UCF started asking USF for a football series almost as soon as the Florida Board of Regents decided USF could start a program in 1995. The Bulls, realizing that playing the Knights too soon would stunt their growth, waited until 2005 to oblige so that the two teams would be on more even footing. USF won all four meetings between 2005-08, and ever since then UCF has been pining for another series.
↵Enter Knights coach George O'Leary, who decided to tell a room full of UCF boosters on Thursday that the two teams will play again:
↵↵↵"We're on the docket to play a home-and-home series and we’ll try to make that a yearly thing, hopefully every Thanksgiving," O’Leary told the Tampa Bay chapter of the UCF Alumni Association on Thursday.
↵"That’s something that is a no-brainer. For the life of me I don’t understand why people don’t want to do that."
↵
This was news to the USF athletic department, though. On Friday morning, associate athletic director and SID Jeremy Sharpe said "there are no contracts, proposed or signed, relating to future games" and that this had only been discussed between the two athletic directors, UCF's Keith Tribble and USF's Doug Woolard.
↵Fans may not like it, but in their current situation the Bulls have nothing to gain from playing the Knights, and it's very unlikely that they would have been the side to propose new games. It wouldn't surprise me if this was a case where Tribble called up and asked, and Woolard politely told them to forget about it, thus constituting a "discussion."
↵So that leaves O'Leary, who you might remember has a bit of a history with not telling the truth, looking pretty dumb. Then again, based on the staggering news from Pete Thamel in Saturday's New York Times, that's suddenly the least of UCF's problems.