Back in Wood River, on that worn grass that is forever appealing on autumn Friday nights, Gerrod Lambrecht used to snap the football to Scott Frost. It is made mention of here because there is something to be said for the connection a quarterback sometimes forms with his center.

It’s usually hard to pinpoint when the greatest trust is formed in a relationship between two people. But at some point probably way closer to those days as teens than these days as men now in their early 40s, they found it. And so the conversations continued between the two friends even as they both had successes in different jobs and different area codes.

“I’ve always known that he was somebody that I could trust almost implicitly,” Lambrecht says.

Yet you can also excuse Lambrecht’s better half for assuming that some of the talk the two shared as they grew older about one particular subject was nothing more than idle chatter.

Those talks? Oh, they went kind of like this: One day Frost was going to become a head coach and when that day happened Lambrecht was going to move on from his successful career outside of athletics to become basically Frost’s chief of staff.

Sure, sure. Just men filling the air with words.

And then around Thanksgiving of 2015, Lambrecht’s phone buzzed and this whole thing got real. One supposes that place is as good as any to start. Begin with Lambrecht explaining, and then others from the Husker staff joining in the telling of how they not only got to know Frost, but found their way with him to Orlando, and then to Lincoln, connected to the same adventure that seems only at its early stages.

What follows won’t always be in a straight line. It never is when putting a coaching staff together and building a football program the way you want it.

Lambrecht: “It’s funny because I was actually in St. Louis for the Thanksgiving holiday when Scott called me. And I was with my wife’s family at the time. He gave me the call to come on down and I told my wife about it, and I’ll never forget that she said: ‘You’re going to do what?’ I said, ‘Honey, I’ve been trying to tell you about this for a while now. We’ve been preparing for it.’ She just said, ‘Man, I thought that was just guys talking. I didn’t think you were serious.’ I think I was down in Orlando within two days of him giving me the phone call.

Lambrecht had been living in the Indianapolis area, and was about 15 months off of selling his ownership interests in a healthcare company.

Lambrecht: “I was just doing a little bit of consulting at the time, because I actually had been in a mode where I was preparing for Scott to get a job a year earlier than what he had done. So I was kind of in the mode of preparing for that. So I was just in that interim period. I was trying to get a company off the ground, trying to do a little consulting work, and then basically Scott got the job and it was off to Orlando.”

Others were getting the call too. Quarterbacks coach Mario Verduzco first met Frost when he was a player at Stanford, while Verduzco was attending a quarterbacks school that included teaching from Bill Walsh and Terry Shea. That is still a clear picture to Verduzco all these years later.

Verduzco: “He was out there throwing. I just remember him being such a good looking athlete. Really light on his feet. Big and strong and all those sorts of things that you would want in a quarterback. (laughs) For example, at UCF, our first year, he was the best quarterback on our team.”

Little did Verduzco know he would one day be coaching peers with that QB. Frost was a defensive coordinator at Northern Iowa while Verduzco coached there. First impressions: Favorable, you could say.

Verduzco: “I told my wife, ‘Man, if Frosty wants to do anything in this profession, it’s just a matter of if that’s what he wants to do.’ He was really bright. So intelligent. He put in the Tampa 2 defense for us. Knew everything from the front end to the back end of the defense. Then when you couple that with his background of offensive football, he was a pretty dynamic defensive coordinator.”

Remember that thing about not everything going in a straight line? The man who is now Nebraska's defensive coordinator, Erik Chinander, meanwhile, was coaching on the offensive side of the ball at Northern Iowa while Frost led the defense. They grew close. Pretty much had to as it turns out.

Chinander: “We lived in a little tiny apartment for a year. I knew I wanted to be with Coach Frost from the minute I met him. I knew he was going to be something. I didn’t know if he was going to be the head coach at Wartburg College or if he was going to be the head coach of the Chicago Bears, but I knew he was going to be something.”

The coaches liked each other as much off the field as they did on it.

