Collegiate Sports

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U.C.F. Is the Best College Football Team in Florida. So, Where’s the Respect?

By Marc Tracy
Oct. 19, 2018

ORLANDO, Fla. — Josh Heupel, the head football coach at the University of Central Florida, was on a recruiting trip several months ago when his wife called and asked when his next flight was.

There was no flight. He was simply driving to Jacksonville, a couple of hours from Central Florida’s Orlando campus.

“Last year during recruiting, I got on maybe four flights total,” said Heupel, who put in years as a recruiting road warrior when he was an assistant at Oklahoma and Missouri.

Florida, after all, has the highest percentage of high school players who are recruited by Division I teams, the most blue-chip recruits of any state, and is by many other metrics the best state in the country in which to set up a college football team. And that makes U.C.F. the current definition of disruption in college football.

Still, undefeated U.C.F. is probably the fourth- or fifth-best-known team in the state, a directional university celebrating its 50th anniversary, whose football program has played in college sports’ top tier for barely two decades. Its league, the American Athletic Conference, distributes to its members a small fraction of the windfall from media deals compared with what the biggest conferences deliver to their schools.

Three years ago, U.C.F. went 0-12. Yet the No. 10 Knights are, for a second year in a row, the best team in the state and one of the best anywhere else. In the last five years, they have won two New Year’s Day bowl games. They hold the longest active winning streak in the Football Bowl Subdivision, at 19 games.

Last year, after the Knights went undefeated, they won the A.A.C. and then beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl. They claimed a national championship, even though they were left out of the four-team College Football Playoff and were ranked sixth in the final Associated Press poll. The N.C.A.A. has formally recognized U.C.F.’s title alongside Alabama’s.

This year the offense is ranked third in Division I in yards and seventh in points per game. It is worth noting that a game at North Carolina was called off after Hurricane Florence, and the Knights have trounced mostly weak competition (including one Power 5 team, Pitt) and barely survived Memphis last weekend.

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Getting the versatile McKenzie Milton from Hawaii to play quarterback has changed everything for U.C.F.CreditPhelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press
“I often say that reputation lags reality,” said Dale Whittaker, the U.C.F. president. He was referring to the university as a whole, but it might apply to the football team especially.

Originally Florida Technological University, and founded several miles east of downtown Orlando in connection with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — Cape Canaveral is less than an hour’s drive to the east — U.C.F. has grown into one of the country’s largest universities, with 68,000 students. Whittaker compares U.C.F. to Ohio State and Arizona State as a giant, urban university well suited to the 21st century’s information economy.

As for football, “Our competitive advantages are very real,” said Danny White, the university’s athletic director.

“Who doesn’t want to be here?” said Richie Grant, a defensive back from Fort Walton Beach, Fla. “Like, it’s supposed to be fall, winter, something like that? And it’s, what, 90 degrees out here?”

Florida being Florida, there will always be a surplus of talent.

“They may not be big enough for Florida or Miami to go after them, but they’re still going to be fast or strong,” said Luke Stampini, a recruiting analyst for 247Sports who is based in Delray Beach, Fla.

These athletes, then — rawly gifted, but not as purely talented as those who end up at the in-state blue bloods — may need specific schemes built around them, but White conceived the potential for a “moneyball”-esque strategy as he watched Baylor and Texas Christian routinely defeat Texas and Texas A&M during the past decade with innovative game plans.

When he arrived in late 2015, White sought a coach who would install a quick tempo to complement the athletes’ physical speed. He got Scott Frost, who had been an assistant at Oregon under Chip Kelly, known for his creativity and fast pace.

At Oregon, Frost had tutored Marcus Mariota, who won the Heisman Trophy after his final year with the Ducks and went on to become the Tennessee Titans’ starting quarterback. Mariota is revered in his native state, Hawaii, and so McKenzie Milton, a talented Class of 2016 quarterback from Mililani High School in Hawaii, was receptive to Frost’s entreaties. But Oregon never offered Milton a scholarship.

“He’s small,” Stampini said of Milton. “If he was 6-2, the whole Pac-12 would have been after him.”

When Frost took the U.C.F. job, Milton flipped his commitment from Hawaii. Last season, he threw for more than 4,000 yards, with 37 touchdowns against nine interceptions, adding 613 yards and eight touchdowns on the ground.

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Central Florida head coach Josh Heupel has installed his version of the “Air Raid” offense in his first year leading the Knights.CreditMark Zaleski/Associated Press
Frost departed during the past off-season for Nebraska, his alma mater. White turned to Heupel, who ran the Air Raid offense as Oklahoma’s national-title-winning quarterback for Mike Leach, the offensive coordinator at the time.

Heupel hired Randy Shannon, a former player and longtime assistant at Miami and then Florida with vital in-state ties, as his defensive coordinator. He got recruits on the phone the night of their first news conference, Heupel said.

U.C.F. now has a 45,000-seat stadium and an array of new and planned amenities: a development center, a nutrition center, a scheduled lazy river. The construction is financed through debt, donations and athletics revenue, White said, along with student fees that average out to under $200 per semester, according to Josh Boloña, the student government president.

With 68,000 students, the university is set to collect roughly $25 million in fees this year.

U.C.F.’s two final games in the regular season are against No. 20 Cincinnati and then down Interstate 4 at South Florida, currently ranked 21st. Win out, and U.C.F. will get a conference championship game against strong competition, but will it be strong enough to impress the playoff committee?

Snubbing U.C.F. last year, the playoff committee argued that “they had not been as challenged with their nonconference schedule, and their schedule over all, as teams right above them and right below them,” in the words of Kirby Hocutt, the committee chairman, who is Texas Tech’s athletic director.

White felt that was disrespectful not only to U.C.F. but to its league, which counted two other teams in the final A.P. rankings. This past weekend, undefeated Notre Dame moved up a spot in the A.P. poll, to No. 4, after barely beating Pitt — the same squad U.C.F. torched by 31 points a few weeks before. A.A.C. teams, from top to bottom, are 7-8 versus Power 5 teams this year.

Two years ago, U.C.F. was one of several finalists for spots in the Big 12 before that conference elected not to expand. The next expansion era most likely will not occur until the middle of the next decade, when several broadcast deals are set to expire. The A.A.C. is preparing to negotiate a new deal now. Its agreement with ESPN expires in 2020.

White said the A.A.C. merits inclusion in a “Power 6” setup for the F.B.S. For now, though, the Knights must win all their games and hope a payoff will come.

“People are going to look at this conference, look who we played, crossover games, look at scores,” Heupel said, “and I think we’ll be where we want to be.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/sports/college-football-playoff-ucf.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fsports&action=click&contentCollection=sports®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront