Looking back: A week to remember

It's been a week since Nebraska announced Scott Frost as their head coach.

There has been so much that's happened this last week with the hiring of Frost. HuskerOnline looks back at the five things we learned since Frost's hiring a week ago.

It doesn't play out like this very often, but Scott Frost will bring all 10 of his top assistant coaches from Central Florida with him, his strength coach and main support staff members.

By doing that, it's made this transition seamless over the last week. There has not been a "getting to know" period for this staff because they have all spent the last two years working together already.

It's been very beneficial on the recruiting trail, as they have been able to execute a plan they already had in place at Central Florida, on top of adding some new wrinkles to it.

When a new staff has taken over at Nebraska in the past, it's taken a while for them to get things going in recruiting.

When Mike Riley first got here, he didn't have his support staff in place right away, or a full boat of assistant coaches going out. They mainly worked on keeping the Huskers current committed players on board, and you didn't see a big wave of new offers go out right away.

With Frost's staff, that hasn't been the case. As of Friday at 1 pm, HuskerOnline has confirmed 44 new 2018 offers that went out over Frost's first week.

This appears to be the one major advantage Frost's staff has had coming in together. They've been able to take over their recruiting plan from Central Florida, and execute at Nebraska the second they walked on that plane last Saturday.

Frost and his staff still plan to be back in Orlando this week for practices on Tuesday and Thursday to get their former team ready for their New Year's Day date in the Peach Bowl.

However, there still appears to be some snags that need to be worked out, as Frost said on multiple national radio interviews this week that "he wants" to coaches his former team in the game against Auburn, but they are continuing to get the "logistics" worked out.

It's hard to know at this point what all of those logistics are, whether it has to do with money or how and when practices will take place over this next week.

The biggest challenge probably will be from now until Dec. 20 when both UCF and Nebraska are trying to close out their early signing classes. Coaches can only be out the road recruiting through Dec. 17, so theoretically they will have plenty of time to get UCF ready for this game.

When you look at the history of Nebraska's roster size, every head coach over the last 20 years has done it a little differently.

Mike Riley carried a roster around 130, which allowed him to have about 45 walk-on players in the program. Bo Pelini started out with roster sizes of 145-150, which let him have about 60 to 65 walk-on players on the team, but he dropped that number down to 130-135 over his last few years at NU.

Bill Callahan liked a roster of about 115 with about 30 walk-on players on it. He kept far and away the smallest roster in NU history based on the way his practices were structured.

In comparison, Tom Osborne's final team in 1997 had 188 players on it, while Frank Solich carried roster sizes of 150 to 189 players. NU took huge walk-on classes in those eras, which allowed more players to filter through the system, and that gave you a better chance to find a diamond in the rough.

I look for Frost to grow this roster. I don't ever see a time where they have teams of 190 players, but I think getting the roster back up to 140 to 150 players makes sense. It will allow them to take more walk-ons per year, vs. the approach we've seen under Riley where a lot of quality guys with a chance to develop don't even get an opportunity because of the smaller roster size. NU is scheduled to host a walk-on day this week on Wednesday. It will be interesting to hear the plan Frost has laid out for that.

Over December, we've seen more drama in the coaching business than in quite some time.

Luckily for Nebraska, they were no part of this drama. You can argue the Huskers had the most successful coaching change made this month, especially when you see how quickly Frost and his staff have transitioned this month and used the momentum they gained from their 12-0 season to NU's advantage.

It's been fun to watch, and it's hard to believe this staff has only been here one week, because what they've accomplished already has people very optimistic about the future.