Head Coach Scott Frost Quotes - 8/26

Nebraska Football
Weekly Press Conference
Memorial Stadium (Lincoln, Neb.)
Monday, Aug. 26, 2019
Pre-South Alabama

Scott Frost
Head Coach

On sophomore running back Maurice Washington
“We’re still trying to determine what is going on with Maurice. I’ve said this before, we’re taking his issues very seriously. We’ve got to wait and get more clarity and resolution before the week comes up and have several people sit down and determine what is the best decision.”
 
On if the University will allow him to play
“We’re having those discussions. We will continue to have those discussions. I think there are certain things that will lead to him absolutely letting him play and certain things that would happen that would lead us to considering it. That still has to be worked through, and we’re still trying to gather information to make a good decision for this weekend.”
 
On if he expected the decision to come down to the wire or if he would know before
“I’m just coaching a football team. Those things are being worked out by other people that do that for a living. Like I said, we’re taking it very seriously and are going to try and do what’s right for everybody involved.”
 
On how much better the team is compared to the end of the season last year
“My hope coming out of last year was that we could build off of the momentum and improvement that we made in the second half of the season. I think our guys have done that from winter conditioning to spring ball to summer conditioning to now. We’re a lot better football team, I’ve said that repeatedly but we’re better at almost every position. We’re better at every position group I believe. I think we’re going to be better on special teams and more talented. That’s all great, but we need to go out as a team and play like we’ve been practicing and try to earn some wins.”
 
On the four captains that were elected over the weekend
“I was really excited. Especially excited to see the look on those guys’ face when we announced Saturday night who the captains were. Those are the guys that were elected by their peers, the team voted on it. A lot of guys got votes, but those four were clearly the leading vote getters. I think it says a lot about the two guys on offense that they were elected as a sophomore and a junior. Mo Barry obviously has been a good leader for this team since I’ve been here. Says a lot about Darrion Daniels. I believe he’s going to be a captain on two different power five teams in two years and he did a great job of coming in and not just doing things right himself but holding others to a standard he expected. It was great to see our team recognize that.”
 
On the Blackshirts being handed out
“We actually, this was a spur of the moment kind of thing, but we didn’t want to just have the Blackshirts show up in guys’ lockers. We wanted it to mean more than that. So we got on the phone and got some of the Blackshirts that are in the vicinity to come to practice today and they kind of took turns coming up in front of the team and telling us what they thought it meant and what it stood for and then they presented the Blackshirts to the guys. Some of them were my teammates, some of them were my good friends. They did an unbelievable jobs. The Kelsay brothers were here, Jason Peters, Steve Warren, Barrett Ruud, Marc Munford, Kenny Wilhite, Tony Veland, Keyuo Craver, Zack Bowman, some great Huskers and great Blackshirts and their message to the team was spot on. It was an inspiring and neat to see that happen after practice.”
 
On what that message was
“Each one of them gave their own message and meaning of Blackshirt. I left out Jay Foreman too who is my teammate. I don’t want to say necessarily what they said individually. Jay Foreman was one of the neatest ones to me, he said there’s only two jerseys in his office. His first Husker jersey and his Blackshirt. Actually, in his will, he said he’s going to be buried with his Blackshirt. So if anything tells you what it means to those guys, his message told us that.”
 
On how many received Blackshirts
“I don’t know the exact number. I guess I could figure it out. Carlos Davis, Darrion Daniels, Khalil Davis, Ben Stille, Caleb Tannor, Alex Davis, Lamar Jackson, Marquel Dismuke, Deontai Williams, Dicaprio Bootle and Cam Taylor. They’ve earned it.”
 
On if sophomore quarterback Adrian Martinez has had any “wow” moments
“Adrian provides us with at least a  “wow” moment a day. He made a throw the other day that I’ve never really seen before. Maybe watching the Chiefs play last year. We just need him to play like he’s been practicing. He’s way more comfortable in the offense, obviously he has the talent to make any play he needs to on the football field. Now we just need to be efficient and have that at a high rate.”
 
On sophomore linebacker Caleb Tannor
“Caleb has had a good camp. He’s played harder. I think he knows what he’s doing better. He’s shown up more, he’s handled things off the field better that probably prevented him from having a better year last year and in some ways I think he was given an opportunity with a couple of other guys being out. JoJo (Domann) missing some time early gave him some more reps. Other guys getting nicked up gave him some more reps, and he took advantage of it.”
 