Verduzco: “He plays guitar, you know. Being a classical musician myself, he would come over after games or whatever it might be, or after practices on the weekend or whatnot. It would be him and Chins and (Mario’s wife) Cate and so on and so forth, and we would have a little cheer and play some music together. He’s good at playing Bob Marley. Then we would have the song books by The Eagles and song books by The Beatles. Flip open the music and whatever song you might want to play, start playing.”

The musical get-togethers had to stop when Frost moved to Oregon. But after he was put in charge of coaching the QBs for the Ducks, Frost still kept Verduzco in mind.

Verduzco: “I got the sense from Northern Iowa he appreciated how we did things in terms of quarterback play, and obviously that’s why he brought me out to (speak at) Oregon, you know. But you never know how things are going to go in this profession. Hell, I could’ve been the 10th, 8th, 5th, 4th guy he called (to coach at UCF). I don’t know that. But I was honored to get the call, no doubt. I was thrilled. I was excited. I was fired up.”

Frost’s first hires at UCF, best his staff recalled, were offensive coordinator Troy Walters, Verduzco and running backs coach Ryan Held, joining the two coaches he’d retain from the previous UCF staff: tight ends coach Sean Beckton and defensive backs coach Travis Fisher. Length of a person’s resume was down on the list for Frost.

Frost: “The two traits I was looking for was intelligence and character. I valued those two things even over experience in some cases. I had guys in mind for a long time, probably just a couple three years into my Oregon career, guys that I had met and knew were smart guys and would be good coaches. I was lucky to get a lot of them down with us in Florida. We retained two guys from the staff down there that are both home runs for us to have on staff in Coach Fisher and Coach Beckton. The camaraderie among those guys to have their ability to work together has really been one of the things that has helped us win.”

When Frost was at Oregon, Walters remembers Frost occasionally calling him when there was a head coaching job that might be open to him. There was a point a few years back when Frost mentioned the Purdue job being a possibility.

Walters: “He asked if he got the job if I’d come with him.”

No Purdue, no matter. There would be plenty of other opportunities.

Walters: “Whenever he had that opportunity, or thought he had a good chance, he would give me a call to see if I was going to go with him. And deep down, the other schools weren’t really a good fit for him and for me. UCF turned out to be the right fit, and the right timing.”

It sure felt that way to Held, who had gone to school with Frost at Nebraska, and sometimes used to draw up plays with the coach in their spare time. After years of grinding hard as a junior-college coach, he was about to be connected with Frost again.

Held: “I was at a high school, actually, watching practice. He called me and kind of the finalization of, ‘Hey you want to do this?’ I was at a really good high school too. It was pretty awesome. It’s that deal, where you’re like, ‘Golly, it’s actually going to happen.’ And then when he called and said, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?’ It was pretty special, there’s no doubt about it. You work your whole life and your goal is to be a Division I coach…”

Verduzco: “It was an honor, to be quite honest. And I don’t mean to speak any sort of hyperbole, but it really was. I just asked him if he could call Coach Steck (Dave Steckel), who was the longtime defensive coordinator at Missouri, and then Steck hired me at Missouri State when he took over there. I just asked if he would call Steck and get Steck’s blessing. Steck called me right after the call and said, ‘Mario, you gotta go.’ … Frosty called me back and I said, ‘When you need me?’ He said, ‘Whenever you can get here.’”

Held: “About four or five years ago, we’d talk and he’d shoot me a message like, ‘Hey, I might be up for this. I would love to bring you with me’ type deal. So that obviously made you excited that you were at least in consideration. But I know how this business works. Just because a guy tells you that you’re in the mix doesn’t mean he’s going to bring you. I’ve heard stories from many coaches that that doesn’t happen. But he held up his end of the bargain and believed in me."

Frost quickly met up with Beckton, who had coached at UCF for 17 years at that point. Beckton had not only played and coached at UCF. He was in the UCF Hall of Fame.

Beckton: “He had known that I had been there a long time. Basically when he got hired, I guess the AD, the president, whatnot, said this guy here can be advantageous. We’re not telling you what to do. But he’s going to be advantageous for you in the transition.

