Knights face tough challenge with East Carolina

Edgewater

The Edgewater Eagles let Buchholz quarterback Jackson White throw for 387 yards to edge them 30-27 in the 7A regional football quarterfinals Friday night.

But it was a field goal with only a few seconds left that lifted Buchholz (10-1) over Edgewater (7-4), after the Eagles let a 13-point first half lead fall apart. An interception and two fumbles didn’t help the Eagles who let Buchholz catch up late.

The loss ends Edgewater’s season.

UCF

When the UCF Knights walk onto their home field to face East Carolina on Thursday night, they may be taking their best shot at preventing a winless 2015. Up until now, it’s been one long streak of losses that propelled head coach George O’Leary out of a job and Knights fans out of the stadium. Against the Pirates, a longtime rival the Knights have had moderate success against, they could stop one of the worst seasons in team history from becoming their third winless season of all time.

“[It’s] not an ideal situation to be in,” interim head coach Danny Barrett said in a press conference announcing his promotion on Oct. 26, ahead of the Cincinnati game. “I look forward to getting our guys into the win column as soon as possible.”

Since Barrett’s ascension to UCF football’s leading role, he has yet to produce a win.

Anything the Knights (0-10, 0-6) had to lose this season, aside from a catastrophic injury to yet another starter, has already been lost. Any shot at a championship in a very competitive American Athletic Conference disappeared with their second conference loss on Oct. 10 on their home field against UConn. The next game, another loss, this time at Temple, wiped out the only other thing they could have mathematically predicted: a shot at a bowl game. For the Knights, any chances at retaining the magic of the 2013 and 2014 seasons had already evaporated by the middle of October, with five games left in the season.

Now with two games left, all that a win in the next two games can do is avoid the Knights playing officially their worst season of all time. Though the Knights have two winless seasons, in 1982 and 2004, the 2015 season has the chance at being one for the ages: if they lose their final two games, the Knights will have lost more games in a season than any team in UCF history. If they lose only one of those games, they’ll tie the 2004 season as the worst.

The odds of avoiding going 0-12 do not favor the Knights, though they have surprised odds-makers on point spread in at least one game this season. As of the start of the week the average sports book was predicting UCF will lose to ECU — a 4-6 team that’s won two conference games all season — by 15 points. That’s still a better shot than against USF on Thanksgiving night, when the Knights will face the type of Bulls team that used to give them nightmares before the Bulls began their implosion in 2011. Against the suddenly resurgent Bulls, who are 6-4 and threatening a shot at the AAC championship game, the Knights are expected to lose by 18 points.

With the worst season of all time on the line, the Knights face an ECU team with even more to lose: a shot at a bowl game. The Pirates were 4-3 and seemingly well on their way to a bowl bid before losing three straight games — including a 31-13 loss to a struggling UConn — to arrive where they are now, 4-6 and needing to win their last two games to become eligible.

Against the Knights, the Pirates have their statistically most likely chance at winning. After their date in the Bright House, the Pirates host Cincinnati (6-4, 3-3), home of one of the most potent offenses in NCAA football.

The Pirates, reeling from their three losses, recently switched over from platooning two quarterbacks — Blake Kemp, a pocket passer style quarterback, and James Summers, who runs well but has trouble with completions — to using just Summers. Against USF on Nov. 7, that equated to 220 total yards of offense. That was an immediate drop-off from the 350-plus yards per game they’d amassed in the previous two losses. And compared to earlier in the season, their offense has been flagging the last three games, with the Pirates averaging only 14.7 points per game in that span. The Knights have scored 15.7 points per game in the same span, while facing Houston, Cincinnati, and Tulsa.

But in their last game, against Tulsa on Nov. 7, the Knights saw a serious uptick in offensive production, amassing 412 yards against Tulsa, with quarterback Justin Holman finally getting his groove back, throwing for 293 yards.

On defense, the Knights have given up season-high scores in their last three games. The Knights have allowed an average of 45.2 points per game by opponents in conference play this year. East Carolina has allowed just 27 points per game in AAC play.

The game starts at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, televised on ESPN.