As you escape the pervasive Florida humidity and enter into the Wayne Densch Sports Center, it’s easy to breeze right past some of the accoutrements that set the UCF Knights’ football facility apart from any other building on a college campus.
The giant graphics plastered on walls and the oversized, lit-up letters welcoming in official visitors to the foyer are fairly standard nowadays and draw your attention with the necessary effect to the fact that this is the central hub of a power conference program. So much so that it takes a determined turnabout to notice the shiny silver football that shines brightly atop the 2018 Peach Bowl trophy sitting matter-of-factly near the entrance.
Every day, coach Scott Frost walks from his nearby parking spot past the trophy on the way into the building, a reminder of the school’s—and his—zenith on the football field. Now, he plots out its future in an office that is hardly unchanged from both his predecessor, Gus Malzahn, and his own stint in Orlando that ended eight years ago with Frost holding up that same silver football looking as giddy as a kid in a candy store.
Much has changed from then to now, even if there’s plenty of through lines that link past success with the current program. The Knights are no longer a Group of 5 banner-carrier but a Big 12 team still learning the ropes of being in a power conference, with 67 new players filtering in whose memories of that undefeated 2017 squad are still fresh enough to recount. McKenzie Milton, the record-setting quarterback of that magical era, still roams the hallways as quarterbacks coach.
Frost is no longer a first-time head coach, but a few weeks away from his eighth year in charge of a program and on a rare second stint leading UCF.
“This place has done an unbelievable job pushing forward and growing,” says a relaxed Frost from his office in an area of campus enveloped by construction fences that underscore that fact. “But a lot of things are still the same. A lot of the things I loved about it the first time were still the same.”
The same … yet different in so many ways that matter. That’s as true about UCF as it is about Frost, who still looks like he could suit up on Saturdays despite turning 50 earlier this year.
Football can often be an unrelenting business, one where the bottom line can often subsume and then overtake the fuzzy feelings generated by nostalgia and the metaphorical stars aligning off the field.
UCF knows this, having earned a golden ticket to the Big 12 and seemingly lucked out in being able to land a proven former SEC head coach like Malzahn—coincidentially on the opposite sideline of that Peach Bowl victory in 2018—to help guide them through the step up in competition. Yet the momentum behind those moves didn’t translate on the field, with a 28–24 record the past four years combining with the onset of a new era in college athletics off the field helping nudge Malzahn back to a dedicated play-caller up the road with the Florida State Seminoles and old protege Mike Norvell.
Frost, more than just about anybody in the game, can understand such sentiment considering how his last head coaching gig went from a can’t-miss combination to underwhelming disappointment at the place he once quarterbacked to a national title.
The Nebraska Cornhuskers are Frost’s version of Fight Club. The No. 1 rule is that you do not talk about it. The second rule is, also, not to talk about it.
That’s understandable, with a Big Red wound that is still raw and likely will always be with any kind of probing. It’s the downside of all the bubbly affection generated with going back to a place you’ll always call home. Sometimes taking a job at one’s alma mater, for all the positive feelings attached with it, also means you’re going to get fired by that same school eventually.
In Frost’s case, it was bad enough to get the axe at a place he loved and poured his heart and soul into across five years in charge. Getting shown the door three games into the 2022 season after a home loss to the Georgia Southern Eagles though? That’s twisting the knife on an already painful ending that few saw coming when the native son first trekked back to Lincoln, Neb., having turned UCF from winless to undefeated.
In the subsequent months that followed from the lowest of lows, Frost had time to reflect on his place within football and where else he wanted to go with a headset in hand. He moved to Arizona after getting fired from Nebraska on what amounted to a sabbatical from the game, only to get back on the field somewhat by happenstance.
A visit with the Los Angeles Rams during team activities prior to the 2024 season eventually led to a whirlwind recruitment by head coach Sean McVay shortly thereafter when an opening on staff came up at the last minute. Frost was initially caught off guard by the opportunity to join the organization on the eve of the season, but quickly bought into a role that saw him working primarily with special teams while contributing on both offense and defense as needed.
