The Bill Belichick era at UNC hasn’t been overly spectacular so far. Their first game came against a pretty good TCU team, and they got blown out, made more embarrassing by the standalone Monday night timeslot and the media attention surrounding the game. Since then, they’ve won two games to much less fanfare, although not against the toughest competition — a poor Charlotte team and a FCS Richmond squad — and not in the most impressive fashion.
Now this week, the Tar Heels are going to ramp up the competition
level again, as they go on the road to face Big 12 team UCF. Will the increase in difficulty cause trouble for a UNC team still trying to find their footing or can the Tar Heels pick up their first pretty good win of the Belichick era?
The Golden Knights come into this meeting with a 2-0 record, having picked up wins over Jacksonville State and North Carolina A&T. The JSU victory came down to the very end, with UCF needing two fourth quarter touchdowns to rally for the win — against a team that was 9-5 and went to a bowl game last season, though. Meanwhile, they absolutely blew A&T out of the water — again though, against a team that was very bad on the FCS level in 2024.
The 2025 season is the first for coach Scott Frost in his second stint in Orlando. The first time around, Frost used a 13-0 season — that UCF somewhat infamously claim a national championship for — as a springboard to an ill-fated stint at his alma mater, Nebraska. UCF has taken a step down since then, leading to the Golden Knights trying to get the magic back by rehiring Frost. As UNC fans have just seen with Mack Brown, it can be hard to completely do that, but you can understand where they’re coming from.
Part of what led to UCF’s surge in Frost’s first tenure was his spread offense. This time around, they’re averaging 42.5 points per game, although that is in a very small sample size. Of their 85 points overall on the season, 68 of them came in that aforementioned blowout of NC A&T. So far, their offense has produced one very good performance and one less than stellar one, even if it did end in a win.
Frost’s offense in the past has relied on a quarterback who can move a bit, with McKenzie Milton starring for his 2017 team. So far, they’ve mostly used Tayven Jackson to throw the ball, as he has 471 yards at over 10.5 per attempt on the season. However, he hasn’t been much of a factor in the rushing game, with six yards on 10 attempts — albeit with two coming on goalline touchdowns. Meanwhile fellow quarterback Jaccuri Brown has over 100 yards on the ground over his first two games but only has three pass attempts on the season. Both of them got a decent amount of reps in the A&T game, although teams are generally more willing to do that against FCS teams, we’ll see if they rely on one more than the other and what that means for their game plan against UNC.
As I wrote about in the X-Factor post, a large part of UNC’s success in this game could come down to whether they can stop UCF on the ground, both their quarterbacks and otherwise. The Golden Knights ran all over A&T and absolutely blew them out, but were held in check by Jacksonville State, and had to rally late in that one.
On defense, UCF is allowing 4.0 yards per play on average, although it was 4.7 against JSU, the other actual FBS team they played. Even in that game, they managed to keep the Gamecocks from passing it effectively, as they completed barely half their passes and averaged just 5.2 yards per attempt. JSU was able to run it a little better than that, and you’d hope some of UNC’s running back corps will be the most talented UCF has seen to this point.
In looking at the Golden Knights’ stats through the first two games, there’s nothing specifically in there that completely terrifies me, but they’re definitely a better team than either of the last two UNC have faced, and those games have been far from perfect. The Tar Heels definitely could win this game, but they absolutely could lose it in pretty bad fashion as well.
