After leading by just two points to open the third quarter, the UCF Football team held the FAU Owls to just 18 yards offense in a big bounce back 40-14 victory for the Knights Saturday night.
The Knights were coming off a disappointing performance at home last Friday night where they were shut out in the second half of play offensively by the Louisville Cardinals to suffer their first loss of the season and home loss since November of 2020.
UCF found themselves in a hole early as they traveled down south to take on in-state rival FAU, where the Owls scored on the opening drive of the game easily to go up 7-0. The Knights responded quickly on the very next drive with UCF Senior QB John Rhys Plumlee running over the FAU defense and into the endzone to tie the game up at 7-7 a piece.
FAU then took the lead scoring in the final seconds of the 1st quarter to go up 14 –7, in what would prove to be the final points of the game for the Owls as the Knights would go on a 33-0 run to get a much-needed rebound victory after letting last week’s game slip away.
UCF Head Coach Gus Malzahn said he was proud of how his team responded in the wake last week’s tough loss to the Cardinals.
“I’m proud of our team bouncing back,” Malzahn said. “Everybody knows how tough of a loss that was last week.”
The Knights did what was done against them against Louisville last week and shut out FAU in the second half of play allowing only 18 yards of total offense where the UCF defense held the Owls to zero yards in the third quarter.
Malzahn said he was happy with how his team responded in the second half this week compared to last week and says the team is back on track for a great rest of the season.
“We had the ball coming out in the second half like we did last week, and we really challenged our guys to finish the thing,” Malzahn said. “I’m proud of our guys. It was a quality win and we’re back on track.”
Plumlee had Career high day with 339 yards through the air and led the team rushing with 121 yards on the ground finishing the game with three total touchdowns in an impressive showing for the Senior QB’s third game as a Knight.
Plumlee said it was an important win for the team to feel back on track for the rest of the season after the negative atmosphere that was created after last week’s loss.
“It was a bad taste in our mouth after that one(Louisville Loss),” Plumlee said. “That was the atmosphere around the facility leading up to the game this week and we wanted to get that bad taste out of our mouth with our preparation and make sure that never happens again.”
With the win the Knights improved to 4-0 in the all-time series against FAU and 2-1 overall for the season.
Next up, the Knights will return home this Saturday to FBC Mortgage Stadium to take on the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, who are coming off a blowout loss to Ole Miss at 4 p.m. The game will be broadcast on ESPNU.
