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Sources — UCF wants to bring back Scott Frost as football coach

UCF will hire Scott Frost as head football coach, sources confirmed to ESPN’s Chris Low on Saturday, a move that reunites the Knights with one of their most successful coaches in program history.

Frost led UCF from 2016 to 2017 and led a remarkable turnaround in his second year, leading the Knights to a perfect 13-0 season and a No. 6 finish in the Associated Press poll. Frost earned National Coach of the Year honors for that performance, going 19-7 in his two seasons before leaving to take over Nebraska, his alma mater, in 2018.

Frost, 49, joined the Los Angeles Rams coaching staff in September and has not coached at the college level since being fired by Nebraska during the 2022 season.

The UCF job opened Nov. 30 when Gus Malzahn resigned to become offensive coordinator at Florida State under coach Mike Norvell, who had previously worked for Malzahn as an assistant at Tulsa in 2007 and ’08.

Malzahn went 28-24 in four seasons in Orlando while guiding the program’s transition to Power 4 football from the AAC to the Big 12 in 2023.

The Knights have finished 6-7 and 4-8 in their first two seasons in their new conference and are looking for a spark from a head coach who turned the program into an offensive powerhouse in his two seasons in charge.

Frost’s 2017 UCF team was the No. 1 scoring offense in FBS at 48.2 points per game and rolled to an undefeated season and an AAC title, a quick turnaround after a 6-7 debut season. The Knights were shut out of the four-team College Football Playoff, but claimed a national championship after defeating a Malzahn-led Auburn team 34–27 in the Peach Bowl to complete the season 13–0.

Frost left at the end of the season to rebuild Nebraska. The quarterback was a two-year starter for the Huskers and led the program to a national championship in 1997, but he struggled to engineer a turnaround during his five-year tenure as head coach. The Huskers went 16-31 under his leadership and did not have a winning season or appear in a bowl game.

Frost was fired three games into his final season and received a buyout of approximately $15 million. He retired from coaching in 2023.

Prior to his first stint as head coach at UCF, Frost worked as an assistant at Oregon from 2009 to 2015 and served as their offensive coordinator in 2014 as the Ducks made a run to the CFP national title game and quarterback Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy. .

The Orlando Sentinel first reported that UCF was closing in on Frost.

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