On the four-game redshirt rule and who is on it
“There’s a bunch of guys I think that fall into unique categories that fall into the four-game redshirt rule. There’s some guys that we need to play now or have earned the right to play and play the entire season. Some other guys we’re still kind of in wait-and-see mode if we want to use the year or not. Ideally it would be to play them in four games and save the year. There are some other positions where with some other guys, just kind of in that situation, we might be able to play one for four games and give us depth and help out on special teams. So there are some that are clear that they’re going to play, some that are going to redshirt. There are others that we’re going to be in a holding pattern and at least get four games out of them.”
 
On Adrian Martinez 
"I would have guessed that this is what Adrian would have accomplished, just knowing Adrian and the person that he was (getting to know him in recruiting and before we started last year). He certainly hasn’t disappointed. He’s been a leader on our offense, which again was kind of a necessity since we’re still really young on offense. We don’t have many seniors on the field this year on offense, so I think that’s why you see two underclassmen captains on offense. We weren’t sure what we were going to get last year. We had a pretty good idea of what we hoped he could be last year and I think he met those expectations for a first-year player. He’s considerably better right now, so I hope he keeps meeting and exceeding our expectations.”
 
On preparing for South Alabama
"Our team needs to remember the past, live in the present and do the best we can in the future. Coach Chin (Defensive Coordinator Erik Chinander) said that today. We need to learn from some of the things that happened last year, getting beat by a good Troy team here certainly wasn’t one of our brightest moments. I think they’re doing everything they can to be ready for this one and try not to let that happen."
 
On sophomore tight end Austin Allen
"Jack Stoll has had a great camp, and we feel great with him as our lead guy, but Austin has improved by leaps and bounds to the point that there’s no drop-offs when he’s in and Jack [Stoll] isn’t. There’s going to be a lot of sets that we run with both of those guys on the field, so we thought it was just and fair to list them both as ones because that’s how we feel about them."
 
On preparing freshmen for Saturday’s atmosphere
"You can try to talk to guys about the excitement of Memorial Stadium all you want, but until you run out of the tunnel and get the juice it’s hard to prepare guys for it. We’ll have talks about it and all that. Usually the guys who show up as freshmen and have not been afraid of the environment or competing with older guys when they got here are the ones who aren’t going to be shaken by the noise and the crowd."
 
On junior running back Dedrick Mills
"Dedrick is a little like Adrian [Martinez] and what I was saying about him. We had high hopes when we got him out of junior college. I think he’s surprised me on how quickly he’s caught on and his talent. He’s been a real pleasant surprise in camp, and I see good things coming from him. He runs really hard and plays hard and comes to practice every day and works. He probably has better breakaway speed than I expected, and he’s hard to bring down. He’s going to be a big addition to our offense and I expect him to be on the field during our first play on Saturday."
 
On stress from last year
"I feel way less stressed going into this year than last year. We still had a lot of unknowns last year. We still had a lot of guys who were still learning and a lot of guys who were question marks in our minds on how they were going to play. We have way fewer of those this year. For the most part, we have a team that’s doing everything we ask them to do that’s competing on the practice field every day. Their consistency through camp and how they’ve been practicing leads me to believe that that’s what I’m going to see come Saturday. You still never know, but I think last year I was a little apprehensive about going into the start of the season. This year I’m excited."
 
On the speed of the offense
"We’re going to be fast at times and I hope when our fast is happening that it’s a lot faster than last year. There’s going to be other times that we’re not. Practices have been faster, so I expect the tempo to be better when we want it to be. I hope the fans see a difference in execution, that our guys are able to run each play well on both sides of the ball, run each scheme well, understand the scheme and make adjustments. The repetition that we’ve had in camp hopefully will lead us to a cleaner execution on both sides."
 
On scoring a lot of points
"I like statistics after the season and maybe in bye weeks. During the season we just want to win the games. Thirty points isn’t bad, but I don’t want to be just not bad and I think our guys don’t want to either. The big message without getting into 30.3 or 37.2 is if we can score one more time on offense every game and stop the team on defense, that’s a big difference and probably would have led to four or five more wins last year at least. If we’re worried about the wins and losses, that’s an easy place to find them."
 
On the depth chart
"The defensive line is probably the place where we’re the most veteran and have the most seniors. We also have some really good young players there. So we didn’t go too deep on the depth chart because we didn’t want to leave anyone out toward the bottom. But there’s a lot of guys that we feel great about that are ready to play now. We feel like there’s going to be a lot of great players around here in the future. There’s a lot of names, but that’s one of our deepest and most veteran units. There are some guys that aren’t on this list that are talented enough to be great players this year and beyond."
 
On JD Spielman as the starting punt returner and the competition within the position 
“The great thing about special teams I think is we have a lot more guys capable of doing all the jobs than we did a year ago, having good special teams is partly focused on making it a priority, partly technique, but a large part is having more athletes. We have a lot more athletes on the team this year. Punt returner I feel like there are a lot more guys that we feel good about putting back there, but JD is pretty special with the ball in his hands and we are going to use him when we can. When he is not ready to go, or we need to rest him some other guys can do the job as well.”

On redshirt freshman offensive lineman Cam Jurgens' quick recovery
“Cam has done a great job in his rehab. We weren’t really expecting to have him until a couple weeks into the season I would say. He healed up pretty quick, got out onto the field faster than we thought, and made an impact faster than we thought once he got out there. We might keep him on a pitch count early on, just to make sure we aren’t overloading him too fast. But he has a chance to be a pretty good player.”

On freshman wide receiver Wan’Dale Robinson being a starter as a true freshman
“Wan’Dale has done a great job coming in and learning. We feel like we can use him in multiple spots. He picked up the offense really fast. He is one of the kids that we have that just really understands football, understands space, how to get open, concepts, and on top of that he is a talented kid. Look forward to seeing what he can do on the field. He was nicked up a little during camp and missed a little time so hopefully he is in good enough shape to play as many reps as he can because we will be better team with him on the field.”

On the middle linebackers that received Blackshirts
“We gave three to the middle backers: Mo Berry, Collin Miller, Will Honas.”

On how important the start of the season is compared to the 0-6 start last year
“Well hopefully we play more than one play Saturday. I know those guys are excited to come up here and watching them on tape they are a well-coached team with some good athletes. But our guys are excited to play, too. Hopefully we get to play and that we play well and execute well. I think the whole team is looking forward to competing against someone else instead of against each other.”

On the development of Norfolk, Nebraska natives Ethan Piper, Ryan Schommer and Lane McCallum
“McCallum kind of joined fall camp later but he is an important part of our team. He does a great job every single day. Schommer was at camp, made some big improvements. Ethan Piper did a really good job coming in as a true freshman. He is one of those guys on the bubble. Whether or not we are going to play him or save his year because I know he will be a really good player for us down the road. Maybe not quite ready right now, but I don’t think it will be very long so we are just going to wait-and-see approach on that one.”

On Isaac Armstrong as the starting punter and the competition for the position
“The whole walk-on to walk-on rule where we have a transfer from Michigan State that is eligible right now, he has done a great job. Isaac obviously when called into duty last year came in and did really well for us. Both those guys have been punting the ball really well, so I feel great about both of them. We don’t like to put pressure on guys by saying if you don’t do a good job someone else is there, but we feel good that if something isn’t going well we have another guy in the chamber ready to be put in the game.”

On how Frost plans on managing a large roster on game days
“Well luckily I have good people working in the football office that can pay attention to that, so I don’t have to. But on a game day, we want our guys involved in the game so a bunch of them will be suited up and dressed ready to play. Some others are on the sideline in jerseys, and some guys we definitely know are redshirting might have to be in the stands year one. When I was a redshirt here in '95, I was in the stands, so I have been through that. It makes you more hungry to put yourself in a better place next year. But with the roster the size we have, we just don’t have room on the sidelines so that’s the way it will be, but we want everyone to feel like they are a part of it.”

On kickoff being at 11 a.m.
“We are excited to get the game kicked off. Coaches kind of like the 11 o’clock slot because we are able to get up, get the game played, and get onto other things rather than sitting around waiting for it all day. And then if there is lightning at 11 o’clock, I think we will still have time the rest of the day to figure something out.”

On the possibility of a week zero game 
“If the circumstances were right, I think week zero is great. I think the public is anxious for college football to start. You get to start practice a week earlier, so it shouldn’t really make a difference in your team’s execution. You get the same amount of practice before the game. If we are ever [presented that opportunity] I think it would be good for our team.”

NU Athletic Communications