“Just get to the season without making any more headlines”: Scott Frost, the Luke McCaffrey transfer, and the Beckman Effect

I know we’ve picked on Scott Frost a lot, but his latest work is just impossible for me personally to ignore on behalf of Nebraska Cornhuskers fans.

I say that because right now, going into year 4 without making a bowl game but with some worrying signs of the state of the program, even the most optimistic Husker fans probably want to just get to the season without Frost making any more headlines. They already have to know his program is headed for a dubious payoff season of sorts, and there’s a lot of anxiety that comes with waiting for a season where you need results or you’re starting over. Every time he opens his mouth and gets dunked on, then, makes one feel worse about Nebraska’s prospects even if it doesn’t seem related to their performance.

How can I know this feeling?

Simple. It’s how I felt in the offseason with Tim Beckman.

All I wanted from those offseasons is for there to be no news with his name in the headlines because I knew it couldn’t possibly be good.

All this is to say that Scott Frost took a couple minutes to complain about the kids these days being irresponsible with their futures today by just transferring on a whim willy-nilly and say how bad an idea he thinks it is. He didn’t say it like this, but he was basically saying “Luke McCaffrey is a big time peepee head and I hope he has some embarrassing anal leakage at his new destination” without naming names:

This on its own is a pretty petulant take that you’d expect from a fossil like Jim Boeheim, but not from the one-time whiz kid...unless you’ve heard anything he’s said as Nebraska’s head coach. The flourish with which he casually lumps Alabama in with Nebraska as equivalent destinations would be cute if there were any signs it was less than sincere.

But then the McCaffrey boys caught wind of this, and Max McCaffrey pointed out something interesting on Scott Frost’s wikipedia:

That’s right. He repackaged the “complaining about wearing hoodies while himself wearing a hoodie” bit as a different Old Man Yells At Cloud moment.

It’s like Frost saw Pat Fitzgerald’s 2019 offseason performance as the youngest surly boomer in the profession and has been trying to one-up him ever since. He just can’t stop throwing pick sixes in his press conferences.

While he hasn’t had the worst pick-six media moment of the offseason, that’s only because I don’t know how you top “pissing off a bunch of sexual assault survivors, some of whom were your teammates once” as far as the worst PR appearance by a coach goes.

What is becoming increasingly apparent, however, is that this clumsy windmill-tilting is who Scott Frost really is, and his history as a player in Lincoln is doing him a lot of favors as far as his reputation with fans is concerned. His mouth certainly isn’t.

This season will go a long way towards building his legacy as a coach, but his tactical decision-making in press conferences kind of bodes poorly for that.

The Huskers open the season in Champaign against a coach who’s batting 1.000 in press conferences on his current job.