UCF walked through hell to get to the Big 12 | Commentary

When you’ve suffered — when you’ve crawled through the briars, endured the barbs and weathered the storms to reach your destination — the sense of satisfaction and pride is much greater.

Some of the most inspirational quotes of all time are about the gratification you feel when you overcome adversity to reach your goal.

Bianchi: Why are Power 5 propagandists raining on UCF’s national championship parade?

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” — Molière

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” — Robert Kennedy

“Life keeps throwing me stones. And I keep finding the diamonds.” — Ana Claudia Antunes

“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” — Milton Berle

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” — Khalil Gibran

And my favorite one of all:

“There’s nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.” — Woody Hayes

Make no mistake about it, the UCF Knights have had the hell kicked out of them on their long, arduous climb up the college football mountain. The Knights have literally traversed the mire and the muck to get to where they are today — into the Big 12 and among the elite of college football.

In fact, their very first game as a Division III nobody was in the mire and the muck of a driving rainstorm in a cow pasture at St. Leo College. The coach, Don Jonas, was an unpaid volunteer who worked for the city. None of the players was on scholarship and had to buy their own shoes and socks and jerseys and jocks. They dressed in the public bathrooms next to the old baseball field.

“My locker was a hook on the wall in the handicapped stall,” Bill Giovanetti, the team’s star linebacker, told me once.

As former Sentinel columnist Larry Guest reported back then, 148 players showed up for UCF’s first practice in 1979 — among them, “a bartender, a beekeeper, a bouncer and a guy who boasted experience with a team that had placed second in a flag football league.”

That rag-tag bunch of ballers lived by the words of another never-say-die Central Floridian — the great Walt Disney, who once said, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” And that’s why UCF is where it is today, because the school not only has had dreamers it had doers.

A national reporter from The Athletic called me the other day for a story on UCF moving into the Big 12, and he asked me … Why?

Why did I write all of those columns through the years lobbying for UCF to get into a Power 5 conference?

Why did I write that the SEC should dump Ole Miss and Mississippi State and add UCF and USF?

Why did I go on Paul Finebaum’s show numerous times and let the most influential voice in college football ridicule me for writing that undefeated UCF absolutely belonged in a four-team playoff in 2017 and ’18 or for writing that the the ’17 Knights — the only unbeaten team in the nation — were “the real national champions” after they beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl.

Why?

Because I’ve seen where this program came from, what it’s been through and where it was headed.

Because I’ve talked to the people through the decades who kept believing and kept building and kept overcoming and absolutely would not take no for an answer.

I’ve talked to the great players who believed in UCF such as Daunte Culpepper, Brandon Marshall, Kevin Smith, Blake Bortles, the Griffin Twins and McKenzie Milton.

I’ve talked to the administrators and the ADs like Steve Sloan, Steve Orsini and, most recently, Danny White and Terry Mohajir. I interviewed White many times about why he was so adamant about self-declaring UCF as the national champions in ’17 and railing against the exclusionary college football playoff, which he liked to call “The Power 5 Invitational.”

“It offended me that our program was being disrespected,” White told me during one of those interviews. “I guess when we look back, history will tell us who was right.”

White was right.

Finebaum was not.

I’ve talked to the many coaches who believed in UCF — from Jonas to Gene McDowell to Mike Kruczek to George O’Leary to Scott Frost to Josh Heupel and now Gus Malzahn. It was O’Leary who told me once that he would have never taken the job at UCF in 2004 if the school didn’t commit to investing in facilities, infrastructure and an on-campus stadium.

“I always said the program was a sleeping giant. Somebody just had to come in and wake it up.” O’Leary said then.

I’ve talked to the big-money boosters like Dick Nunas, Jerry Roth, Tony Nicholson, Ken Dixon, David Albertson and so many others who forked over contributions through the decades to keep the program afloat.

McDowell told me several years ago that the school’s board of trustees was prepared to shut down the football program in the mid-1980s if enough money couldn’t be raised to get rid of the university’s $1.5 million football debt. Local Anheuser-Busch distributor Wayne Densch pretty much erased that debt with one stroke of his pen when he wrote a check for $1 million.

“I was introduced to Wayne through some mutual friends,” McDowell explained. “We went fishing a few times, drank some Scotch, and Wayne said he’d like to do something to help his local university. His first donation was for a million dollars and that pretty much saved the program right there. When I went to thank Wayne for the donation, he looked at me and said, ‘Coach, there’s more where that came from.'”

And, yes, I sat with late, great school president John Hitt in his office and talked about his vision for UCF somehow, someway, someday kicking down the door and getting into a Power 5 conference.

Hitt was an avid football fan and former small-college defensive tackle at Austin College, a tiny Presbyterian liberal-arts school in his home state of Texas. He talked about how those suffocatingly steamy two-a-days in the Texas sun helped mold him into one of the longest tenured and most successful university presidents in the country.

“Sports teaches you that old lesson: ‘Sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug,'” Hitt told me on his 20th anniversary as UCF’s president. “For a young man, it’s not bad to taste your own blood a time or two. In sports, you learn that if you get hit in the mouth or get a bloody lip, it’s not the end of the world. You get up and you move on.”

And that’s exactly what has happened. The Knights have been hit in the mouth and kicked in the teeth and knocked on their asses countless times through the years, but they’ve always gotten up again and charged on.

They endured the tragic death of former football player Ereck Plancher during offseason conditioning drills in 2008 and lost a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family.

They endured an ugly NCAA investigation in 2012 that cost former athletic director Keith Tribble his job and resulted in the school being hammered with five years of probation.

They endured their in-state rival, USF, doing everything in its power to keep the Knights from joining the Bulls in the Big East, which was then a major conference.

They endured the disappointment of being turned down by the Big 12 in 2016, partly because their football team was coming off a winless, grinless 0-12 season.

Remember what Woody Hayes said a long time ago:

“There’s nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.”

More importantly, remember what O’Leary said not so long ago:

“I said when I came to UCF that the program was a sleeping giant. Well, the entire country knows now that the giant is wide-awake.”

Good morning, Mr. Giant, and welcome to the Big 12.

Would you like to have your coffee out on the terrace?

I think you’re going to love the view from up here.

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2