Josh Heupel has a pretty good thing going in Orlando. He took over for Scott Frost in 2018 after Frost led the Knights to an undefeated national title campaign in 2017 before departing for Nebraska and for the most part, the former Oklahoma quarterback has kept the ship steady and picked up right where Frost left off.
A slight dip in 2019 brought with it some turmoil, but that was to be expected with UCF searching for a replacement for star quarterback McKenzie Milton, who has still yet to return to action almost two years removed from a knee injury that nearly cost him his leg. Things stabilized when Dillon Gabriel took the reins, and everything seems to be right back where it was in Orlando entering 2020. The Knights picked up where they left off and lit up the Georgia Tech defense to open their campaign, to the tune of 49 points and 660 total yards.
I think we take what has happened at UCF in recent years for granted sometimes, we being the the college football media, fan and consumer collective at large. Much like what has happened with Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma, UCF’s offense has been so consistently incredible in recent years that it almost becomes stale and expected. That a program that went 0-12 in 2015 had the sixth, 11th and 14th best offense in SP+ in 2017, 2018 and 2019 is hard to fathom and has unfortunately become “business as usual” for UCF, even though this offense deserves quite a bit more fanfare than it gets.
I say that not just because of production, but because of the way that UCF creates that production. The Knights were the top G5 offense in SP+ in 2017 by far, with Memphis coming in second at No. 17. In 2018, UCF was again at the top of the G5, trailed by Memphis at 14. Even in 2019, with a brand new quarterback, UCF trailed only the Tigers, who finished at No. 8. UCF is putting opponent-adjusted numbers on the boards that nearly equal those put out by some of the biggest football factories in America and is doing it without five-star talent.
That happened under Frost for the same reason it’s still happening with Heupel: this offense is as well-designed as any in America and it adapts brilliantly to the talent on the field. There’s no better place to see the latter portion of that than by looking at Gabriel and comparing him to Milton. These are wildly different quarterbacks, and UCF has built wildly different schemes around them while still relying on the same basic core concepts of isolating and putting defenders into conflict by throwing a ton of movement at them at once.
Under Milton, the best way for UCF to do that was with quick-hit passes off of the RPO game, with play action tied in for deep shots when needed. That stuff is still there, but this offense has changed drastically because Milton and Gabriel are different players. The quick-hitters worked so well for Milton because he was at his best reading the defense before it was ready to defend whatever it was seeing. He lacked elite arm talent but made up for it with accuracy and vision.
Gabriel doesn’t have those deficiencies. He has a much better arm and can launch those deep shots down the sidelines with ease, but he isn’t as quick on the read as Milton was. So, rather than force Gabriel into an offense that worked perfectly for someone else, Heupel took the core of that offense, stripped down the usage of the quick stuff and changed the way that UCF passes the football by pulling in concepts from vertical spread teams like Clemson, Oklahoma or Baylor under Art Briles.
The heart of the offense is still misdirection and overloading defensive backfields, but the pieces that power the heart change with personnel. It’s a much harder way to build an offense, but it works a whole lot better if you’re able to do it, and the best offensive coaches (Riley, Ryan Day, Dan Mullen) in the country usually are.
For UCF under Gabriel, the passing attack is built much more around plays like this one to set up chunk plays later in the game, whereas under Milton, the setup plays would usually happen across the middle within about five yards. When you’re attacking down the field primarily on the perimeter, it makes sense to get your quick gains near the sidelines as well, because it conditions the defense to play closer to the line of scrimmage, specifically on the outside. UCF relies on tight cornerback coverage that can be easily beaten with the speed the Knights have at wideout and success on screen passes like this one encourage defenses to over-adjust.
This specific screen pass is actually off of an RPO (look at the line), which means that the linebackers are also being conditioned to bite harder on play action fakes, hoping to beat the line before it can get down the field. UCF doesn’t test the middle of the defense a ton, but there’s no harm in taking the linebackers out of the play if you can do it without sacrificing time in the pocket, because, if nothing else, it’ll just further isolate the defensive backs that you’re putting in conflict with intricate route combinations.
