From Todays WSJ: Convince your in-state to say at home
Twenty-five years ago, the University of Nebraska was home to the most fearsome football team in America. Its coach, Tom Osborne, was famous for convincing blue-chip boys to walk on to his team rather than accept scholarships elsewhere. The roster was 180-strong, filled with players from small Nebraska towns who grew up paying tribute to Cornhusker football each autumn Saturday.
Those days are just a memory now. Nebraska entered the 2019 season after back-to-back 4-8 campaigns. The Cornhuskers are currently 3-1, but not a single player on this year’s roster is old enough to remember the 1997 season when their coach, Scott Frost, quarterbacked Nebraska to its most recent national championship.
Frost, in his second year as head coach, is attempting to bring Nebraska football back to relevance by building his roster the same way his former coach did: by focusing on in-state recruiting and resurrecting the university’s moribund walk-on tradition.
“Coach Osborne had figured out a formula that helped him be successful and we want to try to copy it as much as we can,” said Frost in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
And while Osborne’s recruiting tactics proved wildly successful two decades ago—it won him three national championships between 1994 and 1997—Frost is making a big bet that the local strategy can work in the modern era of college football, in which powerhouse programs have national reach.
“I think there’s a lot of players in the Midwest that don’t get recruited as much, where there’s plenty of talent, but it might not be developed as well as other states where they play football year round,” said Frost. “Those are the kids we need.”
The Nebraska-centric approach also stands in contrast to the recruiting practices of this week’s opponent, No. 5 Ohio State. Only 10 freshmen on the roster are from Ohio and just 7 of the 22 commits in the Buckeyes’ incoming Class of 2020, currently the third best recruiting class in the nation, are from within state lines.
That’s not to say that Frost and his staff avoid signing players from coastal states. Both of the Cornhuskers biggest stars this season, quarterback Adrian Martinez and running back Maurice Washington, hail from California.
Still, 46% of the players on the 2019 roster are homegrown, up from 38% in the last season of Frost’s predecessor, Mike Riley. But it’s well short of Nebraska’s championship teams, which drew about 57% of their talent from the state.
“I don’t care if it’s a kid from inner city Omaha or a kid that’s working on the Sandhills of Nebraska,” said Frost. “I want kids that care and are going to work hard.”
Additionally, Frost is rebuilding the walk-on program, which peaked around the turn of the century. He’s added 28 non-scholarship players to the roster this season, bringing Nebraska’s walk-on total to 71. Of those, only one has earned a scholarship, though Frost said he planned to award a handful more this week ahead of the Ohio State game.
The Cornhuskers pioneered the practice of signing “preferred walk ons,” players that were heavily recruited by Osborne’s staff but not promised scholarships. The title was coveted; young men regularly turned down scholarships to play in Lincoln, where the coaches guaranteed them an equal chance of earning playing time as the blue-chippers. Many won scholarships, starting spots and berths in the National Football League.
According to Joel Makovicka, a preferred walk-on fullback who started during in 1997 and 1998, the non-scholarship players’ hunger to prove themselves elevated the level of competition in practice.
“[Walk-ons] push everybody every day,” said Makovicka. “Coach Frost was around the guys and the kind of chemistry that we had and the work ethic we had…. It shaped him.”
Osborne-era practices were choreographed affairs, featuring two offensive stations for passing and running and two similarly structured stations with defensive scout teams, each large enough to make regular substitutions. That enabled every player on Nebraska’s enormous roster to get significant reps, said Adam Treu, a preferred walk-on tackle-turned-long snapper who played 10 NFL seasons after graduating in 1997.
“There weren’t people standing and watching,” recalled Treu. “That competition is I think one of the aspects that made the football team great at the time.”
A series of changes around the end of the millennium shook the program to its core. The NCAA capped football scholarships at 85 in 1992, causing Nebraska’s roster to contract. Fewer spots were reserved for walk-ons under coach Bill Callahan, who came to Lincoln in 2004 after nine seasons in the NFL, where practice squads never exceeded 59 players. By the time Alex Henery arrived in 2006 as a preferred walk-on kicker, all of Nebraska’s 104 players fit into the locker room that once barely contained the upperclassmen.
“There were different mindsets,” said Henery of how Callahan approached roster building.
Frost concurred. “When you have people in charge that didn’t necessarily understand a lot of the things that helped make Nebraska what it was, then it’s not an accident that a lot of those characteristics got phased out.”
Frost aspires to run complex practices like his former coach, but with a smaller roster of 154 he has settled for getting in reps by running plays at two stations at a high tempo. He is confident that the walk-ons will one day give the Cornhuskers an edge. That, however, will take time.
“A lot of these [walk-on] kids need a couple years of development to catch up with some of the other guys at their position,” he said. “The program when Nebraska was the best in the country wasn’t built overnight and this won’t be either.”
