Scott Frost’s press conference after Illinois loss: ‘It looked like the same movie today’
By SDS Staff
Published:
Scott Frost started off on the wrong foot Saturday in Nebraska’s 30-22 loss against Illinois.
Frost’s Nebraska record now falls to 12-21, and it could be a long season ahead.
Here’s what Frost said after Nebraska lost to Illinois:
OPENING STATEMENT
“It looked like the same movie today. We can’t let it be that way. These kids, I feel bad for them because they put in so much hard work. We put a lot on this game, and they’ll bounce back, but I know how much better our team is right now than what we’ve been. Didn’t always look like today.”
WILL HE WILL MAKE CHANGES GOING FORWARD?
“Yeah, we keep doing the same things. I’d have a lot of nickels if I had a nickel for every time we talked about a lot of that stuff. It wasn’t a ton of penalties, it was, I think, five for 67 (yards) is what they said. But they came at the wrong time and the one really hurt us. We’ve got to be more disciplined than that.”
DISCUSSES THE RUNNING BACK RUN GAME
“Not very good. I will say, I give them a ton of credit. It’s hard to come in as a new staff and get a team ready. They’re a veteran team and so I’m sure that helped them pick it up quicker. But we — our strategy for this was to rep against a certain look all of camp against our defense and we guessed wrong on what they were going to be in. Their defensive guys come from a place where they’ve been a lot of odd front. We didn’t get more than four or five snaps of odd, I don’t think. We had a contingency plan for that and we were going to go back to stuff that we’ve been running all camp, we went through that this week with the kids. But we certainly didn’t get as many reps at it as we normally would. Bottom line, we got to run them all better early and then once we got behind, we weren’t able to commit to it as much.”
WHY DID HE THINK ILLINOIS WOULD DO THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT IT DID?
“It was all a guessing game for us. Bret’s been a bunch of places, their d-coordinator’s been places. Our best guess was they were gonna be a lot like what they were at Missouri and in the spring game. And they weren’t.”
DID HE THINK THE OFFENSIVE LINE WOULD IMPOSE ITS WILL?
“That’s what we wanted to have happen. But you know, that’s this league. When one team gets ahead, they can run it, and the other team has to do other things. We certainly had our chances to be ahead at halftime. We gave them two on the safety and gave them seven by not getting the turnover, and then got a strip sack fumble. They earned it, but we gave them those 16 points. The one thing I’m really disappointed in is we didn’t respond very well coming out of halftime, letting them go on a 75-play drive. We needed to make a stand right there. Late in the game, I thought the guys fought. But very disappointing, man. Disappointing.”
HOW PLAYERS REACTED TO ROUGHING THE PASSER AGAINST CALEB TANNOR?
“The one thing we’ve never gotten around here is this spark. You know, we need to win a couple of close games, string some wins together, get some momentum. The guys really believe they’re better, they know they’re better, they are better. They’re better than they’ve ever been. We got more talent, more depth; I’ve been saying that. But they need some good things to happen if they’re really going to believe and sometimes I feel like we’re snake-bit with the timing of when these things happen, but we’ve got to find a way through.”
WHAT WAS THE EXPLANATION HE GOT FOR THE CALL?
“I didn’t get an explanation about either of the 15-yard penalties on the same play. …Live, I was watching the ball. On the replay, I didn’t think the hit was late at all. It was bang-bang. So, I don’t know what it was for, but it was certainly a big play.”
DID HE CONSIDER BEING MORE AGGRESSIVE BEFORE HALFTIME?
“I wanted to go score when we got the fumble before half. We had our chances. I think (they) were in a broken defense on our third down call. I don’t think they got lined up right and they took our first slip away, because I think they were a little confused with our formation. Adrian went to his next look and they twisted, and we didn’t pass it off well enough. They got the ball out and the thing spun right on the ground for them to pick up. We’ll get our break, sooner or later.”
HOW WELL DID ADRIAN MARTINEZ PLAY?
“He played okay. You know, there’s some plays we got to make. I thought he made some good plays, there’s some plays we got to make. You know, the throw to Wyatt (Liewer) in the end zone, put us up two touchdowns. You know, they had a similar play and they made the throw and the catch, and we didn’t. Two touchdowns up in the first half changes the game so, you know, this league man, a lot of games are gonna ride on those — a play here and a play there. We didn’t make enough of them today. So, I need to do a better job making sure we avoid the mistakes and keep putting them in situations where they can rise up and make those plays.”
WHAT’S THE KEY TO GETTING THIS SEASON BACK IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION?
“I believe in my heart this team can still have a special season. We just have better players than we’ve had and we got a better team than we’ve had. Now, I expected today to go a lot different. Just didn’t go our way early on, and still should have probably been in good shape at halftime and then got really behind the eight ball at the start of the second half. I thought our guys fought back but we got to play better an entire 60 minutes.”
You can watch Frost’s postgame press conference below:
Saturday Down South reports and comments on the news around the Southeastern Conference as well as larger college football topics.
