Scott Frost and Nebraska open with a thud, plus RJ Young's Top 25

By RJ Young
FOX Sports College Football Writer

Before Nebraska and Illinois kicked off the 2021 college football season Saturday, Scott Frost had already made some history of the wrong kind.

He began the game with the second-worst winning percentage among Cornhuskers head coaches who have had the privilege of keeping their job for more than three years.

Since becoming head coach in Lincoln, Frost is 12-21 overall and 9-18 in Big Ten play. Put another way: Frost won 13 games in one season at Central Florida, but he has won a total of 12 games in three years at Nebraska.

For more up-to-date news on all things Cornhuskers, click here to register for alerts on the FOX Sports app!

Having made it to Year 4, Frost is the first Huskers coach with a losing record in his first three years since Bill Jennings held the same dubious honor from 1957 to 1959. 

Nebraska’s 30-22 loss to Illinois Saturday — in a game in which oddsmakers favored the Huskers by seven points — also means Nebraska has lost back-to-back games to the Illini for the first time since 1923-24. 

All of this begs a very obvious question: How did we get here? 

Well, let’s start with Saturday's game and work backward.

The first points scored in Big Ten play came off of a safety — not the position but the scoring play. Late in the first quarter, Illinois punter Blake Hayes used every bit of his 6-foot-6 frame to belt the ball down to the Huskers' goal line. But it was too good. The ball was going to fall into the end zone for a touchback.

Cam Taylor-Britt decided he would field it anyway while backing up, into his own end zone. To avoid getting tackled, he flung the ball forward and was called for an illegal forward pass. Safety. 

It was 2-0 before Erik Chinander’s defense went to work.

Not long after, still in the opening quarter of the season, Illinois lost starting quarterback Brandon Peters when, dropping back on a play-action pass, he got folded in half by Huskers Deontre Thomas and Garrett Nelson. Nebraska was playing fast and fierce.

Yet after losing its starting QB, Illinois led 16-9 going into halftime, thanks to an unforgivable Adrian Martinez fumble that resulted in a scoop-and-score just before the intermission. 

If I were Frost, I'd have been so angry. His defense was playing with its hair on fire, and his quarterback was playing like he'd seen Sam Darnold's ghosts.

Then it got worse. At one point, Nebraska had given up more sacks than it had converted third downs. Illinois backup QB Art Sitkowski settled in and hit his first 11 of 13 pass attempts for 121 yards with two TDs.

Illinois stretched its lead to 30-9 in the third quarter and drained the clock on an eight-point victory.

What has happened to Nebraska? First, some perspective:

Since 2015, Nebraska is 31-40. In fact, since Tom Osborne’s retirement, the Huskers have lost more than three games in 19 of 23 seasons. Osborne never lost more than three games between 1973 and 1997. If it feels like it was 24 years ago that Frost himself quarterbacked Nebraska to a national title, that’s because it was.

Following an epic 2017, when Frost led Central Florida to an undefeated season and a national title — yeah, I said it — most expected a return to glory with his move to Nebraska. 

Frost built a winner at UCF by recruiting Florida kids. He decided to do the same at Nebraska. The Huskers signed 14 players from the Sunshine State in Frost’s first four recruiting classes in Lincoln. That number includes six in the 2018 class and seven in 2020.

Among the Big Ten’s 14 teams, the Huskers ranked No. 4 in three consecutive recruiting cycles. So why isn’t the Sunshine State strategy working at Nebraska like it did at a non-Power 5 school in Florida? 

Because for the strategy to work at Nebraska, those players have to stay at Nebraska, and they haven’t.

Heading into the opener against Illinois, only one Florida recruit was listed on Nebraska’s two-deep depth chart. Five of the six 2020 Florida signees transferred, and that includes two before their freshman seasons began.

In 2021, five of the players Nebraska signed hailed from the state of Nebraska, and that’s a solid pivot in strategy. I have long thought that the backbone of every good college football team is a vertebrae native to the state. 

But Frost might not have time enough to see that back built out.

Nebraska still has games against No. 2 Oklahoma, No. 4 Ohio State, No. 12 Wisconsin and No. 18 Iowa on the schedule.

From 1970 to 2014, Nebraska football posted a record of 440-120-5. The Huskers are one of the four winningest programs of the past 50 years — or since integration.

Indeed, the list of college football’s winningest programs in the past half-century goes like this: Alabama is first with 495 wins, Ohio State is second with 490, Oklahoma is third with 482, and Nebraska is fourth with 471.

You’ll notice every single one of those programs except Nebraska is ranked inside the top five of the preseason AP and my rankings. Insult to injury? I don’t think anybody makes Nebraska one of the top 50 teams in 2021, let alone a Top 25.

Speaking of the Top 25, if I had an AP ballot, it would look like this:

RJ Young’s Week Zero Top 25:

1. Oklahoma
2. Georgia
3. Ohio State
4. Alabama
5. Clemson
6. Iowa State
7. USC
8. LSU
9. Utah
10. Oregon
11. Wisconsin
12. Texas A&M
13. Notre Dame
14. Miami
15. Indiana
16. North Carolina
17. Texas Christian
18. Coastal Carolina
19. Arizona State
20. Louisiana
21. Iowa
22. Texas
23. Washington
24. Cincinnati
25. Florida State

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young, and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube. He is not on a StepMill.