Knights storm to Final 4
Amazing season all part of plan for Knights
Ear muffs! Come on, feel the noise. Is this a rock concert or a college basketball game?
Just listen to those 10,111 screaming meanies. That is how many fans showed up at the CFE Arena Wednesday night, the majority of them dressed in black, wishing darkness upon the Fighting Illini. Wish granted. This is March Madness. This is UCF Basketball, 2017. Winners, moving onto New York for the NIT semifinals Tuesday night. Can we pipe things down just a little bit so we can hear that melodic melody from the Sultan of Swoon, The Chairman of the Board, The Voice.
Sinatra, Frank. New York, New York it is.
The Knights defeated Illinois 68-58 with a little help from all those people challenging their vocal cords to scream for two hours. Exhausting, and inspiring.
“It feels like everyone in the crowd is playing with you,” said forward A.J. Davis.
Coach Johnny Dawkins said he couldn’t hear himself think
at times.
Imagine the poor guys from Illinois. It wasn’t a fair fight. Five plus 10,111 = 10,116. They had no shot.
First sellout in CFE Arena history. Largest home crowd in UCF basketball history.
Somewhere in that crazy scrum was Danny White, his rabble-rousing plan in play, working perfectly:
Put the University of Central Florida on the big stage athletically, and have it stay there forevermore.
“Our goal is to build a Top 25 athletic department,” said White, UCF’s athletic director since November 2015. “Top 25 in every sport we have; competing for conference championships every year and eventually for national championships. The sky’s the limit.”
Big-time.
The Knights were officially playing with house money after upsetting host Illinois State Monday night. The Knights had earned a post-season berth for the first time in five years, using a downsized version of heart and hustle with just seven scholarship players eligible.
Now it’s another pile of house money, going to New York.
Kudos to first-year coach Dawkins, who is a bit of an NIT icon, having won the tournament in 2012 and 2015 while coaching at Stanford.
Dawkins’ success is part of that bigger-picture perspective at UCF:
The football team going from a winless season to a bowl game under first-year coach Scott Frost.
The women’s basketball team that finished with the program’s best record since the 2010-11 season and first postseason victory in school history under the leadership
of Kate Abrahamson-Henderson.
There’s obvious connective tissue here: White has his people in play.
Only 37, White knows the business of brand-building in college athletics, having done much the same thing when he was athletic director at Buffalo from 2012 to 2015.
White hired Bobby Hurley, a former two-time NCAA champion with Duke University, to coach at Buffalo. He hired Dawkins, a former star at Duke in his playing days, to reinvigorate the UCF program after Donnie Jones was fired in March 2016. The program wasn’t going anywhere under Jones, who finished his final season with a 12-18 overall record and 6-12 in the American Athletic Conference.
Dawkins? Now 24-11, UCF has the most wins in program history since 2004-05. UCF’s 11-7 record in AAC play was its best in league play.
“We’re ahead of schedule,” White said, “with Scott going from o-fer to a bowl game, and Johnny and Katie getting to the postseason and getting their first postseason wins here.”
“This is a great program moment for us. We have to build off it.”
The Knights caught a bit of a break on Wednesday night by getting to play at home against a better seed because of a scheduling conflict with the musical "42nd Street" at Illinois’ State Farm Center. Perfect. The Knights, under Dawkins and White, are no longer content with being an off-Broadway act.
They are ready for the big-time, and zooming in on the bright lights of New York.
Cue the Sultan of Swoon.