’Tis the season
New year means Florida high school athlete free agency now in full swing
Like other Orlando area football fathers, Tony Jurgensen considered advice offered from specialized trainers and high school assistant coaches on which programs might be the best fit for his son.
Those discussions began nearly five years ago after Jurgensen’s family, including then 10-yearold aspiring quarterback Bjorn, moved from Virginia to east Orange County.
“We’ve been hearing it since we moved here,” Tony Jurgensen said. “There’s a whisper campaign about where your kid would be the best fit and the schools not to send them to because a lot of these trainers and 7-on-7 coaches know the depth charts and who is graduating.”
In a state where school choice policies are designed to provide a multitude of academic options, Florida has come to be known as a free-for-all for athletes, with many of its best players opting to transfer from one school to another in hopes of winning big and bettering their college scholarship chances.
Conversations about where to go are not exclusive to high school football circles, where the emergence of position camps and offseason 7-on-7 tournaments help forge relationships between kids and coaches connected to other schools.
It’s been like that for years at youth volleyball, AAU basketball, travel baseball and softball and club soccer events, where many high school coaches (and other influencers) can be found coaching offseason teams as young players (and parents) talk about choosing their schools.
“You just try to put your kid in the best position to succeed academically and athletically,” Jurgensen said. “As a parent, if it’s his dream to play football at the college level, you want to see him be coached up and developed in high school.”
Coaching stability (and reputations), potential for playing time and academic performance are just some of the variables considered by parents and kids when it comes to finding the best fit.
— the man who invented the game,” notes UCF athletic director Terry Mohajir. “We’re going to be competing against programs that have been playing sports since the late 1800s. These are programs with long, storied histories. We’re behind some other schools because of the [TV] distribution dollars they’ve been receiving for years and years.”
UCF, once it starts getting its full allotment of Big 12 TV revenue in 2025, will eventually catch up, but in the meantime the Knights will have to rely on more donations, ticket sales and other revenue streams. During his National Signing Day news conference on Wednesday, football coach Gus Malzahn was not bashful about asking fans to start donating to a collective — “The Kingdom” — that raises NIL money and distributes it to UCF athletes and recruits.
“I really want to encourage our donors to help us with the collective,” Malzahn said. “This is a new age of college football and we want to continue to recruit at a high level and to keep our top players [from entering the transfer portal]. We’re going to need help [from donors] with that.”
Malzahn has even admitted that he is giving up some of his coaching duties (like play-calling) so he can concentrate more on fundraising. Of course, he isn’t judged on how much money he raises; he’s judged by how many games he wins. And, quite frankly, UCF fans have been spoiled ever since Scott Frost and Josh Heupel posted back-to-back unbeaten regular seasons in 2017 and 2018. There is a vocal fraction of UCF fans who seem to think going unbeaten should be the norm instead of the rarity.
Many entitled UCF fans grumbled when Heupel won “only” 10 games in his second season and grumbled even more when the Knights finished with 9 wins under Malzahn last season even though they advanced to the conference championship game.
Hopefully, UCF fans realize that winning 8 or 9 games in the Big 12 this season would be considered a major success. Granted, there’s the remote possibility the Knights could run the table in its inaugural Big 12 season, but that’s a pipe dream.
UCF opens its first Big 12 season by playing the last two conference champions — Kansas State and Baylor — and will face eight conference opponents who were in bowl games last season.
A case could be made that the Big 12 was the deepest conference in college football last season and that was with Oklahoma and Texas enduring subpar seasons. This will not be like UCF’s first season in the American when the Knights ran the table (in 2013) in the conference and ended up in the Fiesta
Bowl where, ironically, they manhandled Big 12 champion Baylor.
Make no mistake about it, this time it’s gonna be a lot tougher on a weekly basis when UCF is playing much better teams in front of much larger crowds. Here’s all you need to know: UCF finished No. 1 in average attendance in the American last season, but if the Knights had been competing in the Big 12 they would have been deadlast in attendance. Even if you take departing members Texas and Oklahoma and their huge crowds out of the equation, the Big 12 s average attendance was 22,000 fans per game more than the American.
“We’re not tiptoeing into the Big 12,” Mohajir said when I asked him if fans should temper their expectations this season. “We’re going in to win it — this year, next year, every single year . ... From a fan standpoint, being optimistic is always a good thing.”
I agree.
Knight Nation should be optimistic, but also realistic.
In Year 1 of the Big 12, UCF fans should just enjoy the journey without worrying about the final destination.