'Old school' testing ramps up Huskers' winter conditioning

Head coach Scott Frost’s goal from the start has been to return Nebraska’s football program to the level it was at when he was a national champion quarterback for the Huskers in the late-1990s.

While that process has undoubtedly been an uphill battle over the past three years, Frost and his staff found a new way to bring back a tradition to motivate their current players.

At the end of NU’s winter strength and conditioning program, the team went through performance testing on a series of hand-picked drills and workouts. Those included 40-yard dash, 10-yard dash, agility run, vertical jump, squats, and hang cleans.

Not only that, Frost had the Huskers do so with the knowledge that their results would likely be made public for everyone to see, just like in the old days under former strength coach Boyd Epley.

“We just did testing for the first time since I’ve been here – old-school testing like we used to do with the performance index…” Frost said. “Seeing the improvement our guys made in those areas, I think, gives them a lot of confidence.”

Frost said he planned to take the nostalgia even further by releasing many of Nebraska’s scores to the public sometime this week “so people can have an idea of the work that Zach (Duval) and his group did and the work the players did this offseason.”

Players who spoke with media during NU’s spring press conference on Monday said knowing their testing scores would be put out there for all to see provided some added motivation and competition during winter conditioning.

That translated into all but seven players on the entire roster improving their marks in every tested category, Frost said.

“It was good for us. Competing is always good,” senior outside linebacker JoJo Domann said. “To be able to go through winter conditioning knowing that our skillset is going to be tested at the end of it and then possibly be shared with the world gave us that extrinsic motivation that we shouldn’t necessarily need, but it’s also nice.”

While the official numbers aren’t available to the public yet, Frost listed a few of the most notable performances from the testing sessions.

Senior safety Deontai Williams broke the program’s record in the agility run. Sophomore wide receiver Wyatt Liewer would have tied the previous record.

Junior receiver Oliver Martin registered the team’s highest mark in the vertical jump at 40 inches.

Sophomore center Cam Jurgens said another motivator during winter workouts was seeing how previous Husker players scored during their testing.

He said the numbers put up by the 2021 group were right on par with some of the program’s greats, which proved they weren’t as far off physically as some may have thought.

“The point Frost would emphasize was that they used to do this back in the 90s, so being able to see those guys’ scores and then see some of the guys on our team just blow those out of the water, it shows us that we’re just as athletic and big, and we can do everything that they did in the 90s.”