It’s not often that going from Big Ten head coach to an NFL analyst role (doing entry-level work at times) can be a career rejuvenation, but that’s precisely what Frost found on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
“I think the biggest thing is it kind of reignited my passion. You can get beat down in this business and when you’re in a bad situation, I wasn’t even 100% sure I wanted to [coach] again,” Frost says. “That got my passion for it back. Those guys gave me an opportunity and that really got me excited about being back involved in the game again. I’m grateful to Sean and the people [with the Rams] for giving me a chance.”
Although his name had been bandied about for offensive coordinator and head coaching openings since leaving Nebraska in 2022, fit was important for Frost—who had the luxury of being in a position to be choosy with his next steps. The experience with the Rams had reaffirmed thinking about his future remaining in the professional ranks, especially with a playing background that included stints with five different NFL franchises from 1998 to 2003.
But then, in the thick of a chase for the NFL playoffs, rumors surfaced that his old job might be open once again. Malzahn flirted with an exit before he eventually stepped down as UCF’s head coach after Thanksgiving to take the job in Tallahassee. It was natural that some within the Knights’ fan base might push for a reunion with Frost and a rekindling of good feelings from yesteryear, but such a feeling wasn’t quite mutual until it became clear that his old chair really was there for the taking.
“I had no interest in coming back to college. I was going to stay in the NFL. Then my agent called me and gave me a heads up that this might happen,” Frost says. “This is probably the only college job I would have taken because we were happy here. We love Orlando, like being in Florida, the growth potential of UCF. And rather than chasing jobs around the country, [my wife and I] could raise our kids here.”
Such a sense of belonging was notable given that the job Frost began to pursue was far different from the one he left behind during the first time. Not only were the Knights in a different league and sporting far higher expectations of winning on a weekly basis, but there was also a different athletic director making the hire in Terry Mohajir instead of Frost’s old boss Danny White, now in charge of the Tennessee Volunteers with another ex-UCF coach in Josh Heupel.
Over the course of numerous conversations with school brass and an eventual sit-down in person halfway across the country, the thing he weighed was not facilities improvement or what the program would be able to spend between NIL and forthcoming revenue sharing, but the comfort factor he had in the first stop that he could experience again.
“UCF kind of feels like a small college town, but there’s downtown 20 minutes away and [Disney World] is 15 minutes past that. There’s enough to do here that I come and do my job and then I leave campus and I feel just like a normal person,” Frost says. “First time I was here, my wife, Ashley, and I would go two miles off campus and have dinner and nobody would bother us. For health, for me, for raising my kids, it’s just a lot better environment.”
Creating a better environment on the field has also been on his mind since arriving last December. In addition to investing much of his waking moments during transfer portal windows to flip the roster to find players better suited for this second rebuild, Frost will call plays again this fall—a priority for him after not doing so at Nebraska.
While things won’t exactly be a carbon copy of what he ran offensively during his first stint with the Knights, Frost is excited to blend many of the concepts that brought success dating back to his time with the Oregon Ducks and Chip Kelly with what he picked up from the Rams and McVay. The fact that he gets to do so alongside Milton—an elite coach in the making, Frost says of the school legend he considers family—only adds to the excitement ahead of the opener against the Jacksonville State Gamecocks on Aug. 28.
Perhaps even more important, for both coach and program, is that Frost 2.0 will be familiar with fans fired up to see him again even as he’s evolved across the board to be much better in the role than the first time around.
“I’ve grown and learned. I think if you don’t learn anything new, you’re being stubborn and not very intelligent,” Frost says. “So there’s things that I’ve learned that I think I can implement and make us better. At the same time, most of the sayings and principles that we stood on are still painted on the walls here. So you don’t want to adapt too much, but at the same time, there’s no sense fixing it if it’s not broken. So a lot of the things that we did before, we’ll use again.”
To what level of ultimate success remains to be seen, though the nature of the Big 12 certainly lends credence in the ability to pull a worst-to-first kind of move in Orlando again.
If that winds up being the case, in a league their coach once helped inaugurate as a player three decades ago, there may be room for some additional hardware at the football facility’s entrance very near the Peach Bowl trophy.
“Yeah, it’s kind of like wallpaper,” he says with a sly smirk. “Sooner or later, you don’t notice it.”
In such a familiar setting, with such a similar end goal, turning to relive the past often takes a concentrated effort. UCF, with Frost back in charge again, clearly doesn’t mind doing so as long as it gets them back to where they both want to be.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Back at UCF, Scott Frost Bridging Past Success With Hopeful Future.