Scott Frost has promised to bring to UCF an exciting brand of football that's fun to watch and will appeal to Florida's rich talent base. An Oregon of the South, if you will.
While much of the early press has centered around that vision, equally important are the steps he'll take to get the current players to buy in. During a 10-minute interview with FOX Sports Florida's Paul Kennedy, Frost outlined his initial message to the team.
"My first message was they didn't have any reason to trust me," Frost said. "Trust comes from shared experiences and over time, so hopefully they'll learn to trust me and learn to trust the group of guys we build to coach them. The other thing I told them is one thing I want them to trust me on is to buy into the process. There's a process I've been a part of at Oregon that's a proven process of building champions on and off the field. They don't have to trust me as a person yet, but the quicker they buy into the process and do the things we tell them, buy into the roadmap we're going to give them, the quicker they do that, the faster the path to success will be."
Frost added that he wants his players to "get used to playing with a desire to excel" and "not a fear of failure."
"They played a lot of young guys last year at UCF and I think those guys were often times, from the tape I've seen, afraid to make mistakes and not cutting it loose," Frost said. "Listen, I don't want guys that are afraid to go and make a great play because if you don't and make a bad play, they're going to chew you out and get yelled at. Be afraid to fail. That's not the right kind of motivation to me. The right kind of motivation is to attack everything you do in life and football. Go out and be fearless in what you do and we're going to play to that style of ball. We're gonna go for it on fourth down when we shouldn't. We're gonna attack and go fast. I want every kid to have that confidence when they go into the classroom and when they go on the field.
"Second, we're gonna practice better than anybody else around. That's the real cornerstone of it. We're gonna practice fast, not be on the field long. But we're gonna get a ton of reps when we're out there and a ton of training in a way that the kids are having fun playing football. We're going to work hard, but we're going to work smart and we're going to have fun doing it."
You can check out the full interview at FoxSports.com.
