Are Nebraska Strength and Conditioning Coach Zach Duval’s Videos Part of a Strategic Plan?

Over the past couple weeks Nebraska’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Zach Duval has been tweeting out videos of Nebraska football players lifting. The amount of weight these kids are lifting is ridiculous. At some point do you ever wonder if they could ever be lifting too much weight?

Of course not.

It has to be said, that it is extremely likely that every other Big Ten football program has players who are “moving” a ton of weight just like Nebraska right now. They just aren’t posting it on twitter. I am of the mind that you keep stuff off of twitter and let your work show on the field. Though these times are a changing.

From all reports it sounds like the kids are lifting more weight than they were under the last administration. It was a priority for Scott Frost to get bigger on the offensive and defensive lines.

After the Iowa game in 2018 he said the following:

“What disturbs me right now is that Iowa is a bigger, stronger football team. I never thought I’d see or hear that or say that about a Nebraska football team. That we can fix. We can get bigger, we can get stronger. Give their guys credit. They had three, four years in Iowa’s strength and conditioning, we had one year with Zach [Duval]. They leaned on us quite a bit in the second half. I thought the defense did a nice job of responding, but I look forward to the day where we’re not going to get pushed around by anybody.”

So why post the stuff on twitter?

I have four theories by which I can get behind.

Theory One: Recruiting. Recruiting. Recruiting. You want to get the NFL? Well you better get stronger and as you can see our kids are moving a ton of weight. Don’t you want to be a part of this?

Theory Two: You know who gets all of the love? Skill position players. Our beloved skill position players have been relatively absent from videos of them lifting excessive weight. That is probably by design for them physically. We know they are lifting, conditioning and putting in work but that work is different than a lineman. So what do the video’s do? It puts the spotlight on the big guys for once. They aren’t scoring touchdowns (usually). The public however gets to see what they can do and that is move weight which means during a game they should be able to move a person against his will. Which is the point.

Theory Three: Motivation. You want Coach Duval to tweet out a video of you lifting? Better put in the work.

Theory Four: Mentality. What does Coach Frost want Nebraska to be all about? The Pipeline. Power on both the offensive and defensive lines. It could just be about mentality.

With all of that said, Coach Duval could tweet out a bunch of videos of skill position players lifting and then I’ll have to write a different article.

Here are all (I believe) of the video’s posted by Coach Duval, himself, over the past several weeks in case you missed it.

Ethan Piper - OL

Cam Jurgens - OL

Will Farniok - OL

Damian Jackson - DL Moving to OLB

Nash Hutmacher - DL

Ty Robinson - Punter

Ty Robinson - Also DL

Keem Green - DL

Chris Walker - DL