UCF seniors chasing a win
Knight eager to top Bulls, avoid winless season
Every time Danny Barrett drives to Miami, he’s haunted by the bitter memory of his last college football game.
Barrett, a former quarterback for the University of Cincinnati and UCF’s current interim coach, recites the ill-fated finale like a script from a horror movie. It was a 19-12 loss at the old Orange Bowl to Miami, led by backup Bernie Kosar. Barrett’s team needed just one yard to upend the Hurricanes and advance to a bowl game.
“I’ll never forget that,” Barrett said. “On the 1-yard line, lose your last game.”
The Knights would like to forget most of their miserable 2015 season, but they’re hoping to create at least one memorable experience with a win against rival USF before an ESPN audience on Thanksgiving night.
While the Bulls lead the series 4-2, the Knights’ senior class has never lost to its rival after recording victories in 2013 and 2014. Last year UCF handed USF a historic shutout loss on its senior day in Tampa.
Surely, the Bulls are eager to return the gift. Should the Knights lose, it would be their second winless season since 2004.
Entering the week, UCF one of just two winless teams at the Football Bowl Subdivsion level. The Big 12’s Kansas is the other winless team and owns the nation’s longest losing streak dating to the 2014 season.
“The seniors have done a great job here. I pointed to the wall the other day as far as the conference championships and bowl victories that they’ve been a part of,” Barrett said. “They’re used to winning and this is something they’re not used to, so I really challenged their teammates to make sure they go out on a positive note.”
UCF took a hard blow to the ego last week as the team suffered a lopsided 44-7 loss to East Carolina on Thursday on national TV. It was the sixth game this season during which the Knights’ defense gave up more than 40 points and the third game in which their offense failed to score more than one touchdown.
The Knights can’t afford to collapse on both sides of the ball if they want to have any shot of knocking off USF, which currently sits in second place behind Temple in the East Division of the American Athletic Conference.
“We definitely want to go out with a win as seniors and as a team. You don’t want to go through a season without winning a game at all,” senior H-back Cedric Thompson said. “Obviously that’s been a goal for every game, but definitely for sure we want to go out with a win, go out with a positive note and put a game together [for] 60 minutes and go out on top. And of course they’re our rivals, but that hasn’t been as much of our focus this week. We really tried to focus on us because obviously we’ve had a problem with each other in terms of putting things together, so that’s been a major focus this week.”
From start to finish, UCF’s season has been overshadowed by off-thefield upheaval from player and coach exits to a newest arrival, recently hired athletics director Danny White.
A signature win against a rival won’t completely erase the bad taste of this season, but it could at least give seniors one last good memory.
“You will always remember your last college game, win, lose or draw. You’re gonna remember that,” Barrett said. “So I want the rest of the team to help these guys enjoy one last victory because they deserve that.”