10 things we learned from NU's Signing Day press conference

From the moment he officially accepted the job to become Nebraska’s next head football coach, Scott Frost made it clear he wanted to finish what he started at Central Florida before he left.

Not only did he and his staff complete a perfect 13-0 season capped with a win over Auburn in the Peach Bowl, they were able to simultaneously assemble a top-25 recruiting class with the Huskers despite only having two months to work.

During his Signing Day press conference on Wednesday, Frost admitted that it had been a difficult grind trying to wear two hats between Nebraska and UCF. That's not even mentioning the added pressure of the first-ever early signing period in December.

As a result, he and his staff were all physically and mentally exhausted by the time Signing Day finally arrived.

But after leading the Knights to their best season in program history and taking a 2018 NU class that was 94th nationally when he took over to a 24-player group regarded as one of the Big Ten’s best, Frost said he had no regrets now that it was all said and done.

“It’s been a difficult couple of months," Frost said. "It’s been exhausting for me and the coaching staff. We were basically doing two jobs for a while... We tried to handle every decision based off what was the right thing to do. To help the young men at UCF win a bowl game was the right thing to do. It was hard work for us, but it was really rewarding when it worked out the way it did.”

Just as he did when he took over a UCF program that had gone 0-12 the season before, Frost knew one of the most important tasks in putting together his first Nebraska recruiting class was establishing a foundation for future success.

Frost said the staff’s approach over the past two months was not just to try and get as many talented players as possible, but to bring in prospects with the most upside to develop in their system.

Most importantly, they wanted players who wanted to play for Nebraska.

Frost added that while a lot has been made about the systems he runs on both sides of the ball, they weren’t all that overly complicated. What it ultimately depends upon, he said, was how hard the players were willing to work and how much they want to learn.

One of Frost’s best lines was “when you’re taking over a 4-8 team, there’s a lot of needs” to address in recruiting. When it came down to it, though, he said finding the best possible players who were the best possible fits topped the priority list.

Frost said he didn’t want to make “knee-jerk” decisions on recruits and sign kids just to fill spots, and as a result, he ended up with a class full of players capable of helping the Huskers down the road, including several who could make an impact as soon as this season.

Of the 24 signees Nebraska added for 2018, nine were offensive skill position players. Of those nine, eight were running backs and wide receivers.

Frost and his staff clearly made it a point to revamp those position groups not only to tailor them to the style of offense they want to run, but to provide an influx of speed and athleticism closer to the level that the coaches know they need to make their scheme work.

Some players Frost noted by name on Wednesday included running back Maurice Washington, a three-star Signing Day commit who had been on the staff’s radar long before he blew up as a national recruit.

Frost said Washington still had some work to do academically, but called the Cedar Hill, Texas, standout someone who could “do everything we ask of our running backs.”

Frost also pointed to Miles Jones and Justin McGriff, who could be immediate factors at receiver. Frost said Jones was the type of versatile wideout who could play inside or out that has thrived in his system over the years.

McGriff will likely start out as a perimeter receiver but could end up moving to tight end as he adds more size and strength to his current 6-foot-6, 220-pound frame.

"I’ve been recruiting to this scheme for a while and kind of have an idea of what fits and what’s going to work in this scheme..." Frost said. "I think that the perception out there is that those kids won’t come here. Our staff had six weeks to work and we got the ones we needed. You don’t have to get them all, you have to get the right ones, and I think we did.”

Despite all of the hype and national attention surrounding Frost the past few months, even he had to combat the common misconception of what life is actually like at Nebraska on the recruiting front.

He said many players from the coasts and the south see Lincoln as a football stadium in the middle of a cornfield, and that was something he and his staff had to clear up more often than not during their recruiting efforts.

Frost said the key for this class and likely every class going forward was to get as many recruits on campus as possible to show them what Lincoln was actually all about.

The problem with the 2018 group is that when Frost and Co. took over, the previous staff had already used up about half of Nebraska’s 56 allotted official visits.

That left the new coaches having to be very particular in who they invited for officials, because the limited numbers left little room for error.

"We had to bat a really high percentage to fill our class," Frost said. "So, we were real careful not to bring in kids where we thought it was just a visit. We had to feel good about our chances of getting him before we brought him in."

As successful as Nebraska’s staff was on the recruiting front, Frost said he couldn’t wait to get started on the aspect of the job that he loved the most - coaching.

Because of the hectic schedules, Frost said he hadn’t been able to connect with his current players and fully evaluate the roster as much as he would have liked.

Now that the 2018 class is in the books, he and his assistants will turn their full attention toward the next task at hand.

The immediate focus will continue to be on strength and conditioning, as Frost said they needed to get the entire team into better shape in order to play the brand of football they want this fall.

In particular, Frost said that while he likes the size and ability of Nebraska’s current offensive linemen, “we have to change their bodies” to become better-conditioned athletes.

