Scott Frost Quotes - 11/30

Nebraska Football
Pre-Purdue
Monday, Nov. 30, 2020

Press Conference Video

On what the team can do with the extra time now that classes have ended
“We're still limited to hours we can spend with them per day, but if we can get a little extra time here and there it might help.”
 
On the status of Marcus Fleming
“Yeah Marcus, we wish him the best. He's not gonna be on the team anymore. So, we'll move on. Feel good about that position where it is.”
 
On the affect that bringing in past players has on the current players
“I don't know. We haven't had hardly anybody talk to the team all year. It’s just been a strange year. It's been hard on our team. It's hard to complain because there's people out there losing businesses and losing salaries and fighting through COVID. It certainly affected us. I think it's affected some of our young players a little bit too. Getting on campus and seeing students everywhere and being able to go out in Lincoln and see Memorial Stadium full. That's certainly a benefit for us when we bring kids to Lincoln and we haven't been able to do that. We haven't been able to have people come speak to the team. We didn't get to spend as much time around them this summer. But I think it's a different era. I think kids are a little different these days, but there's no reason you can't motivate them to be modeled after something that obviously worked for a long time.”
 
On Cameron Jurgens’ performance at center
“No, we need to get it fixed so we're gonna get as much help and as many ideas as we can to get it fixed. He's too good of a player not to have on the field. He's too good of a player to even consider moving him out of that role or moving him somewhere else. But we can't continue the way we're going. We did a study this week and we scored on our drives where we don't have a penalty, a bad snap or a turnover. We scored on over 90% of those drives and we just had far too many. The snaps last week hurt us. Four or five of those when you're only getting 63 plays in a game, was about 10% of your offensive snaps and it puts us behind the eight ball. It puts us in third and longs. Cam cares as much as anyone on the team, so he wants to get it fixed. And we'll do whatever we have to make sure that we're getting it better.”
 
On what makes Jurgens so valuable at center
“He's smart, he's extremely athletic and he's exceptionally explosive. He's still in some ways learning the position. He didn't play it until last season, but he's got the skill set to be really, really special at that position.”
 
On the running backs
“Sevion Morrison won't be available. We’re crossing our fingers for everybody else at this point.”
 
On Rahmir Johnson’s performance
“I thought he did really well. We've been waiting for Rahmir to kind of attack everything. Thought he took advantage of opportunities. It was good to see him get in the end zone. That's a position where all we have really available to us with (Dedrick) Mills down is freshmen. I think those guys would play pretty well considering their age and level of experience and Coach Held’s done a good job”
 
On the challenge of building a tough love culture
“I think that's a multiple facet answer. Kids are little different now. I don't think there's as much tough love for a lot of kids when they grow up. Our program is going to be about love first and the toughness has to be built in along with that. That's how you reach players today, in my opinion, if they know you care about them. And if you genuinely care about them, they'll do about anything for you. Once you develop that connection through experiences with people, then it's your job as a as a coach and sometimes kind of as a second parent to teach him how to be tough, teach him how to be resilient, teach him how to be detailed and do all the little things right. That takes a while, particularly when you're starting off with new kids. I think our staff does a great job with that. Again, this year we're playing a lot of young kids that haven't maybe learned some of those lessons as many times as the old ones. The culture piece, I mentioned after the game, it's gotten better and better and better. But it's still got to come from the locker room a little bit, and we're trying to train that. Hopefully we'll get some more time around the young guys. As far as departures and things like that, first of all, we have to make sure that we were recruiting the right kids, not just the right athletes. We have to make sure that we're going to recruit type kid that's going to flourish in Nebraska. And I think certain kids are going to come here and assimilate and love it. Maybe there's a few others that wouldn't. Like I went somewhere else and it didn't fit me, so that's not unusual. This has been a tough year, too. Like I said, you know, kids can go to the mall right now. They can't be around other students. I compliment our players for being really disciplined. We haven't had COVID issues, so they've been doing things the right way. And one of the biggest selling points of this place is playing in front of a Sea of Red and we haven't even had an opportunity to do that. So, it's been a tough year, but it starts with us making sure we get the right kids. I also think in this day and age, there's a little more impatience. I was fairly higher highly ranked guy coming out of high school. I didn't play until my fourth year of college and that's not unusual. It still worked out pretty well. But a lot of kids now, if it's not working immediately, get impatient. And we try to teach our guys patience as far as that and resilience as far as that goes, too.”
 
On if Grant Wistrom and Jason Peter could have led now like they did in the 90s
“There's probably a few things they did that they couldn't do nowadays. But it's just the accountability. You know when you have a time with the team and you built the culture you want, we call it culture keepers, where they come in as young players and they learn how it's supposed to be done, what the expectations are, how to hold other people accountable to that. Then those young players become the old players that not only hold the team to those standards but teach the young guys how to do that as well. When you're building that, the first thing you have to do is get the veterans right and then the veterans can start teaching the young guys and then the young guys learn it and start teaching and so on and so on. We kind of started from square one with that and we've come a long way. But we still can button it up a little more and make sure that the leaders on our team aren't allowing anything to happen that's counterproductive to what we're trying to get done.”
 
