What athletic vision looks like

Last Saturday night, UCF fans stormed the field at the Bounce House after the Knights upset No. 2 BYU 39-31 in double overtime. Nearly 4.75 million people watched on FOX — peaking at 10 million during the second overtime. It was the most-watched Big 12 league game this season. UCF operates on a $121 million athletic budget, shares in Big 12 television revenue, has invested more than $150 million in its athletics village and just launched a $3.5 billion university fundraising campaign.

Thirty years ago, UAB and UCF played on the same turf at Legion Field. It was November 9, 1996 — the first year of FBS football for both programs. UAB led 10-0 early. UCF quarterback Daunte Culpepper threw for 421 yards, and the Knights scored 21 straight points in the second half to win 35-13 in front of 12,500. It was UCF's first victory over an FBS opponent as an FBS team. Both teams finished 5-6 as independents that year — the same record, the same starting line.

One invested. One didn't.

I covered both. I helped launch UAB football as a student assistant and later covered the Blazers as sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald. In 2003, I moved to the Orlando Sentinel, where I was an assistant editor and ultimately the sports editor during UCF's rise from the Mid-American Conference to Conference USA to the American Athletic Conference — and the trajectory that carried the Knights into the Big 12. I have watched both programs from the inside. What separates them is not geography or talent or market size. It is institutional will.

UAB went big early — in basketball. Gene Bartow left UCLA to build the Blazers' program from scratch, and by year three he had UAB in the Sweet 16. By year four, the Elite Eight. Football was not an afterthought. It was not a thought at all. The naysayers spoke out against it as soon as Bartow was hired. UAB did not launch football until 1991. Since then, the program has received intermittent institutional support, survived active attempts to sabotage it and an attempt to shut it down permanently, and was resurrected by a groundswell of public support that raised nearly $48 million to bring it back.

UCF was worse.

When I arrived in Orlando in August 2003, UCF football was a football-only member of the MAC. Its other sports competed in the Atlantic Sun Conference. The Knights went 3-9 that fall. They lost their season finale 56-21 to Ben Roethlisberger and Miami of Ohio in front of 12,902 at the Citrus Bowl. Most of the seats were empty. The university fired coach Mike Kruczek and hired George O'Leary, the former Georgia Tech coach who had resigned from Notre Dame after five days when his resume was found to contain fabrications.

O'Leary went 0-11 in his first season. The 2004 finale was a 41-24 loss to Kent State in front of 12,083 at the Citrus Bowl.

The losing continued into 2005, when UCF joined CUSA — the same league as UAB. The Knights lost their first two games that season, and their losing streak reached 17, the longest in the nation. The Orlando Sentinel ran a back page with O'Leary covered in pink "LOSS" sticky notes under the headline "O'WEARY." I was in that newsroom.

Then it turned. UCF beat Marshall in its first CUSA game and kept winning. That 2005 team went from worst to first, advancing to the conference championship game in the Knights' first year in the league. The game drew 51,978 to the Citrus Bowl. UCF lost to Tulsa 44-27, but the trajectory was set.

What happened next is what separates UCF from UAB. The university decided to commit.

While O'Leary was building a winning program on the field, UCF President John Hitt was building something larger off it. When politics stalled major renovations to the Florida Citrus Bowl, Hitt did not scale back. He pushed forward. UCF would build its own stadium on campus.

It cost $55 million. Four Texas high school stadiums cost more. But it was theirs, and it was designed to grow. David Hansen, who has directed UCF's athletics village operations since the stadium opened, told the Orlando Business Journal the university has invested $1 million to $2 million a year back into the facility.

The university didn't christen it with a cupcake. On September 15, 2007, Bright House Networks Stadium — what we now call the Bounce House — opened against the Texas Longhorns. "NEW ERA AT UCF," the Orlando Sentinel declared on the front page. Not the sports section. The front page.

UCF nearly beat Texas that afternoon, losing 35-32. The Knights finished that 2007 season with 10 wins and the school's first FBS conference championship, beating Tulsa 44-25 in the CUSA title game. "KNIGHTS ARE KINGS," the Sentinel sports front read the next morning.

"I'm not sure we're in the Big 12 if we were still playing at Camping World," current UCF athletic director Terry Mohajir told the Orlando Business Journal. Marc Daniels, UCF's longtime play-by-play voice, told the Orlando Business Journal it was "the single most important decision that UCF's Athletic Department ever made."

It didn't stop. By 2013, with future No. 3 overall NFL Draft pick Blake Bortles at quarterback, UCF went 12-1, beat Baylor 52-42 in the Fiesta Bowl and finished No. 10 in the AP poll — the first top-10 ranking in program history. That is athletic vision aligned with university commitment.

But it wasn't a straight line. That is the point.

In 2008, UCF redshirt freshman Ereck Plancher collapsed and died during offseason conditioning drills. The tragedy devastated the program and led to a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. O'Leary's tenure eventually fell apart. In 2015, UCF went 0-12.

