Frost: Don't expect to see permanent captains in 2018

The topic of captains has been an interesting one the last several years at Nebraska.

Every head coach since 2004 has done it a little bit differently than Tom Osborne and Frank Solich.

In Bill Callahan's first season in 2004, he had just one senior captain, two juniors, and one sophomore. Bo Pelini chose to go with a rotating captain system each week, and then permanent captains were named after the season.

Under Mike Riley, he did things differently each of his three seasons. In 2015 Riley's staff appointed captains before the season without a player vote.

In 2016 the players voted for captains outright, and four-year starting quarterback Tommy Armstrong was not selected after being a captain the previous year. In 2017 the players once again voted, but there was more control on the selection process of who could be selected.

When head coach Scott Frost looks at how he'll name captains, he's not going to reinvent the wheel. However, he said don't expect to see permanent captains named for this season any time soon.

“I want to kind of stick with what’s traditional for Nebraska, eventually," Frost said. "The time has to be right to do that.

"Eventually, we are going to have a unity council or leadership council on this team too. I think right now, I don’t think we are ready for that. We need to get everybody on the team to understand the culture that we need.

"Once we get to that point, then there will inevitably be leaders that understand it better than others. Then our captains will be made up from the guys from that unity council. Nebraska has had captains around here for a long time, so when the time is right, we’ll probably get to that point too. In the meantime, we’ve got work to do with the entire football team to make sure they understand what we want to do and how we want to do it.”

Frost reiterated that don't expect to see any permanent captains named this summer or even in late August as we've seen in past years.

“I don’t think this year we are just going to announce four captains like maybe we did back in the day at Nebraska," Frost said. "We have a lot of work to do to help train our leaders and get leaders established. Probably this year it will be a rotation of guys that we use as captains for games that come out of our pool of best leaders.”