Knights chasing 11th game
UCF tries to offset games lost due to Irma
UCF athletics director Danny White reiterated Thursday his office is doing everything it can to replace Georgia Tech on the 2017 football schedule, noting there are “a lot of irons in the fire” as the Knights work to play 11 games despite the setbacks caused by Hurricane Irma.
White also said the options are not limited to Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) opponents and if UCF can find a willing opponent from the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), it will pursue that avenue. UCF lost two home games against Memphis and Georgia Tech due to the storm.
With the game against the Tigers rescheduled for Sept. 30, displacing FCS opponent Maine from the original schedule, UCF still has just 10 games on the current slate, two shy of the NCAA regular-season limit.
“We’re exhausting all options. We just want to make sure we get an 11th game,” White said. “They’ve worked too hard and they deserve to play at least 11. They deserve to play 12, but I don’t think that’s possible unless we’re playing in the conference-championship game and that’s what we aim to do.”
The difficulties are based on the numbers. Even though there are several FBS schools with open dates the same week as UCF’s Oct. 28 idle date, all of those schools already have 12 games scheduled and it would take an NCAA waiver to allow a team to play a 13th game.
“There are only 13 weeks to the football season and everybody’s got 12 games. Until you get into it, it’s really hard to explain how difficult it is to move football games when you have everybody’s schedule involved. It’s very complicated,” White said.
White added UCF considers itself quite fortunate to have gotten the postponed Memphis game back on the calendar.
“A week ago, we were all thinking it was highly unlikely that it could get rescheduled, but the more we looked at it and looked at it, it turned out that there was a way but it required a lot of willing partners,” said White. “I think with the level of devastation across the state of Florida everybody understands how impactful Hurricane Irma was and certainly that probably put people in a more cooperative place, but we had some great partners in our conference that really made some changes to make this possible and I’m really grateful for that.”
In total, the AAC adjusted the schedules for seven of the league’s 12 teams, including rescheduling the postponed USFUConn game now set to be played on Nov. 4, in order to get each conference team an equal number of league games.
“There are a lot of moving parts. I don’t know if there is much precedence for moving that many games in conference play. Just credit to our leadership and our commissioner Mike Aresco and so many teams … across our conference willing to be flexible and change their schedule, even those that weren’t impacted by the storm,” White said.
“I’m proud to be a member of the American Athletic Conference right now. … The rescheduling of this game and the UConn-South Florida game is a strong testament to the cohesion of our league.”
White also said UCF fully intends to honor its home-and-home agreement with Georgia Tech despite this year’s game being canceled. UCF is scheduled to travel to Atlanta to face the Yellow Jackets during the 2020 season.
“Todd Stansbury, the athletic director who used to be here and is now there, and I just talked to him this morning and we both want to keep the series,” White said. “We’re going to work to find a date when they can come back down here and we intend to go up there in 2020 as is scheduled right now.”