Thread by @UnCommonSense00

Why Scott Frost's Offensive Concepts Grew Since UCF, But He's Still in Trouble & Headed To Getting Fired. A thread.

As OC, you have 3 primary goals. Find a great C, great QB, & dynamic playmakers. You do two of those, you can have a great offense. 3 & you're PJ ELITE. But why?

(1) Your C is one of two primary ballhandlers on every play, & he sets the line calls with your QB. IOW, he's one of your two hubs, & so he has to be secure with the ball & above average with his positional intelligence. If not, it looks mucked up.

(2) Your QB is your other primary ballhandler, he's responsible for adjusting the plays on the fly through audibles, & he controls the tempo of the offense. Just like the center, he needs to be ball secure, smart, & accurate distributing the football.

(3) Your dynamic playmakers make the O go in 2020. Doesn't matter whether they are in the backfield or on the perimeter. As I've talked about on my website, football is a numbers game, & playmakers force defenses to tilt numbers to them & expose other areas of the field to do it.

Your QB can also be a playmaker like Lamar Jackson. If so, the O is basically unstoppable if you have other playmakers. But no matter what, that QB has to be ball secure & great at distributing the ball to your other playmakers. That means the ability to pass consistently.

These three things are what make guys like Lincoln Riley great. He may be the best QB developer in the game. His playmakers are well publicized. But overlooked is that his C was 1 of 3 Rimington finalists in '19 & a frosh AA in 2018.

So how has Frost done on the same goals?

He converted a great TE/OLB type who had never snapped the ball to C & played him as a rFr. Predictably, the results have been horrible. Snapping issues, mismatched blocking schemes, & now foot injuries because we put a ton of weight on his frame in a very short amount of time.

This has been an abject failure on the first goal. Jurgens is a great kid, but he's not a great C. Not even an average one at this point in this career. And you can't play offense, especially in the shotgun, when you can't snap the ball or get calls to get the play started.

& on goal 2, Frost may have done even worse. He ran off two D-1 starting QBs (understandably at least 1 didn't fit his O), turned down Joe Burrow, & recruited primary running QBs who can't pass. He smoked and mirrored it in 2018, but the book is open now in the Big 10 on his O.

Recruiting QBs isn't easy, especially at a school like Neb located in a recruiting desert. Other much better schools have also struggled to find QBs. Texas, Michigan, Penn State, etc. But we've signed highly rated QBs. They've just been athletes masquerading at QB.

Again, this isn't about AMart or McCaffrey being bad kids. From a character perspective, they're off the charts. I'd much rather hire them than TFrazier. But talent wins games, & we're recruiting 1990 Nebraska QBs to play in a 2020 offense. It just doesn't work that way.

Goal 3 is the most disappointing though. Other than WanDale, there isn't a single guy on our roster who forces defenses to adjust, & even he only does so when in the backfield. As a WR, he's so so. As an RB/Hybrid, he's great. And our RBs have heavy feet.

At the WR/TE positions, that record has already been played. We do have some good young WR talent, & we've got a potentially generational TE coming in next year. But if you don't play them, you don't help your offense. 5 heart walk ons are glue guys, but they're not starters.

So why does it look bad on Saturdays even if Frost is still a conceptual genius like I claim? Because personnel issues at the 3 key goals have stolen the balance to his O. Ds know we can't pass, & so they drill down & commit extra bodies to take away the only thing we do: QB run.

When they do that, they've beat us in the numbers game without any cost to them in doing so. They've committed more than we can handle at the LOS, but we don't have playmakers at WR/TE to take advantage of the extra space in the secondary. This is exactly what Lovie did.

Played soft CBs to keep passes in front, came down hard w/the safeties & QB spies to slow down McCaffrey's running. & neither he nor AMart can throw well enough to back them out of it.

You can have all the concepts in the world as an OC, but if you can't throw, you're done.

& here's why Frost is in trouble. He may have playmakers coming at WR/TE, but he has no answer on the roster at C. & unless Smothers is the 2nd coming & Frost swallows his pride, his QB play is about to be a nightmare for 2 more years.

Those are recruiting fails, not OC fails.

We could go into the defensive side of Nebraska too, but Frost was primarily hired for his offensive genius. & conceptually, he still is that guy. But his QB talent eval skills have been terrible, as have his position management choices. Those errors aren't quickly fixed.

They're the difference between Scott Frost & Lincoln Riley. They may also be the difference between Lincoln and Norman. Put Frost & Riley on a whiteboard, & they'll both spin your head around.

But w/out personnel at QB/C, those Xs & Os are just scratches on a white board.