"The Nebraska I knew and the strength and conditioning and what was expected of them, and what kids look like physically - that’s not really what we’re walking back into," Frost said. "But that’s what (strength coach) Zach Duval is here for.

"I think we got guys on the team that can be great offensive linemen but we got to go to work in the weight room, we’ve got to cut our body fat, eat right, we’ve got to get stronger, we’ve got to get in better shape.”

Frost still remembers a practice back when he was a quarterback at Nebraska in the late-1990s when head coach Tom Osborne lectured him after he ran out of bounds on a run to avoid taking a hit.

Osborne told him that the quarterback sets the tone for the entire team, and when the other players see their leader shy away from contact, it had a ripple effect on the rest of the roster.

That philosophy has stuck with Frost throughout his coaching career, and he said that kind of toughness was a critical trait in the recent quarterbacks he’s coached, which included Marcus Mariota at Oregon and McKenzie Milton at UCF.

It's something he said would be drilled into NU’s quarterbacks from here on out, and was also a big reason why Frost was so high on Adrian Martinez, the four-star prospect from Fresno, Calif., who was lone QB in the 2018 class.

The same goes for Noah Vedral, a former backup at UCF from Wahoo Neumann who eventually followed Frost to Lincoln.

Both quarterbacks possess the mentality that Frost wants in the leaders of his offense, and their toughness should quickly set the tone in the QB room for the future.

While Frost may be able to tell you exactly where Nebraska’s recruiting class was ranked nationally when he took the job, he’ll also tell you those rankings as a whole don’t mean much after Signing Day.

Like many coaches, Frost is a firm believer in recruiting players that fit his system and the culture that he and his staff are trying to build, not just the most talented and highly-rated prospects.

The Husker coaches will get a lot of praise for piecing together one of the better classes in the country in such a limited amount of time, and deservingly so. But that type of acclaim is among the least of Frost’s concerns.

"I don't really care about the rankings," Frost said. "It matters on one day and that's today. I'm not here to win February. I'm here to win football games in the fall."

Along with the 24 scholarship signees Nebraska officially added on Wednesday, the Huskers also inked 17 additional walk-ons in their 2018 class.

Frost made it clear from Day One that he wanted to make the walk-on program a priority and get it back to the pipeline it was when he was a player.

That showed in landing a group of 17 prospects, all from the state of Nebraska, who in many cases turned down scholarship offers elsewhere to walk-on at NU.

Frost added that the hefty number of walk-ons in this class was most certainly done by design.

“I think we wanted to introduce more this year to get the ball rolling,” Frost said. “We want to make sure we have the right guys in the program, the right walk-ons in the program and guys that we feel like can eventually be on the field and help this football team.

“That’s what has happened at Nebraska in the past, and I want that to happen again.”

Asked what he envisioned NU’s overall roster size would be by the time fall camp rolled around, Frost said he’d ideally like at least 150 players, and certainly more than the 130 the Huskers had last season.

While nothing has formally been announced regarding Nebraska’s practice schedule for the spring, Frost did confirm that the Huskers would hold one full practice before spring break - which runs from March 17-25 - and then would resume once classes started up again.

It remains to be seen if NU will shift to a morning practice schedule, which Frost used at both Oregon and UCF, and also what the daily format would look like leading up to the Red-White Spring Game on April 21.

Speaking of the Spring Game, it took less than three days for Nebraska to sell out of tickets for the annual scrimmage, meaning more than 85,000 fans will be in Memorial Stadium for Frost’s unofficial Husker debut.

Frost stressed that a lot of work still needed to be done between now and the spring game, but also admitted he couldn’t help but get excited about the passion surrounding his program.

“A lot of people say they have the best fans in the country,” Frost said. “I think selling out a spring game in three days kind of puts that argument to bed.”

There was a point when Frost was juggling coaching Central Florida’s bowl practices and scouring the country while recruiting for Nebraska that he reportedly threw up on the UCF practice field out of pure exhaustion.

The 43-year old still never really slowed down much even into Wednesday’s Signing Day finale, but now he and his staff are ready for a well overdue break.

Frost said his offensive assistant coaches would take next week off to recharge, and then the defensive coaches would get the same break the following week.

As for himself, Frost said one of the hardest parts about the two-month grind was the time away from his wife and infant son, who he said were still living back in Orlando.

Now that the dust has settled for the time being, Frost said he couldn’t wait to get back to his family.

“It has been hard for me because my wife and my newborn son are still in Orlando,” Frost said. “Thank goodness for FaceTime, otherwise I would be missing the first few months of his life.

“(Coaching at Nebraska) was an opportunity that I couldn’t turn down and our staff felt the same way. But, transitions are always hard and I am going to get back down to Orlando for part of next week to see my family.”