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O'Leary resume touts new
entry: turnaround season
UCF AD plans to reward
the coach he thinks can help program flourish
By TIM REYNOLDS
AP Sports Writer
ORLANDO, FL — Less than
three months ago, Central Florida was mired in the nation's longest
losing streak and expected to finish at the bottom of Conference USA.
Now, UCF is bowl bound for
the first time. And George O'Leary's infamous resume is better than
ever.
There's a reason Notre
Dame hired him four years ago — O'Leary knows how to coach. He's proved
that again at UCF, which he's transformed over the last few weeks from a
punch line to a postseason team — one that will host the Conference USA
championship game on Saturday against Tulsa.
For the Golden Knights,
it's been a breakthrough.
For O'Leary, it's been a
rejuvenation.
"There's nothing I can do
about what happened at Notre Dame," O'Leary said. "A mistake was made. I
paid a dear price for it. But, as my mom used to always say, 'God
doesn't close one door, he opens another.' I think this was a door that
opened and I'm making the most of it."
UCF is 8-3 and 7-1 in
league play. The school is in the midst of the second-biggest one-season
turnaround in NCAA football history. Only Hawaii's 1999 team, which
improved 8 1/2 games over its 1998 record, has exceeded what the Golden
Knights have done this year under O'Leary — a national coach of the year
candidate.
He got his dream job at
Notre Dame in 2001, only to resign a week later after admitting to
falsifying his academic and athletic credentials on his resume for
decades. His claims of having a master's degree in education and being a
three-year college player at New Hampshire were ultimately proved
untrue.
But UCF had no
reservations about giving O'Leary a five-year contract in 2003. Now,
school officials feel like geniuses for putting their program in his
hands.
"We didn't hire him
because of how many letters he had at New Hampshire as a football player
or whether he had a master's degree or not," said UCF athletic director
Steve Orsini, a captain on Notre Dame's 1977 national championship team.
"And he's more motivated than ever, both for himself to clear his record
professionally, and to turn this program around."
That process has advanced
faster than anyone — O'Leary included — could imagine.
Most preseason magazines
ranked UCF near the very bottom of all the 119 teams in Division I-A
football. The team's media guide offered probably the most positive
outlook, saying the Golden Knights "enter 2005 hopeful to continue to
lay the groundwork for a successful football program."
Hardly a ringing
endorsement. And O'Leary's goal for the season? Six wins.
"I got a lot of twisted
eyes looking at me when I said that," O'Leary said.
The Golden Knights opened
with a respectable 24-15 loss at South Carolina, then lost by 17 to
South Florida. The program went exactly 700 days without a victory, and
it seemed even longer to the players.
"After the USF game, I
know a lot of guys were thinking, 'Here we go again," ' said senior
defensive end Paul Carrington, a tri-captain. "But the fortunate thing
about seasons is, it's not how you start them, it's how you finish them.
And again, that's something Coach O'Leary has always stressed and
instilled in us."
UCF's 17-game losing
streak ended with a win over Marshall, starting a run of eight wins in
nine games for the Golden Knights, who have only 10 seasons of Division
I-A football history and are in their inaugural Conference USA campaign.
"It wasn't just a win, it
was breaking a lot of bad records we had at the time," O'Leary said.
"Continuous losses in the country. The first win with this staff, a new
staff that was here. I told the kids, we're going to throw all that in
the garbage pail, throw the lid on and keep it on."
UCF hasn't exactly
outclassed its opponents. But if there's any positive to glean from an
epic losing streak, it's resiliency. And the Golden Knights have clearly
shown that.
Only one of their wins was
by more than 10 points. They've won five straight games and trailed in
every one, including a 12-point halftime deficit last week at Rice, and
an 11-point deficit the previous week at UAB.
"It's definitely surreal,
how everything's worked out for us," Carrington said.
Until now, UCF's biggest
football accomplishment was the exploits of Daunte Culpepper, who threw
and ran for 12,432 yards from 1995-98.
The school is planning a
45,000-seat on-campus stadium and has indicated that it will do whatever
is necessary to keep O'Leary if any other program comes to woo the man
who was 2000's national coach of the year at Georgia Tech.
"We're going to do the
right thing," Orsini said. "He has earned us to step up now, too. He has
done his job. It's time for us to do our job and do the right thing for
him. He and his staff have earned that. He has a chance to create the
program, the next big Division I program in the state of Florida."
Whether O'Leary stays or
goes, the Golden Knights could have an extremely bright future. Most of
the team is composed of freshmen and sophomores, with only a handful of
seniors in key roles.
"When you come back to
college and you go 0-11, I'm sure there was a lot of doubters," O'Leary
said. "But I never doubted that we were going to win. And you know,
could-ofs and would-ofs don't get it done. So I've moved on from what
happened at Notre Dame. And I'm real happy for this program here."
02/23/07 10:43 AM
©2005 The Associated Press. All
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