Nebraska Fired Scott Frost After Losing To Georgia Southern At Home

The Nebraska Cornhuskers did something they’ve never done in their long history as a college football program on Saturday night, when they scored 42 points at home and still lost to Georgia Southern — a team they paid $1.4 million to come to Lincoln to play the game.

Nebraska was 254-0 in program history when scoring 35 or more points at home prior to Saturday night, and having that streak snapped was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Trev Alberts and the Nebraska athletic department. On Sunday, embattled head coach Scott Frost was fired, which everyone had expected was coming later this season, but happened earlier than expected after dropping to 1-2 in dismal fashion.

What makes the timing so stunning is that Frost’s buyout drops from $15 million to $7.5 million if he was fired after October 1 of this year, so most everyone anticipated Nebraska would just gut it out until then. However, the team was so bad coming off a 3-9 season that they just couldn’t wait and clearly some wealthy boosters stepped up and said they’ll cover the extra $7.5 million.

Frost went 16-31 in his four-plus seasons at his alma mater, failing to come close to replicating the success he had at UCF prior. His Huskers were famously terrible in one-score games, which is usually an indicator of poor coaching, and eventually bad luck could no longer be reasoned as the excuse for their struggles executing in close games. Where Frost’s career goes from here is a fascinating question, as he was once a rising star who now figures to go back to a coordinator gig for awhile before getting another crack at a head coaching job given how disastrous his Nebraska tenure was.

For the Huskers, their search begins for another new coach, as they find themselves lost in the morass of the Big Ten West, despite still striving to recapture the glory days of old. Whoever steps into this vacancy will have their work cut out for them, especially as the Big Ten only figures to get more difficult with the addition of USC and potentially others.