Twenty-five years ago, the University of Nebraska was home to the most fearsome football team in America. Its coach, Tom Osborne, was famous for convincing blue-chip boys to walk on to his team rather than accept scholarships elsewhere. The roster was 180-strong, filled with players from small Nebraska towns who grew up paying tribute to Cornhusker football each autumn Saturday.
Those days are just a memory now. Nebraska entered the 2019 season after back-to-back 4-8 campaigns. The Cornhuskers are currently 3-1, but not a single player on this year’s roster is old enough to remember the 1997 season when their coach, Scott Frost, quarterbacked Nebraska to its most recent national championship.
Frost, in his second year as head coach, is attempting to bring Nebraska football back to relevance by building his roster the same way his former coach did: by focusing on in-state recruiting and resurrecting the university’s moribund walk-on tradition.
“Coach Osborne had figured out a formula that helped him be successful and we want to try to copy it as much as we can,” said Frost in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
And while Osborne’s recruiting tactics proved wildly successful two decades ago—it won him three national championships between 1994 and 1997—Frost is making a big bet that the local strategy can work in the modern era of college football, in which powerhouse programs have national reach.
“I think there’s a lot of players in the Midwest that don’t get recruited as much, where there’s plenty of talent, but it might not be developed as well as other states where they play football year round,” said Frost. “Those are the kids we need.”
The Nebraska-centric approach also stands in contrast to the recruiting practices of this week’s opponent, No. 5 Ohio State. Only 10 freshmen on the roster are from Ohio and just 7 of the 22 commits in the Buckeyes’ incoming Class of 2020, currently the third best recruiting class in the nation, are from within state lines.
That’s not to say that Frost and his staff avoid signing players from coastal states. Both of the Cornhuskers biggest stars this season, quarterback Adrian Martinez and running back Maurice Washington, hail from California.
Still, 46% of the players on the 2019 roster are homegrown, up from 38% in the last season of Frost’s predecessor, Mike Riley. But it’s well short of Nebraska’s championship teams, which drew about 57% of their talent from the state.
“I don’t care if it’s a kid from inner city Omaha or a kid that’s working on the Sandhills of Nebraska,” said Frost. “I want kids that care and are going to work hard.”
Additionally, Frost is rebuilding the walk-on program, which peaked around the turn of the century. He’s added 28 non-scholarship players to the roster this season, bringing Nebraska’s walk-on total to 71. Of those, only one has earned a scholarship, though Frost said he planned to award a handful more this week ahead of the Ohio State game.
The Cornhuskers pioneered the practice of signing “preferred walk ons,” players that were heavily recruited by Osborne’s staff but not promised scholarships. The title was coveted; young men regularly turned down scholarships to play in Lincoln, where the coaches guaranteed them an equal chance of earning playing time as the blue-chippers. Many won scholarships, starting spots and berths in the National Football League.
According to Joel Makovicka, a preferred walk-on fullback who started during in 1997 and 1998, the non-scholarship players’ hunger to prove themselves elevated the level of competition in practice.
“[Walk-ons] push everybody every day,” said Makovicka. “Coach Frost was around the guys and the kind of chemistry that we had and the work ethic we had…. It shaped him.”
Osborne-era practices were choreographed affairs, featuring two offensive stations for passing and running and two similarly structured stations with defensive scout teams, each large enough to make regular substitutions. That enabled every player on Nebraska’s enormous roster to get significant reps, said Adam Treu, a preferred walk-on tackle-turned-long snapper who played 10 NFL seasons after graduating in 1997.
“There weren’t people standing and watching,” recalled Treu. “That competition is I think one of the aspects that made the football team great at the time.”
A series of changes around the end of the millennium shook the program to its core. The NCAA capped football scholarships at 85 in 1992, causing Nebraska’s roster to contract. Fewer spots were reserved for walk-ons under coach Bill Callahan, who came to Lincoln in 2004 after nine seasons in the NFL, where practice squads never exceeded 59 players. By the time Alex Henery arrived in 2006 as a preferred walk-on kicker, all of Nebraska’s 104 players fit into the locker room that once barely contained the upperclassmen.
“There were different mindsets,” said Henery of how Callahan approached roster building.
Frost concurred. “When you have people in charge that didn’t necessarily understand a lot of the things that helped make Nebraska what it was, then it’s not an accident that a lot of those characteristics got phased out.”
Frost aspires to run complex practices like his former coach, but with a smaller roster of 154 he has settled for getting in reps by running plays at two stations at a high tempo. He is confident that the walk-ons will one day give the Cornhuskers an edge. That, however, will take time.
“A lot of these [walk-on] kids need a couple years of development to catch up with some of the other guys at their position,” he said. “The program when Nebraska was the best in the country wasn’t built overnight and this won’t be either.”
