This is the second time that Frost has been hired by UCF to be the team’s head coach. He was first brought in by the school in 2016 after spending seven seasons as an assistant coach with Oregon.
In 2016 and 2017, Frost led the Knights to a combined 19-7 record, which included a 13-0 record during the 2017 campaign when UCF finished as the No. 6 team in the final AP Top-25 poll for that season.
After the Knights’ success in 2017, Frost was hired to become the new head coach at Nebraska, a school where he was the starting quarterback in 1996 and 1997.
Unfortunately, what he was able to help UCF achieve in 2016 and 2017 was never able to be replicated during his tenure at Nebraska. The Cornhuskers posted a combined 16-31 record with Frost as their head coach, and he was unsurprisingly fired midway through the 2022 season.
A little more than two years later, he’s back with UCF, and the school is hoping his return can get the football program heading back in the right direction after two underwhelming seasons in 2023 and 2024.
UCF finished the 2024 campaign with a disappointing 4-8 record, and last week, Gus Malzahn stepped down as the school’s head coach to become the new offensive coordinator at Florida State. There was a good chance that the Knights were going to fire Malzahn before the 2025 season anyway, so his departure wasn’t viewed as a significant loss.
Now, Frost is back in charge of the football program, and it seems like UCF is going to be patient with his efforts to turn things around since they signed him to a five-year contract.
He’ll have his work cut out for him, though, as the Knights are now members of the Big 12, which is a much tougher conference than the one the school was a part of the last time he was its head coach.
Can Frost lead UCF back to success, or will his second opportunity to coach a team in a Power 4 conference turn out to be his last?
