USA TODAY High School Sports‘ Friday Night Notes is a weekly high school football recruiting recap that looks at the latest news from around the country—from the Class of 2022 to ’23 and beyond.
Look back 30 years ago in the college football world, and you’ll see that part of the battle for supremacy included the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
Tommy Frazier, Ahman Green and Lawrence Phillips. Osborne is at the helm. A slew of defensive standouts, Ed Stewart and the Blackshirt dynasties. The overall product made the Cornhuskers a powerhouse contender and a recruiting mecca for high school football’s best year after year.
And though Nebraska has had success since then, nothing has matched the overall dynamics of the stretch back in the 1990s.
Instead, it’s been more of a spiral toward a gray area among college football teams, where coaching woes and atypical records have been more of the norm in Lincoln. From an outsider’s eye, those shortcomings had left the fans, alumni and boosters—one and the same—hoping for a resurgence, for the trend to shift back to when Nebraska ruled.
And with that, we arrive at a point in time when the 2020s are the new 1990s for Nebraska football.
Where, overall, things… things don’t seem so meh.
While head coach Scott Frost’s latest haul isn’t a 5-star bonanza, there is something notable about landing top in-state recruits. (They aren’t leaving the state? Check.) Casey Thompson and Chubba Purdy highlight a transfer portal group that only adds to the upgrades for 2022 and beyond.
Surprising? To me, yes. Very much so. And give credit to Mark Whipple, who kicks off Year One as offensive coordinator, for much of that. The former Pitt OC has been around the recruiting game for decades, including the years when Nebraska was tops. So he knows what it takes.
He also knows that recruiting is simply a teaser for the larger work ahead.
“Recruiting, no question, is really, really important,” Whipple told 247Sports. “But a lot of it still has to do with development and the coaching culture.”
Here’s more from the notebook…
