The UCF Knights will host the UConn Huskies at Brighthouse Networks Stadium on Saturday as they try once again to come away with their first win of the season.
“Well I don’t really know much about the rivalry, but we are just going to treat it as we treat every other conference game. We have to go and win the conference, that’s our goal as a team,” sophomore receiver Jordan Franks said.
UConn is coming off a three-game losing streak to Orlando after winning their first two games against lesser opponents Villanova and Army. Second-year head coach Bob Diaco brings the defensively-driven Huskies to take on a young UCF Knights offense that has struggled early on in the season.
The Huskies defense is comprised of seven upperclassmen (5 seniors, 2 juniors) and is the top American Athletic Conference team in passing defense. The Huskies’ vaunted secondary is led by redshirt senior safety Andrew Adams who tops the team in tackles (33) and is tied for the team lead in interceptions (2).
UConn also touts a dangerous set of linebackers in redshirt seniors Graham Stewart, Marquise Vann and redshirt sophomore Junior Joseph. Both Stewart and Vann were named to the preseason Lombardi Award watch list and have had solid seasons thus far, but they haven’t had quite the blistering start that they had hoped to given those lofty expectations. On the other hand, Junior Joseph has really come on in his second season with the Huskies as the team’s second best tackler.
UConn, not unlike the Knights, have a fairly young offense as well as they only have one senior started listed on their depth chart. Almost inherently, a young offense comes with inconsistency, but UConn has held up rather well on the shoulders of their redshirt sophomore quarterback Bryant Shirreffs.
“I think that new quarterback [Shirreffs] they have has helped them solidify the offense a little bit more, they have good size and they’ve always played pretty good defense,” Coach George O’Leary said.
Shirreffs has been efficient through the first five weeks of the season, completing 61.8 percent of his passes while posting a 134.9 passer efficiency rating. The sophomore QB’s efficiency rating is good enough to place him above Ohio State’s Cardale Jones and Nebraska’s Tommy Armstrong. However, Shirreffs struggled this past week against the BYU Cougars in what was a terrible outing for the entire Huskies offense.
On the ground, UConn’s running game is a bit of an anomaly week to week as sophomore running backs Arkeel Newsome and Ron Johnson have each taken turns as the lead back. Newsome seems to have the hot hand the past two weeks though and has been prevalent in the passing game even when Ron Johnson handles the majority of the carries.
The Knights have faced their fair share of running back committees (FIU, Stanford, and Tulane) already this season and a closer look shows that they have done a solid job at stopping them. UCF’s defense has only allowed over 4 yards per carry to two teams this season, South Carolina and FIU. The South Carolina game was exacerbated by their running QB Lorenzo Nunez who ran for 123 yards while UConn QB Bryant Shirreffs has accumulated just 110 yards throughout the season.
This is the first in-division contest for both the Knights and the Huskies and is an incredibly high stakes game for both teams. Not because a Civil Conflict trophy is involved, but more so because the American Athletic Conference is incredibly competitive this year and is still up for grabs. The UCF Knights and UConn Huskies will kickoff their in-conference ‘conflict’ on Saturday at Brighthouse Networks Stadium at 3:45 p.m.
Photo Credit: Aileen Perilla