On Adrian Martinez’s performance against Iowa
“I thought he was efficient. He didn't turn the ball over. I thought he ran hard when he had a chance to. Made a couple throws downfield. There are still a couple simple things that we could have done a little better. His eyes a couple of times. But I thought returning to play, he did a good job and Luke (McCaffrey) was really efficient on his snaps, too. Again, in that game set, that’s a tough team. That's the kind of game we're going to have to win to beat a good team like that. And when we have our opportunities, we just can't get the untimely holding penalty. That's the downside. The good side is we only had I think four penalties. They just came at the wrong time. And you can't fumble a punt when you're going to get great field position to try to go win. And Cam Taylor-Britt is one of our best players. He's not going to drop very many, but it's just untimely. We certainly can't miss a guy on a protection when we're going to win and the guy that missed that is one of our best players. Those are all fixable things that happened. That's good, but like I said, the intensity and the approach to the game was the best that I felt. So we need to continue to do that and not have those mistakes that cost us.”
 
On the injuries at running back this season and how the learning curve has helped to set up for next season
“The injury thing, I don't know. (Dedrick) Mills got rolled up on a little bit. Marvin (Scott III) got hit in the head and the other kids are not available for health reasons right now. So, I don't think you can point to anything other than football on that. But we knew we needed to get a lot of young guys ready because we were going in with one veteran with experience. And like I said, I think Coach Held has done a good job of getting a lot of guys capable of going in.”
 
On the progress of the defense this season
“Yeah, I agree. We certainly didn't play well two weeks ago on that side of the ball, but every other game this year I've been really happy with how they battled, how physical they played.
They did a really good job against the run Friday. There's been a couple of big plays a game that we gotta get ironed out and fixed, when we miss a gap or miss one little assignment. But overall, we're tackling a lot better. I think we're playing more physical at the line of scrimmage. We can certainly help the defense out by fixing special teams and field position for them, kind of like offense with clean drives versus drives with mistakes. When opponents are starting inside the 25, we're stopping people at a really good rate and when we give them good field position, we're not doing as well. So that's not miraculous, that's not something that doesn't happen to everybody in football, but we can certainly help the defense out that way, too.”
 
On how the start of this week compares to past weeks this season and the challenge of keeping players engaged
“I don't think I'm going to have a problem with this team keeping them engaged. This team’s hungry. This team approached last week really well, approached today really well. These guys want to get this right and they're going to give us everything they have to get it right. We hope we still have three games, three opportunities. We need it as a football team. We're young in a lot of places. We didn't get bowl practice last year. We didn't get spring ball. We had a lot of non-padded practices, a ton of non-padded practices, but very few real fall camp type of practices. So, we need opportunities to practice. We need opportunities play games to really get the improvement we need. You can feel it coming. You can feel the young talent and the veteran talent on our team, and I think the guys the guys know that they're close and they want more opportunities.”
 
On if he wanted to call a timeout at the end of the third quarter of the Iowa game
“Yeah, we talked about it. I was kind of looking up and the wind was swirling. I couldn't really tell which way was helping and which way it was hurting and I asked our special teams guys. We talked about it, but I also knew that I might need the timeouts in my back pocket in that game too, so we decided not to use it.”
 
On if he was pleased with the fact that if they needed a time out, they would’ve have had it
“Yeah, I thought about using it on first down on the series before. Waited and used it on second. That kept one in the pocket. We had plenty of time, so we were managing that.
I think we had a minute and 30 left on that last play, so we actually had time to just run our offense. Hindsight is always 20-20 so you don't know you're gonna miss protection, but certainly could have been able to run the ball at that point too and take a little pressure off our offensive line. I think that the time management worked well and we gave ourselves an opportunity. We just didn't capitalize.”
 
On balancing recruiting ahead of early signing day while also playing games
“I feel good. I really like the group that we think we have coming in. I think it's going to be another addition, really strong addition. Really strong in certain areas that we need help on the football team and we gotta keep piling these recruiting classes up. I think just because we weren't able to travel as much, the recruiting class I going to be a little more regional to our area which I think could be a benefit. We'll do everything we can to stay on top of that while we're trying to get a team ready to play.”
 
On if recruits see the optimism regarding the team’s potential
“Yeah, when we talk to them, I think they see it. Until they read some of the articles that you guys write. If you watch our team, I love how hard we're playing. I love the talent we have on the team. We've been so close and our kids are tired of losing close games. So, I think they're committed to do whatever little things they have to do to make sure that we don't make mistakes to beat ourselves in those games.”
 
On if he is worried about the status of the rest of the season and if it’s been discussed with the team
“Yeah, I'm worried about the last three games, absolutely. I was worried coming off Thanksgiving with guys going home and coming back, what would happen. Our guys have done a really good job with that. We just haven't had too many issues throughout the season. You know, it's no secret that I think around here we wish we could have started on time and played a normal season so we had some chances to make up any games that we missed. But I do see it rise around the country and that's a bigger deal than football. The health and safety of everyone is a bigger deal than football and I certainly hope we don't lose any games, but I think it's a possibility. Like I said, I think our team needs games. We need practice. We need all those opportunities to continue to get better day by day, so we'll keep our fingers crossed that we're able to finish this thing.”

NU Athletic Communications