Nebraska AD Trev Alberts discusses why Scott Frost wasn't successful

On3 imageby:Jonathan Wagner09/12/22

Jonathan Wagner

The Scott Frost era at Nebraska has come to an end. Frost was fired on Sunday following a disappointing loss to drop to 1-2 on the season. In a press conference after the decision, Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts discussed why Frost wasn’t as successful as they would have liked with the Huskers.

Alberts went back to the coaching cycle in which Frost was hired, saying he was one of the top names at that time. He thought Frost would have had more success, but now Alberts is looking to move forward.

“You know, I haven’t put a lot of thought into that,” Alberts said when asked about what went wrong. “But I thought it would work. Listen, we all have short memories but Scott Frost was among the absolute leaders in that cycle of coaching. Scott’s a good football coach, Scott’s going to go on and be a successful coach. I told him that this morning and he agreed. Scott’s a good football coach. The right situation for him will emerge and I think he’ll be very successful.

“I was very determined to work with him and try to balance that very delicate balance of not meddling – because I think it’s the last thing an administration should do is start dictating the coaches and how they operate their deal – but be supportive. But it is what it is. It didn’t work and that’s why we’re here today.”

Frost amassed an overall record of 16-31 at Nebraska, including a mere 10-26 clip against Big Ten opponents.

Alberts doesn’t know why Frost didn’t have success

After going 3-9 in 2021, Frost’s future came into question. That only became more and more true as the 2022 season got underway. Nebraska dropped a Week 0 contest against Northwestern before rallying to win in Week 1 against North Dakota. In Week 2, the Huskers fell in another one-score game to Georgia Southern, and that was the final straw.

But Alberts was transparent in saying that he doesn’t specifically know what attributed to the lack of success under Frost.

“I don’t know,” Alberts said when asked why Nebraska is 4-11 in his two years as AD. “I’m not trying to be flippant with you. If I knew, we would have made some changes. And I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Now, Alberts is looking forward. He also made sure to point out that Frost always acted in the best interest of Nebraska, and that shouldn’t be forgotten despite an unfortunate end to his tenure.

“I don’t want to spend a lot of time going backwards and looking at and evaluating Scott, only because I think at this point it’s a little unfair to Scott,” said Alberts. “We’ve moved on. Certainly there’s things that you observe and you see and you’d say, ‘Well maybe I’d do something different.’ We would have conversations. But at the end of the day, Scott Frost was the head coach. And I promise you something, Scott made decisions that he thought were in the best interests of the University of Nebraska. They were genuine. He believed that in his heart. So that’s really important.

“I don’t want to spend a lot of time evaluating Scott’s performance over the last five years. At the end of the day Scott’s no longer the head coach here and we’ll move on and look forward too. I think you’ll see some of those changes, and you’ll get to talk to Coach Joseph about that. But mostly, I just want to salute Scott. He’ll always be a Husker. He’s from the great state of Nebraska and he’ll always be welcome here and we want to support him in that role.”