ATLANTA -- Life is good for Scott Frost at the moment. The now current Nebraska head coach is back at his alma mater and coming off an undefeated season at UCF as the toast of the college football awards circuit.
Despite things going about as well as can be for the first person to go 13-0 as both a player and a head coach, Frost still isn’t exactly happy at how his old program was treated by the College Football Playoff Selection Committee over the course of the 2017 season and had plenty to say about the matter over the weekend.
“I hope this season with UCF starts a conversation as to where those teams should be ranked and gives them an opportunity,” Frost told the media on Saturday night as he picked up the Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award. “I know a lot of people around our program, and myself included, that felt insulted by the rankings.
“It seemed like every week they were elevating a new two-and three-loss team ahead of us. To us, it appeared like it was a concerted effort to keep us at a reasonable distance away from the top four so they didn’t have a controversy.”
While the Knights debuted in the Selection Committee’s Top 25 at No. 18 as the month of October closed, the team rose just six spots to No. 12 in the final CFP poll. Perhaps most jarring to those in Orlando was when three-loss Mississippi State leapfrogged the team in mid-November.
“I don’t know if our team deserved to be in the playoff or not, but I think we deserved to be ranked higher and we proved it,” added Frost.
The Cornhuskers coach didn’t hold back when it came to the Playoff system as a whole either. In addition to advocating for an eight-team format, Frost also noted that the SEC and ACC are a little “smarter” for only playing eight conference games to give them an advantage over the Big Ten, Big 12 and Pac-12. While he didn’t quite advocate for UCF’s decision to crown themselves national champions, he certainly hoped that what happened as the 2017 campaign unfolded would help even the field a little bit for Group of Five programs against their bigger brethren.
It will be interesting to see if Frost’s tune changes any as he transitions to the big chair in Lincoln but for now it seems the Knights’ old boss is still one of the team’s biggest cheerleaders.