Nebraska Football: Mickey Joseph shocks with his high school outreach

Nebraska football coaches going back to Bill Callahan have talked a big game about “locking down the state” but this time, Mickey Joseph might actually be doing it. It turns out that offering a ton of in-state players over the last few weeks is just part of a master plan.

If there has been one big complaint about the way that some of the previous Husker coaches have gone about recruiting the state, it’s that they haven’t had a great relationship with the high school coaches in the area. That can be a far bigger negative than people like Scott Frost apparently realized.

So what exactly is Mickey Joseph doing that previous Nebraska football head coaches didn’t? He’s not just reaching out to high school staff around the state, he’s also giving the impression that he actually wants to talk to them. It’s apparently going a long way toward building bridges that Pelini, Frost, and even Riley burned down.

Over on the Husker Online message boards, one poster reported that he’s a teacher at a C-1 level school. He said that on Thursday afternoon, the school’s football coach walked up to him and had him listen to a voicemail that Joseph had left him. Joseph’s message was simple, as he wished the coach luck in the state playoffs.

While that might have been a simple phone call for the Nebraska football head coach, it was a big deal to the high school coach who said he’d never gotten that kind of phone call in 30 years of working in athletics.

It turns out that this wasn’t a one-off situation either. It turns out that there are coaches all over the Lincoln and Omaha area that have told similar stories. Some coaches have said Joseph has even talked over strategy with these guys, showing a real interest instead of just making a perfunctory call.

This kind of effort is especially noteworthy when considering the fact that Joseph might not be the coach next year. While there are signs he’s, at the very least, very much in the running, he hasn’t been hired yet.

Joseph has made several comments about how he doesn’t want to sabotage the Nebraska football program by ignoring recruiting. He’s not only walking the walk in that regard he’s clearly going the extra mile.