the USA during the whole of that season. And the game that culminated in Frost’s firing, September 10, 2022, Nebraska v. Georgia Southern…one of the great offensive battles in college football. Nebraska lost on a weekend when so did Notre Dame, so did Wisconsin, etc.
That’s part of the story because, while some of Frost’s immediate predecessors may have won more games, when we lost it wasn’t great football, it was an embarrassing massacre, and under Pellini made more embarrassing by his sideline temper tantrums.
And certainly, and pertinent to our prospects, one of the minus factors was the absence of any of our coaches of any of our sports in standing up against the attempt by a current candidate for Governor to block our university from teaching the facts about America’s racial history. Facts, as translated in one Facebook meme as: we should let the grandchildren of the people who blocked the door in Little Rock, Arkansas, know that their grandparents were the ones blocking the door.
All of our teams rely on recruiting from a larger, more racially diversified pool of players than we produce in Nebraska, and not one coach stood up in public to denounce the proposal or even to suggest it would hurt recruitment, including the head football coach. Where were any of them? Even the far-right Tommy Tuberville knew that if Ole Miss continued to fly the Confederate flag it would make it hard for him to recruit…and such is the power of head football coaches that the flag came down.
Way back when Solich was fired—and of course long before his own storied career at Ohio culminated in them naming the field for him—my good friend and sports raconteur Charlie Stubblefield noted that the best Nebraska could expect would be eight or nine wins a season because we were at a disadvantage in recruiting (and in climate). We’d almost always end in playing teams heavy with four and five star recruits with our three and four star recruits. We get some great players, but usually not enough to fill out the front 22 players. Once in a decade that might be enough to win a conference, maybe in two decades a national championship, but mostly it meant settling for top 25 rankings and missing out on top ten rankings. Charlie was astute.
If I had wanted to bet on sports, my guides would have been Charlie, Bob Jensen, and Bud Watson!
What Charlie didn’t add was that lots of folks from lots of parts of the country do not have a hankering to come to Nebraska. This is not just true in football, not just in sports; it is true in business and industry, in recruiting leaders for schools and churches, and in many cases even more true outside of metropolitan Omaha. And add to that that the typical recruit for a football team was born in 2004, or coming out of the transfer portal in 2002, or thereabouts and you might, if you didn’t think like a booster, figure they don’t care much about a “storied” program when the story took place before they were even born.
And they sure aren’t looking to play in a state where racism is a quality that might get you elected Governor and voices that object to that are seemingly few and far between. None of this is hypothetical…we’ve lost players because of it. It and the LGBTQ+ unfriendly stance of some of the staff.
Here, if you are vague about it, is the definition of booster mentality: including the pay out to Frost, Nebraska’s pay out bill to its growing ranks of fired coaches and AD’s will now exceed $50 million. Imagine how that sets with teachers in the university system, some of whom are teaching overloads without additional pay! And this is a state whose governing philosophy over the last three state administrations has been antagonistic to “government give-aways.”
And here is what it is like when a university is in thrall to that mentality. This past year, a survey was circulated about what should be done with Memorial Stadium. It took about a half an hour to complete, the greatest agreement generated by respondents being that in great areas of the stadium you are several ramps away from restrooms and concessions. But the kicker was the desire to find out how much “luxury” seating could be added depending on how much season-ticket holders were willing to pay above and beyond the price of their season tickets–$5,000 seemed a nice round number.
True enough, there is very little that compares with game day at Memorial Stadium. Visiting teams are all duly impressed. That hasn’t won us many football games recently. It hasn’t satisfied the fans simply to enjoy good football. The team in their black suits and red ties striding up the mall through one of the tailgate sections, into the stadium, and eventually out onto the field through the tunnel—a thrill, but one that doesn’t show up on the score board.
The only bright light in the whole mess is that Nebraska’s first African American Head Coach will be Mickey Joseph. Only and interim, at least for now, but it might at least signal some vague awareness that there is more to the university than it often appears there is. We’ll see how good he is as a head coach.
Good-bye Scott. I wish it could have been better for you, for us, for Nebraska, for sports. But both your hiring and your firing say something ugly about us, and neither your hiring or firing will bring about the change we most need.
Meanwhile, see you all again for this birthday—Nebraska v Indiana, Memorial Stadium, October 1. You will be able to spot us…we’ll be in red!
SCOTT FROST
Next Blogs—October, the one meant for September, addressing the approaching election, and the quarterly “In Memoriam” of those in and out of the news.
Kearney, Nebraska
September 2022
capeek 