Last December, UCF football addressed its future by turning to its past, bringing in former Knights coach Scott Frost to once again lead the program.
With the benefit of hindsight, Frost would have never left Orlando in the first place.
As he prepares to enter the first season of his second stint at UCF, Frost expressed regrets over departing for Nebraska after the 2017 college football season, claiming he “didn’t really want” to accept the job at his alma mater.
‘I said I wouldn’t leave (UCF) unless it was someplace you could win a national championship,” Frost said in an interview with The Athletic at Big 12 media days on July 8. “I got tugged in a direction to try to help my alma mater and didn’t really want to do it. It wasn’t a good move. I’m lucky to get back to a place where I was a lot happier.’
Frost engineered one of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent college football history during his first stop at UCF. He inherited a Knights program that went winless the season before his arrival and, by his second season at the helm, posted an undefeated season in 2017. That ended with the school claiming a national championship after the Knights were the only undefeated team in college football that season.
That December, one month before UCF finished off its unblemished season with a Peach Bowl victory against Auburn, Frost was hired at Nebraska. It was a homecoming for the Lincoln, Nebraska native: He was the quarterback of the Cornhuskers’ most recent national championship team, which was awarded the Coaches Poll title for the 1997 college football season. (Michigan was awarded the Associated Press title).
A hire that seemed perfect in theory — a native son with an impressive resume and a thorough understanding of the program — was something more disastrous in practice.
Frost went just 16-31 in his time at Nebraska, including a 10-26 mark in Big Ten play. Under their former star quarterback, the Cornhuskers never won more than five games. One day after a 45-42 loss to Georgia Southern in 2022, Frost was fired, three games into his fifth season.
After working last season as an analyst for the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, Frost will look to reignite a UCF program that has struggled in its first two seasons in the Big 12, going 10-15 overall and 5-13 in conference play during that time. He’s one of two first-year Big 12 coaches who’s back at a school he previously led to overwhelming success, with Rich Rodriguez at West Virginia being the other.
Frost returns to the Knights carrying at least one lesson he took from his failure at Nebraska.
‘Don’t take the wrong job,” he said to The Athletic.