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George O’Leary leaves complicated legacy at UCF

By Jonathan Adams

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George O’Leary’s resignation signals the end of the era at UCF. How exactly will O’Leary be remembered by UCF fans?

Ten years ago, few people knew who “Central Florida” was much less UCF. My friends and I have a sick sense of humor which led to us watching a lot of bad football games at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando. None of which we ever dreamed of leaving early.

One particular miserable occasion involved us painting up in anticipation of a nationally televised game against Pitt. They won 52-7 and the remaining fans used deflated thunder sticks to make a chain around the entire stadium to provide some sense of entertainment that we had been cheated out of. I have the privilege of covering college football from a national perspective and with rare occasions the programs of note are historic powerhouses who play in cathedrals for stadiums. As much as I admire these stories, it will never be my story.

I share all this with you, because many people have just discovered UCF in recent years even its own student body. To know the George O’Leary story is to know where UCF has been and not lose sight of where it can go. At some point, my friends, and I began having happy UCF football memories. It was similar to the scene in The Grinch where he discovers he has a heart for the first time. No bowl games, indoor practice facility, weekly rankings or on-campus stadium were part of the program before O’Leary arrived.

My father and I drove across the country to watch UCF pull off a massive upset against Baylor in the Fiesta Bowl. All of this we owe in part to George O’Leary.

If you think this is simply a nostalgic puff piece about how great O’Leary was then you are mistaken. So far, fans have either praised how great O’Leary was or bemoaned how awful of a coach he was. Neither paints a full picture of the story.

O’Leary’s UCF career is bookended by winless seasons. The first one in 2004 was due to a lack of talent. As former players have told me, O’Leary would often tell the team they were in one of two categories: ants or roaches. “When you turn the lights off,” O’Leary would say. “The ants line up in a straight line and the roaches scatter all over the room. I’m looking for ants not roaches.”

O’Leary would eventually find enough “ants”. So much so that a winless UCF team has become national fodder for humor this season. The idea of anyone noticing a bad UCF team was unheard of before O’Leary took over. In many ways, he became a victim of his own success.

To point to all the good he has done for UCF is to also acknowledge the way O’Leary held the program back. He had no problem placing the blame on his players, assistant coaches or even the fans. O’Leary rarely, if ever, publicly owned a mistake but often placed the blame on others. He preached accountability to his players but rarely publicly showed accountability.

O’Leary was at times critical of fans attendance. Much of his tenure was full of an unimaginative conservative offense that was a hard sell for the casual fan. Things like alternate uniforms were seen as silly. The one time UCF wore an alternate black helmet, he blamed the helmets for the poor play and auctioned the helmets off.

There was the Eric Plancher death and the claims of a former assistant of weird racist comments by O’Leary.

O’Leary was an old school coach stuck in a new school era where social media is used as a way to recruit players. This was neither all good nor all bad, but O’Leary was never going to be the kind of coach that adapted to the changing times. He fought for the way he saw things until the end, even when he was wrong.

This is all part of the legacy O’Leary leaves. To be a supporter of a program is also to allow yourself to be critical of its missteps and insist that it is capable of more. In a small way, O’Leary did this when he stepped down. His window to reach his team had closed and perhaps it had been closed for some time.

In all this, George O’Leary I offer you my gratitude for taking something that a few friends and I loved and sharing it with the nation. Whether it was UCF’s coming out party in the Fiesta Bowl in what was the best coached game in UCF history or UCF’s presence on Sundays with NFL players like Brandon Marshall and Blake Bortles, UCF is becoming a national brand.

To those of you that are part of programs at smaller conferences that struggle to have your team taken seriously, it is possible to succeed and worth the growing pains. Whether it is Tuesday night games with the “Funbelt” or a six-win team making a bowl game for the first time in school history, it is part of what makes this sport great.

What O’Leary did at UCF should be admired, but the best is yet to come. The right coach will inherit the largest student body in the nation, a young alumni base that is eager to become enthused about the program and location in the center of the state of Florida that is prime territory for recruiting. For years, UCF was called a “sleeping giant”.

Coach O’Leary awoke that giant and now it’s time to make sure it does not go back to sleep.

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