UCF Football: 3 takeaways from upset loss in Week 11 at Tulsa

3. UCF made too many mistakes to win on the road

As Blake Bortles knows, committing too many turnovers at Chapman Stadium is prone to doom UCF to losses at Tulsa. So it went for the Knights on Friday night to kick off the second weekend of November. And even while they still had a chance to win the game at the end, Josh Heupel’s squad was undone by their stumbles when they had the football.

Dillon Gabriel threw two interceptions, which the Golden Hurricane turned into 10 points the other direction. Then there was the fumble by Adrian Killins Jr. on a fourth-quarter kickoff; while it ultimately resulted in a missed field-goal opportunity, it limited the time available for the Knights to engineer a comeback late in the game.

Discipline also proved a major issue for UCF in their loss. Committing fouls on both sides of the ball, the Knights ultimately drew 15 flags that resulted in 120 lost yards to the Golden Hurricane. In a game that was decided by three points, all those mistakes certainly took a toll at least in the cumulative.

While the Knights weren’t entirely out of the game at any point, they too often shot themselves in the foot. Against a spoiler-type team like Tulsa that is laying on a trap pretty heavily, a favorite cannot defeat itself. UCF did just that, and now they must win out if they hope to get to 10 wins this year and keep that streak of double-digit winning seasons alive into 2020.