Winless Knights now face AAC's best

Fielding an ever-younger team each week as players are felled by injuries, the Knights watched the result as they were bamboozled by a formerly listless UConn in a 40-13 blowout loss. Now they face a string of the American Athletic Conference’s best teams, with odds-makers predicting UCF’s worst losing streak in a decade will continue far deeper into the season.

The harbingers of doom came early in the UConn game, when Hayden Jones caught a kickoff and turned it into an accidental safety with the closest Huskies still 20 yards away. Those two points would be the last the Knights would score — albeit for the wrong team — for the next three and a half quarters, as the Huskies ran roughshod over a team that was forced to use 14 current or former walk-ons in the game.

“A lot of kids out there [are] not ready yet, but injuries and loss of scholarships have caused us to put them on the field,” UCF head coach George O’Leary said in a postgame press conference. “Just too many easy scores and too many dumb mistakes out there in all phases.”

The Knights were already one of the youngest teams in the FBS when they started the season, but injuries caused them to use even more untested backups against UConn. That haunted the Knights on big plays, including their first drive, which would be the most successful of the game before freshman Cam Stewart dropped a wide open short pass in the end zone, forcing the Knights to kick a field goal.

The Huskies responded with 40 unanswered points, while the UCF offense, featuring a corps of inexperienced youngsters and returning injured veterans, failed to strike back.

The Knights had 28 games worth of missed action by their starters going into the game. Starting quarterback Justin Holman, who had been out since Sept. 12 with a broken finger, finally returned, but was plagued by dropped passes. Running back Dontravious Wilson, injured in the Knights’ season opener, finally returned but only in a limited capacity. Wide receiver Taylor Oldham, who was injured in the spring game, saw his first field time, catching 22 yards worth of passes. Nick Patti, who began the year as a backup quarterback, has since been turned into a receiver in the wake of other UCF receiver injuries. He collected 58 yards of receptions in the game.

Jones’ kickoff-turned-safety would have usually been fielded by the Knights’ best kick returner, Jordan Akins, who remains out for the year. Instead, it was fielded by a returner who had never caught a kickoff at the college level, with disastrous results.

Jones would make up for the mistake with a 33-yard kickoff return late in the second quarter, but the Knights would have the drive fall apart in devastating fashion. Holman had just thrown a pass to the UConn 26, caught by Jordan Franks, when it was called back for a personal foul, reversing the Knights by 39 yards on the play, costing them a first down, and leaving them no time to make it into scoring range again. The clock ticked down to halftime with the Knights not having entered the end zone.

In the third quarter, the Huskies ripped wider a gash the Knights hadn’t started to seal. It was already 23-3 when UConn went on a 17-point tear, with their two touchdowns of the quarter requiring just 2:20 of field time. The second touchdown of the quarter required only a 16-yard drive, thanks to UCF’s Chris Johnson fumbling a punt return, recovered by the Huskies. That’s the same Chris Johnson who was caught 62 yards into a passing play and had the ball punched out by Tulane last week, ending a likely scoring drive.

The turnover was just more of the same that the Knights’ had seen in the second quarter, when Holman threw interceptions on back-to-back drives, both of which resulted in touchdown drives for the Huskies.

Among the Knights’ few positive stats compared to UConn, they grabbed 21 first downs — one more than the Huskies — and had 4.3 yards per rush to UConn’s 3.8. That’s a big jump compared to -1.6 yards (negative 1.6 yards) per carry against Tulane. Running back C.J. Jones did most of the carrying, with 44 net yards on seven rushes.

The Knights also sacked the Huskies five times to the Huskies’ one sack on the Knights. That’s a huge improvement from the game before, when the Knights sacked Tulane just once and allowed UCF backup starting QB Bo Schneider to be sacked seven times.

In the end the Knights would gain 315 yards to UConn’s 433, with turnovers largely providing the difference in scoring.

The Knights now enter the toughest part of their season carrying the least momentum they’ve had since their infamous 0-17 streak from 2003-05. In the next four weeks they play Temple, Houston, Cincinnati and Tulsa, teams that have a combined overall record this season of 16-4. Three of those teams are in the FBS’s top-10 teams for offensive yards per game, a statistic in which UCF only this week leapt a slot above last place.

Temple is tied for the best record in the conference and is No. 23 in the NCAA college football power rankings, with an undefeated record in the conference and overall. Last weekend Temple beat Tulane, a team that dominated UCF in a 45-31 drubbing, by 49-10, scoring 42 unanswered points from the second quarter onward. They held Tulane to just 110 total offensive yards.

The game starts at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in Philadelphia, broadcast on CBS Sports.