Four years ago a head coach was fired the morning after his team lost at home to Georgia Southern.
Today the school he went back to beat the number two team in the country as UCF upsets BYU
His father was a high school football coach for decades. His mother was an Olympic discus thrower. Both of them coached him at Wood River High School in Nebraska.
He threw for 6,859 yards there, ran for 4,278, and won a state championship in the shot put.
He played for Bill Walsh at Stanford, then transferred home to play for Tom Osborne. He went 24 and 2 as a starter.
In 1997 he became the first player in Nebraska history to throw for 1,000 yards and run for 1,000 yards in the same season. Nebraska won the national championship.
The Jets drafted him in the third round and made him a safety.
His name is Scott Frost.
In December of 2015 UCF hired him. The team he inherited had gone 0 and 12.
His second year they went 13 and 0 and beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl.
Then Nebraska came and got him.
"I got tugged in a direction to try to help my alma mater and didn't really want to do it. It wasn't a good move."
He went 16 and 31 there. On the 11th of September in 2022 they fired him, the morning after Georgia Southern beat them.
He was out of coaching for two years. On those two years.
"I really enjoyed two years off. I got to spend a whole year with Ashley and the kids, and I'll never get that time back."
UCF hired him back in December of 2024.
Be straight about where he is. He is 43 and 47 as a head coach and went 5 and 7 last year. The NCAA has never recognised that 2017 title. And Nebraska still paid him roughly 8.7 million dollars to go away.
But a man who left the job he was good at for the job he was supposed to want, and got taken apart for it, went back. UCF just beat BYU.
He says the firing is what gave him his kids back.
Whoever is representing Jesse Legree may have cost this young man A LOT of money.
A true freshman leading the nation with 1,040 receiving yards has tremendous market value. At minimum, explore your options and understand your worth before committing.
Loyalty is great, but potentially passing up generational money without testing your value is bad business.
#4thAndFacts