When the coverage does tighten up, UCF is able to hit deep shots like this on pretty much every team in the nation, because this wide receiver group is as fast and as good at tracking the ball as any in the nation. That’s not an overstatement. Marlon Williams, Tre Nixon and Jaylon Robinson form one of the most lethal wideout trios in America, because all three of them are capable of attacking the defense at all three levels.
That gives UCF a ton of fluidity to just take whatever the defense is giving up without needing to depend on a designated possession, slot or deep threat receiver. All three of those guys play all three of the roles, so defenses have to account for any one of them going anywhere on the field every time Gabriel drops to pass. That’s not sustainable if you don’t have multiple first-round caliber defensive backs on your team, and to be brutally honest, no one on this UCF schedule does. Very, very few teams do.
When defenses play loose zones to prevent deep balls like Georgia Tech did, UCF tests them with the screens to see if they’ll bite and tighten up, creating space for the pass behind the defense. Georgia Tech didn’t budge, so UCF expanded the short game out to passes like this one. As much as I hate to say it, you really can’t win with zone against this team unless you’re rolling out a cover 3 with elite players all over the field. Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and Ohio State are just about the only teams that can do that.
If the opponent isn’t one of those teams, UCF just picks and picks at whatever it’s given until the defense finally snaps and adjusts. In Georgia Tech’s case, that meant closing in with tighter coverage to take away the short game.
Which, in turn, gets you this. Georgia Tech is running what looks to be cover 3 here, which should do well to stop deep passes to the perimeter in theory, but doesn’t in practice without good cornerback play. UCF dials up a stick concept from 2x2 with a stop route from the slot on the play side, and pretty much nothing going on to the other side, because the entire play is just about getting single coverage on that perimeter cornerback.
They get it, the throw is perfect, and UCF has a big play against a defense built to stop big plays.
Same basic thing here. Nothing to the back side, slant from the play side slot and then a go route on the perimeter. Georgia Tech is in man with a single-high safety, the slant draws that safety in, and Gabriel just has to put the throw on the money to Nixon in a one-on-one battle. He wins that 80 percent of the time.
And again. Smash concept here, with a neat little switch from the slot and outside receivers. The defense is in man, plays it nearly perfectly, but UCF still wins the play with a good throw. The secret here is that no matter what you do, UCF is going to have a way to beat it.
UCF is unique, because it breaks the will of a defense in the same way that those old, grind-it-out Alabama rushing attacks would, but it does so pretty much entirely through the air. Covering this team for any extended period of time is absolutely exhausting because of the route flexibility that these receivers have and because Gabriel can make every throw on the field. You can’t lean on tendencies to determine what you do and don’t have to worry about against this passing attack, because every player can and will run every route in the offense. UCF builds its offensive identity around the quarterback, but the skill positions are very much recruited to a type.
There aren’t receivers or running backs on this roster that can’t do a little bit of everything, because that provides the wiggle room needed to rework the offense around the quarterback. Gabriel makes all of this work, but the skill position recruiting provides versatility for an offense that has to be remade every few years for a new signal caller.
Pardon my language, but what the fuck do you do about this as a defensive coordinator? An offense this dangerous in so many different ways will drive you completely insane if you’re trying to stop every part of it. Pretty much the only blueprint for even starting to slow down this offense is the one that Marcus Freeman and Cincinnati deployed last season, the only time in four seasons (including this year) that UCF has been held under 30 points, and Freeman’s answer was to stuff the run, blitz on pretty much every play and force Gabriel into making mistakes.
That worked on a freshman quarterback in a hostile environment. Would it work now? Is there any answer to this offense that isn’t just “have a bunch of five-stars all over the field, and also get very lucky?” If there is, we certainly haven’t seen it yet and at this point, I’m not sure that we’re going to.
Up next: Army is +13.5 against Cincinnati this weekend, but you didn’t hear it from me