Two weeks into the season, UCF has already seen both ends of the offensive spectrum.
The Knights opened with a demolition of Bethune-Cookman, rolling up 560 yards and setting a school record with 73 points in a 73-6 win. Seven days later, the attack went flat in a 12-7 loss at Pittsburgh, finishing with just 206 yards. To make the night even rougher, starting quarterback Alonza Barnett III went down with a hamstring injury that is expected to keep him out for several weeks.
That kind of swing can rattle a team, but coach Scott Frost isn’t interested in treating one bad game like a crisis.
“Sports is classic overreaction with everything,” Frost said on Monday. “This team’s going to win the championship and then they don’t play well in week one, and the sky is falling right. We’ve got to be careful on both sides of the ball not to overreact.
“There’s a habit and a tendency to go to the extremes and overreact. As a coach, you can’t do that. We’ve just got to be better next week than we were this week.”
UCF (1-1) gets Georgia State (2-0) on Saturday at 7 p.m. on ESPN+, and the Knights are trying to make sure last weekend’s stumble doesn’t linger.
A big part of that reset centers on quarterback. Frost has not formally announced Barnett’s replacement, but veteran Keyone Jenkins is the likeliest option. Jenkins has started multiple years at FIU and served as Barnett’s backup through the first two games.
Whoever is under center will have to deal with an offensive line that was under constant stress against Pitt. Early injuries at right guard forced UCF to reshuffle up front, and the Knights were pressured more than a dozen times.
“Part of that problem was we had two interior offensive linemen dinged up early in the game, and some other guys got to come in,” said offensive coordinator Steve Cooper. “That’s certainly no excuse. It’s up to us as coaches; we’ve got to find a way to make sure those guys are ready to go.”
Frost said the Knights ran only 53 plays against Pitt, and that the flow of the game made life even harder on the offense.
“I was really frustrated with our offensive performance,” said Frost. “We only had 23 or 24 snaps of offense in the first half and a huge percentage of our snaps were when we were backed up inside our 5-yard line or during two-minute (drives).”
That limited workload helped explain why UCF finished with just 20 rushing yards, its lowest total since it managed 12 yards in the 2016 Cure Bowl. Barnett led the team on the ground with 13 yards on 13 carries, and Duke Watson added 10 yards on six attempts.
“You always need to establish some kind of run game and there are multiple ways to do that. We weren’t able to do that on Saturday last week,” said Cooper. “We just didn’t execute and we didn’t put enough good football on tape in the first three quarters of the game to realistically say we deserve to win that game.”
Georgia State’s defense gives UCF another test. The Panthers are allowing 270 yards per game, a mark that ranks third in the Sun Belt Conference, after games against North Carolina A&T and Kennesaw State.
Even so, Frost said this is the point in the season where his team can start sorting out what it really is.
“Our biggest improvements have to come after Game 2 now, because we didn’t get tested in Game 1. We know a lot more about ourselves and our team right now and we’re going to be capable of addressing those things now,” said Frost.
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