College football fans spend an inordinate amount of time on certain debates. None gets people tied up more often than the one about Nebraska’s place in the modern sport.

That conversation is so fraught, the word “modern” itself just tripped somebody up. How could a team with five titles since 1970, three in the 1990s, and a BCS title trip in this millennium have been passed by? But how can a team with no conference titles since 1999 still be considered a power?

You know the whole back-and-forth from there. No in-state talent! Five hundred miles! The option! It all worked before! Walk-ons! Weightlifting! Great fans! Fans are too, um, great! Prop 48! And now with Big Ten era additions, like Can’t recruit Texas any more! and Just have to beat Wisconsin!

Half of the selling points on new head coach Scott Frost were about the native Nebraskan making the Huskers great again. The 1997 title-winning QB already knew the state and school inside and out, and if anybody could make all that stuff real, it’d be the head coach of a 13-0 team running a modernized option offense.

The fun part: he sounds like every Nebraska fan. Though he last worked in Lincoln as a GA in 2002, he still knows the grand unified theory of Nebraska, including a disdain for Bill Callahan’s West Coast offense and all the stuff about just needing to do it the way it was done under Tom Osborne.

One quote in this story by Bruce Feldman that could’ve come either from the new head coach or from an articulate internet commenter:

“Barry Alvarez came from here and saw what worked, and he used Nebraska’s blueprint more than Nebraska has,” Frost says. “We should be able to out-recruit Wisconsin. We’re not anywhere near huge talent bases, but we’re closer to it than they are. People say Lincoln’s cold. Wisconsin is cold. Michigan is cold. Minnesota is cold. We should be the highest-rated recruiting class at least in our half [of the Big Ten] every year with the facilities we have to offer and with the tradition we have here. We don’t need the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. We just need a top-25 class every year, and we can develop it.”

Nebraska basically averages top-25 classes, about 10 to 20 spots better than Wisconsin’s, which means Frost is saying recruiting only needs to hold steady in order for the Huskers to finally complete the Nebraska-Wisconsin cultural exchange and claim the Big Ten West.

And the argument is reasonable. If Nebraska won, then so could Wisconsin, and now that Wisconsin has, so can Nebraska.

Like every other Nebraska fan, Frost can recite the entire case for the Huskers’ future viability. Unlike any other Nebraska fan, he has the potential to make it happen.

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