An institution that had not invested — that had not built the stadium, the donor base, the alumni engagement, the recruiting infrastructure — would not have survived that stretch. UCF did. The foundation Hitt and O'Leary and their successors built was strong enough to absorb the worst and come back from it.

Scott Frost arrived in 2016. By 2017, UCF was 13-0, Peach Bowl champions after beating Auburn 34-27, claiming a national championship and hanging a banner. They went 12-1 the next year. And when Frost left for Nebraska and the Knights eventually stumbled again, the program was positioned to land in the Big 12 — because the institutional commitment had never wavered.

The operating budget tells the story in numbers: roughly $7 million when UCF joined the MAC. Around $13 million when it joined CUSA. Revenue grew 242 percent from 2006-07 to 2021-22. The budget hit $51 million in fiscal year 2017 and sits at $121 million today. More than $150 million is committed to the athletics village. A $3.5 billion university campaign includes a $400 million athletics goal — of which more than $221 million has already been raised. More than 500 donors in the Shareholders Society, with the number of million-dollar lifetime givers tripling since 2021.

The Big 12 payout alone quantifies the return: UCF earned $8.8 million in its final American Athletic Conference season. The partial Big 12 share was $18 million. The full share is $42 million — a 377 percent increase over what the Knights earned three years ago.

Steve Orsini, the former UCF athletic director who started the process that led to the on-campus stadium, told the Orlando Business Journal: "We were irrelevant in the national athletic conversation back in 2002 — they're legit now. That's crazy."

This former commuter school started a medical school. It became the non-tourism economic engine of Central Florida. Its enrollment surpasses 70,000 students. More than 400,000 alumni — nearly half of them in Central Florida — are invested in their university because the university invested first. A 2024 UCF study found those alumni generate a $6.7 billion annual economic impact in Florida. A 2026 study found Knights athletics alone produces more than $65 million in annual economic impact on Central Florida.

Hitt didn't care what Florida or Florida State or Miami thought about it. He did what was right for his university and for Orlando. Their success didn't hurt the Gators or Seminoles or Hurricanes. The three programs have combined to win six national championships since UCF joined FBS. UCF set a vision, made a plan, committed to it and didn't waver when it would have been easier to wait out the whims of the Citrus Bowl and leave conference realignment to chance. Their battle cry is "Charge On." Sometimes that meant putting it on the credit card.

Some will say the comparison isn't fair. UCF is one of the largest universities in the country. They get all those student fees from tens of thousands of students. They're a much bigger school than UAB.

When Hitt took office in 1992, UCF's enrollment was 20,302. UAB's enrollment today is 20,369. So it wasn't always the case that UCF was a massive university. Vision and choices made it so.

UAB is not UCF. Birmingham is not Orlando. The markets are different, the state politics are different, the university systems are different.

But the core question is the same one UAB has faced for 30 years: What happens when you commit?

UCF's conference peers are already answering it. South Florida's athletics department returns $2.52 for every dollar the university puts in — $96 million in total value back to campus. Memphis is distributing $21.3 million in athlete revenue sharing this fiscal year and positioning for the next round of conference realignment. UAB plays in the same league.

Birmingham has already shown what it will do when you tap into their passion and rally to a goal. When administrators killed a bowl-eligible football team in 2014, the community raised nearly $48 million to resurrect it. The city built a $175 million stadium downtown. On the night of The Return, 45,212 people packed Legion Field. This fall, a record freshman class of 2,600 pushed enrollment past 20,000 — a 30 percent increase in two years.

That is more than $200 million in community investment without the institution ever really asking for it. Now UAB is searching for an athletic director in an era full of peril and opportunity. Some say this is the most important hire in athletics the university has ever made. But it won't matter who is hired unless the institution empowers that person to go make this program what it could be.

I'm not saying UAB can duplicate UCF's success. But what's the worst that could happen if it really tried?

Fans expect university presidents to care about athletics the way fans do. But a president at a major research institution manages a portfolio where athletics is a fraction of the budget and a fraction of the mission. Ray Watts has spent his tenure building UAB into one of the leading research universities in the country. He led the institution into the Association of American Universities — a distinction UCF does not have. He navigated the university through a pandemic and the political headwinds that have battered higher education nationally. That body of work is significant.

But Hitt was an academic too. He was fiscally conservative — boosters had to convince him to spend on football. What changed was that Hitt recognized a moment when athletics could become an institutional lever. "If you want to be thought of as a major university in the South, it's usually based on three things," Hitt told the Orlando Sentinel in 2006. "Really good doctoral programs, a fair amount of research and playing big-time football."

That moment is in front of UAB right now. For all he has accomplished, Watts will forever be known as the president who killed football and brought it back. He could be known as the president who led UAB to the AAU — and the ACC.