Misery Index: Nebraska's issues under Scott Frost on display again in completely unsatisfying win
The current state of Nebraska football can be best summed up by how joyless it was Saturday when the Cornhuskers finally pulled away in the fourth quarter to beat North Dakota, 38-17.
It takes a lot for fans to be mad after victories. They have an addiction to hope. When they are given even a little bit of a reason to see a better future on the horizon, it triggers an almost Pavlovian response to focus on the good and ignore the bad.
As the Misery Index returns for yet another season, we are confident Nebraska fans are smarter than that. Because while Saturday’s 38-17 victory over North Dakota might look like something close to normal when viewed as an isolated event, the context of that performance makes it merely another symptom of the malaise and dysfunction that has defined the Scott Frost era.
In Year 5, we shouldn’t still be talking about a lack of offensive identity or endemic special teams blunders or a defense that struggles to stand up to anyone with physicality.
And yet, that’s all we can talk about with Nebraska because it keeps showing up on the field. When you looked at the Nebraska season on paper, Saturday was supposed to be an easy, breezy afternoon for a team coming back from a difficult trip to Ireland where it inexplicably blew an 11-point second half lead to Northwestern.
Instead, Nebraska found itself in a real fight against an FCS team that went 5-6 last season. Sure, the Cornhuskers did enough to win. But being tied 17-17 late in the third quarter and needing to come up with a big fourth quarter is nothing to celebrate under these circumstances. If anything, it only masks the massive issues that Frost has yet to solve despite having five years now to do it.
Week 1 winners and losers: Georgia off to dominant start, ECU stumbles
College football Top 25 Week 1 scores: Everything that happened Saturday
Before Saturday, Nebraska had lost seven straight games. It hasn’t had a winning season under Frost, who has collected three of his 16 victories at the school against FCS opponents. His Big Ten record is an abysmal 10-26.
These are the facts, and they are so overwhelming that neither excuses nor context will make them look better. Frost’s fate may be sealed, but on the slim chance it’s not, the narrative can only change if Nebraska passes the eye test as a good team. If the Cornhuskers couldn’t do that Saturday against the weakest opponent they'll face all season, it’s hard to see when it will ever happen.
That’s why Nebraska is No. 1 on this week’s Misery Index, a weekly measurement of knee-jerk reactions based on what each fan base just watched:
FOUR MORE IN MISERY
Oregon: Ever since the shocking news that Southern Cal and UCLA are going to the Big Ten, the Ducks have been adrift. Are they stuck in a diminished Pac-12 forever? Does Phil Knight, the Nike co-founder and main Oregon benefactor, have enough juice to get the Ducks into a better conference? And where does first-year football coach Dan Lanning fit into all this as he tries to recruit well enough to lift Oregon from good to great? With all these major questions surrounding the future of the program, it wasn’t an ideal time to take on the Georgia machine. Oregon couldn’t exactly back out of a game that paid the school a $4.5 million appearance fee, but maybe they wish they would have after a 49-3 beatdown that exposed how big the talent gap really is with the best in the country. It doesn’t matter what conference you play in – if that’s the best you can do against a team like Georgia, a national championship is a long way off.
STAY UP-TO-DATE: Subscribe to our Sports newsletter now!
Louisville: The Cardinals haven’t had three consecutive losing seasons since 1985-87 when Howard Schnellenberger had just taken over. That’s what is on the line this season for Scott Satterfield, who had very little goodwill left in the bank with Louisville fans after interviewing for the South Carolina job in 2020. Satterfield didn’t do much to mend fences in 2021 by going 6-7, including a 31-point loss to rival Kentucky. Now, after beginning 2022 with a 31-7 loss to Syracuse, Satterfield is very much in hot seat territory. There’s still time to recover, but it could get ugly fast after such an inexcusable performance.
Virginia Tech: The problem isn’t so much that a first-year coach lost an opener on the road to Old Dominion, 20-17. The talent-deficient roster Brent Pry inherited always made that a possibility. The problem is that Virginia Tech is playing road games at Old Dominion in the first place – not just this year but in 2024, 2027, 2029 and 2031 as well.
If you’re a Virginia Tech fan, it’s fair to wonder why your administration has agreed to give up games at Lane Stadium to play so often at an in-state school in a lesser conference where you have little to gain and a lot to lose. Even in the best of circumstances, that’s a potential problem. For a Virginia Tech program trying to get some momentum after the mediocrity of the Justin Fuente era, such reckless scheduling can crush entire seasons.
Appalachian State: There’s no shame in coming up on the wrong end of the weekend’s wildest game, a 63-61 loss to North Carolina. But there aren’t going to be many teams all season that lose a game in which it had 649 yards of offense and scored three touchdowns in the final four minutes. Unfortunately for the Mountaineers, they also gave up two — including a wild touchdown return on an onside kick attempt — and couldn’t convert a pair of two-point conversion attempts, either of which would have given them the win. It was a missed opportunity for a win that would have really meant a lot to that program.
MISERABLE, BUT NOT MISERABLE ENOUGH
Charlotte: Fans of the nascent 49ers program were once worried that Will Healy, their 37-year-old wunderkind coach, would bolt for a big-time program at the first opportunity. But after winning just five of the last 14 games, including a putrid 41-24 loss to William & Mary, there’s no plausible path to the power conferences anytime soon. At this point, winning in Conference USA seems like enough of a challenge.
Navy: After the 2017 season, Ken Niumatalolo was on the verge of going to Arizona only to see the rug pulled out from under him when the school’s boosters wanted Kevin Sumlin. That was a disaster for Arizona, but it hasn’t been great for Navy either. In his 15th year at Navy, it’s gotten stale for Niumatalolo. Aside from a tremendous 11-2 season in 2019, Navy has finished with a losing record three times in the last four years. And Saturday’s 14-7 loss to Delaware doesn’t suggest that trend is going to change in 2022.
Colorado: If a time machine took you back to the early 1990s and placed you in the middle of Boulder, Colorado, fans would accuse you of being on many illegal substances if you told them they would experience just one winning football season between 2006 and 2021 (not counting the COVID year of 2020 when the Buffaloes finished 4-2). But that’s the reality for Colorado, and a season-opening 38-13 loss to TCU does not raise hopes that third-year coach Karl Dorrell is going to be the guy to reverse that streak.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nebraska's issues under Scott Frost on display in win vs. North Dakota
