ORLANDO, Fla – UCF began initial preparations for Thursday’s season opener against FIU today, getting in the right mindset to handle Butch Davis’ Panthers.
Davis took over the program this year after a six-year hiatus from coaching collegiate football – terminated by the University of North Carolina in July of 2011 amidst NCAA investigation. The long-term absence leaves scores of unknowns for head coaches trying to gameplan for FIU, a team with an entirely new staff and a head coach with game film over half a decade old.
“We’ll watch a few games from last year for personnel reasons and then we’re trying to find whatever tape we can and have our best guess at what they do,” said Head Coach Frost on Thursday. “We’re looking at a bunch of stuff. Coordinators are coming from different places, the head coach is coming from a different place, so we’re doing our best to decipher all of that.”
Butch Davis’ last stint was in North Carolina. Offensive Coordinator Rich Skrosky was Head Coach at Elon University in North Carolina but spent time as the offensive coordinator for Ball State. Defensive Coordinator Brent Guy was out of football in 2016, but was Tulsa’s defensive coordinator from 2011-2014.
There’s no continuity to build from, no coherent tape to really, truly predict from and only educated guesses to be made. Sound familiar? UCF was working with much of the same advantage in their own corner last season, especially with a roster that nobody knew much about. The double edged sword is that even FIU doesn’t have the complete picture of what it is they will be able to install and execute by next week.
“We’re going to take our best guess as to what they’re going to be doing. They’re in the same boat we were in last year going into the first game,” said Frost.
“It’s impossible to get too much in when you haven’t had that much time, but I’m sure their coaches will have them ready and we’re doing the best to get ourselves ready.”
UCF will give their players on off day on Friday, but will be full throttle Saturday until gameday. To the coaching staff at this stage, the gameplan birthed of murky predictions will be backed strongly by a desire to impose their will no matter the situation. Frost said that in the first game, the Knights will be looking to execute what they’ve been working on all through camp.
We’ll see over the course of the week how players and coordinators have been preparing for the challenge, but there will be plenty self-review along the way.
