When it comes to Nebraska football recruiting, Mickey Joseph has a pretty simple philosophy. He’s “never seen a bad coach with players and never seen a good coach without players.”
That might seem like a no-brainer. In order to have success, a program has to bring in good players and it has to do it the right way. However, while the idea behind the saying is simple enough, the interim Nebraska football head coach thinks that the Huskers have strayed from that approach.
In a recent article by Ross Dellenger, Joseph talked about a number of different topics. Most were centered around how he became the interim Nebraska football coach. Others were about what he wants to do to keep that job. At the top of that list is how he wants to approach recruiting.
The long and short of it is that he wants to change things from the way they were being done by Scott Frost. That’s not a bad thing considering that the former coach’s signing classes trended the wrong way from 18th in 2019, to 20th in ’20, 25th in ’21, and 32nd in his last official class.
This year’s class was actually going to be worse. Part of that had to do with Frost and company going after transfers more. Of course, the best transfers this year were brought in by Joseph. Trey Palmer, Casey Thompson and Marcus Washington all followed the wide receivers coach.
While Joseph knows that there’s a need to get transfers to improve the team immediately, he’s been going after good high school players as well. In all, he feels as though Frost and company had the dead wrong approach.
“They were taking kids and rushing . That’s why the roster gets screwed up.” Joseph said.
While he’s probably not wrong about the approach being one that didn’t work, it’s interesting that he’s willing to say that kind of thing about the man that hired him less than a year ago. Of course, those who might take offense will find that all is forgiven with the Nebraska football program if his approach turns around a flailing recruiting class.