On the afternoon of Oct. 28, Central Florida walked off its home field in Orlando, having lost 41-28 to West Virginia.
It was the fifth consecutive loss for the Knights at that point, a team playing its first season as a member of the Big 12 and a team finding no mercy from its new league opponents. Staring at a 3-5 record with four games to play, discussions of making a bowl game seemed moot at that point.
“We definitely grew. You find out about your team, you find out about people when you face major adversity. Our guys didn’t flinch,” UCF coach Gus Malzahn said Tuesday. “They were real disappointed. They didn’t flinch, the staff didn’t flinch and most teams would have jumped off a cliff at that point and never recovered.
“This group hung in there. Says a lot about them, and it says a lot about our program and where our program’s going. That’s something that we’ll be able to look back in the past, that we’ll be able to point to and see how far we’ve come.”
The Knights got off the mat the first weekend in November and won 28-26 on the road at Cincinnati, stopping a two-point conversion attempt with 87 seconds left that likely would have sent the game to overtime. The following week provided one of the more notable results in all of college football this season when UCF buried Oklahoma State, ranked 15th at the time, to the tune of a 45-3 blowout.
A week later UCF was nipped 24-23 at Texas Tech, a blocked extra-point attempt in the fourth quarter being the difference in the final score. That left the Nov. 25 regular-season finale against Houston as UCF’s last chance to reach bowl eligibility.
Thanks to 14 points in the third quarter, the Knights won 27-13 and were rewarded with a trip to the Gasparilla Bowl, where they’ll face Georgia Tech (6-6) on Dec. 22 in Tampa, Florida (6:30 p.m., ESPN).
“As a coach you just take it week by week,” Malzahn said. “I knew we had the capabilities of a good team. Obviously moving up in a new conference, having some key injuries didn’t help. But we just took it week by week. Now we’re here and we need to win the bowl to have a winning season.”
Malzahn, a veteran leader known to most college football fans, coached high school ball for 14 years before his first college gig as Arkansas’ offensive coordinator in 2006. He became a head coach in 2012 at Arkansas State and led the Red Wolves to a 10-3 season.
In 2013, Malzahn took over at Auburn and spent eight seasons there, winning 68 games overall and 39 in the SEC. During his first year on campus the Tigers went 12-2, won the SEC championship by defeating Missouri in the title game and lost to Florida State in the national championship game at the Rose Bowl.
Malzahn was fired from Auburn in 2020 despite never having a losing season. About two months after later, in February 2021, UCF snatched up the offensive-minded coach. The Knights went 9-4 in 2021 (winning the Gasparilla Bowl to end the season) and 9-5 in 2022, a year which included a 27-10 victory over Tech at FBC Mortgage Stadium.
That result, Malzahn said, has no bearing on the matchup with the Jackets later this month.
“A team that’s really good on offense. Their head coach (Brent Key) is doing a super job. He’s very familiar with this place, was here a long time. Got a lot of respect for him, and I know our players are excited to play this game,” Malzahn added. “They got a quarterback (Haynes King) that’s outstanding, a guy that I recruited out of Texas coming out of high school. He’s having a great year throwing it, running it and all that.”
Offensively, UCF is led by former Ole Miss quarterback John Rhys Plumlee, who has thrown for 2,073 yards and 13 touchdowns while being picked off eight times. Plumlee also has 473 rushing yards, by senior RJ Harvey, who is four yards shy of 1,300 for the season, is the bell cow, having scored 16 times rushing.
Receivers Javon Baker and Kobe Hudson have combined to make 85 catches for 1,819 yards.
On defense, senior linebacker Jason Johnson has over 100 tackles, defensive backs Nikai Martinez and Corey Thornton have three interceptions each and defensive end Tre’Mon Morris-Brash has 18.5 tackles for loss and 8.5 sacks.
The Knights are playing in a bowl game for the eighth season in a row and are looking to avoid finishing with a losing record for the first time since 2016.
“It’s real important to our seniors, real important to our players to finish off on the right track. I think we won three of our last four games, started playing really good football. We need to continue that,” Malzahn said. “I really feel like our guys will be extremely motivated to play this game. That’s what it really comes down to, this day and time in college football, is how motivated a team’s gonna be. That’s just the way it is.”
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