“He came in the first day and said, ‘Hey, I want you to be here. I need you on this staff.’ That made me feel good as a coach. I’ve been in situations previous where I basically had to prove myself. He basically said, ‘No, I want you here.’ He was upfront. He said, ‘I have a receivers coach coming who’s going to be my coordinator.’ He said, ‘I want you to coach tight ends.' I said, ‘That’s no problem.’ I’ve coached receivers, DBs and tight ends. It’s nothing for me to learn. So at that point we moved full-fledged ahead in recruiting trying to build a roster of talent basically trying to fit his offense he had at Oregon and implement it at UCF.’”

The coaches admired the delicate dance Frost had in trying to merge the right pieces together for his first staff as a head coach. It is easy to swing and miss on at least one hire, or hire two good coaches who clash because of personalities.

Held: “I think when you’re putting together a staff, that’s the hardest thing as a coach, because you got to find guys that mesh and blend and get along in the sandbox. Because I think there are some staffs where that’s not the case and it’s drama and issues and everything like that.”

Frost kept adding, with Chinander taking over the defense, and Greg Austin coaching the O-line. Outside linebackers coach and special teams coordinator Jovan Dewitt, who along with defensive line coach Mike Dawson, were the final two hires at UCF sometime in January of 2016. Barrett Ruud was hired as a quality control administrator. When it came to that important hire of Chinander as D-coordinator, Frost had seen the way his mind worked while at both Northern Iowa and Oregon.

Frost: “He’s an unbelievable intelligent football coach. Intelligent people are able to solve problems and come up with solutions. And he’s a man of tremendous character. If you give me a room full of guys like that, we’re going to find ways to win."

Dewitt, who also coached at Northern Iowa, quickly noticed something else when it came to many on the staff.

Dewitt: “A lot of us had kind of grown up starting out at small coaches, with Coach Austin at Mesabi (Junior College), and me at Northern Michigan and Fort Scott, and Chins at Ellsworth. We kind of all came up through the ranks. One of the things that you can appreciate when you’re working with a group of people like that is they have perspective. A lot of staffs don’t have perspective, with what looks like it could be hard on the outside, but you’re actually like, ‘That’s nothing. Let’s move on.’

"Whereas you get some of the staffs that have never done anything but a major college football program. So they don’t know what it’s like to not have some of those benefits. So a lot of our staff members have come up quote-unquote ‘the hard way’ through coaching. So we knew there was going to be some challenges in Year 1 but we were all kind of simpatico in the direction we wanted to go and how we wanted to handle some of those challenges.”

Dewitt had previously been coaching at Army, but called the state of Florida home and recruited the area heavily. He had talked on and off for the last nine months with Frost and got a call around Christmas in 2015 gauging his interest in coaching in Orlando. Dewitt was at his home in West Palm Beach and was definitely up for coaching closer to home, but didn’t hear back from Frost for a few weeks. He didn’t sweat it. He knew Frost had a lot to tackle.

Dewitt: “One day I talked to Chinander a couple of times and then Scott called me up and said, ‘Hey do you want to do this?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely, let’s go.’ I had flown back and forth from West Point and West Palm so much that I knew every stewardess on the flight. Like, they literally had a drink waiting for me on the plane. There’s a JetBlue flight from West Point to West Palm. I literally was getting on a plane when he called me. There was no hesitation. (laughs) There was no second thought. I was going to go work with some of my best friends and get back close to family.”

While UCF had gone 0-12 the season before, Beckton was among the voices who told them there was some talent on the roster, but many guys had fallen out of love with the game. It didn’t all go just right immediately, but the staff blend felt right very quickly to most involved.

Verduzco: “Truly the fascinating thing about it is all the guys he hired, as I remember, there wasn’t this sort of wait-and-see period ... at least from my perspective. I don’t remember that there were any egos and all that sort of business, you know what I’m saying. That sometimes can happen on a staff. I don’t remember any of that, ever, at all. I think he really had a good feel for the kind of guys he wanted to hire. Not that I’m inadvertently paying myself a compliment - don’t get me wrong about that. Because I’m a frickin’ knucklehead, as you probably know. But all the guys, they’re just a good group of guys. They’re good ballcoaches. They love what they’re doing. They’re technicians at what they do. And we were all excited to be there, I think having the sense that something special was going to take place.”

UCF won its first game against South Carolina State 38-0, then lost at Michigan 51-14, then dropped a 30-24 heartbreaker in double-overtime to Maryland. Along the way, coaches made a big decision to play true freshman QB McKenzie Milton and let him grow on the job after an injury. There were some tough losses, like a 26-25 defeat to Temple when the Owls scored with one second left, and a 31-24 loss to Tom Herman’s Houston team, after Frost’s squad led 24-3 in the third quarter.

Held: “But even when we lost to Maryland … you looked at that moment, like, ‘You know what? We took this team that was 0-12, we won the first game and I just remember the Maryland game and even into the Temple game, thinking, ‘You know what, we’re going to get this thing right.' You could just see that the kids loved football and the systems that we had in place, and the schemes and everything that we were doing put us in position that we were going to get this thing where we need to be.”

UCF hadn't found itself on offense yet, finishing 113th in total offense. The Knights also were bit with some injuries at key positions. It was the defense that carried a lot of water, giving up just 4.78 yards a play, which ranked 12th nationally. UCF would lose its last three games, including a 31-13 bowl loss to Arkansas State to finish 6-7. But Held thought of those close calls. They weren't that far from winning two or three more. Good progress, but the project to thinking about going undefeated or something surely looked like it would take more than a couple years.

Lambrecht: "There were flashes that showed you that things were going to work well. But there was just way too much inconsistency in Year 1, and most of that was attributed to just the transition and not being deep enough and not having those injuries at some key positions. I think we played five or six true freshmen in very significant roles that first year at UCF."

Dewitt: “It would probably have been Year 2 when I started to recognize that, boy, this is kind of going our way. And honestly for me it probably started a little bit earlier than most. I think it was when we took the road trip up to Maryland (in our second game). Everything just started clicking for us and the way that our players played, and how everyone handled everything, we had a pretty convincing win that day against a Big Ten team. So for me that was kind of a watershed moment where it was like, ‘Boy, we’re going to have a chance to be pretty legit.’”

Lambrecht: "We knew that we were better. We knew that we were going to be significantly better. But I don’t think anybody could have really truly anticipated the way that it ended up going. That was a special group of guys that just continued to come together and work so hard all year long. It’s just an absolute testament to what a good group that was down there.”

Former Huskers like Held and Ruud were dialed in on their team and not the goings-on in Lincoln, although Nebraska lost a game at home this past Sept. 16 was impossible to miss.

Ruud: “When they lost to Northern Illinois, I thought it could be hard to survive that season. But at the same time, we weren’t paying that close of attention back home. You’re so busy you really don’t get a chance to watch that close. Obviously I’d always hear what the final results were but you just don’t have that much time to think about that stuff.”

The week after that Husker loss, is when Frost's team took down Big Ten team Maryland 38-10. Maryland had won at Texas the previous week. Still…

Ruud: “I was kind of in denial of how good we were almost. My wife will make fun of me all the time. She was like, ‘You guys are playing really well.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, we’re not that good.’”

The week after the Maryland win, UCF dropped a top-25 Memphis team by a count of 40-13.

Ruud: “After we played Memphis, which I knew was a really good team because I had studied them all offseason … I was like, ‘OK, this thing is really starting to roll right now.’ That was the one that kind of woke me up to say, ‘Hey, we’re doing a good job here.'”

It was only Sept. 30. It was only Frost’s second year at UCF. But they had put the pieces together quickly. Everyone could see it now. Everywhere. They were already chasing after something special.

Back in Nebraska, a Husker football team under Mike Riley was sitting with a 3-2 record. Wisconsin would be coming to Lincoln the next week. The 20th anniversary of Nebraska's 1997 national championship team would be recognized that night.

The quarterback of that title team would not be able to attend. His team was busy beating Cincinnati 51-23 that day.