Hi there, and welcome to the debut edition of the Sons of UCF newsletter. We’ll use this new vehicle as a way to continue our coverage of UCF, but more importantly, to increase our relationship with Knight Nation. I wanted to open this newsletter with a bit of a self-indulgent manifesto, and I promise I will not do this often, so bear with me here.

The one constant in life is change, and try as we might, it is not always something we can avoid. As some of you have probably noticed, things in and around the Sons of UCF have been changing recently, and I wanted to share more about what we are doing.

First, I’ll start off with the Sons of UCF podcast, but, to talk about this adequately, I need to take you all the way back to the beginning. I met UCF Mike when we were freshman in high school, and while we hung out sometimes, we didn’t see each other terribly often because of the distance between where we lived at that time. Fast forward to senior year, the acquisition of a driver’s license, and the fact that we had a bunch of classes together, increased the amount of time we hung out. I vividly remember Mike going to visit UCF in the spring of our senior year, and returning with one thing in mind “dude, we gotta go to UCF. There were chicks everywhere”. [Editor’s note: I think Mike toured the old Collegiate Village Inn to gain this information, which, seems crazy in retrospect]. A few weeks later, I went to see for myself, and by the time I got back to Ft. Lauderdale, I had made my mind up that I would be a Knight. Mike and I gathered a few other classmates, and we had our first roommate group in a brand-new apartment complex, Knights Krossing, phase 3.

We enjoyed the heck out of our years at UCF, and as we graduated and moved out of Orlando we always stayed in touch to talk about our Knights. But, in a tale as old as time, life and responsibilities began to take up more of our available free space. Mike moved back to actual South Florida, and my career travels took me from Vero Beach, West Palm Beach, and eventually Livermore, California. The elements of family and geography lessened our ability to get together very often, but we still had UCF. In fact, I’ll always remember sending Mike a text message in December of 2015 that said “why the hell is Scott Frost our new head coach”? [Editor’s note: Guess I was wrong about that one]

Moving to California in 2016 was a huge change for me in many ways, largely because all of the habits and norms of my life were impacted. With a three-hour time difference I wasn’t able to talk to my friends and family as much as I would have liked, which was a bummer because I had a daily two hour commute. This is when I first began listening to podcasts to pass the time, and stumbled upon the original Knightline Podcast with Andrew and Trace. It helped lessen the burden of the time in the car, and also allowed me maintain a small connection to UCF now that I was 3000 miles away. But, I was also so struck by the fact that people could just sit around and talk about UCF, and I began to wonder if I could do the same. After kicking that idea around for months, I finally decided to do some research, and lo and behold, I figured out that it was indeed possible. I had been an avid sports radio listener for more than a decade, and truth be told, it was always an old man dream of mine to host a sports radio show. The wheels in my head began turning, but I knew I would need somebody else to talk with me, and there was only one answer: Mike.

After much trial and error, I recorded a brief 17-minute pilot episode and sent it to Mike for a listen. As any supportive friend might, Mike said he thought it was good and wanted to know what I was planning. I told him I wanted to start a UCF podcast, and asked him if he would be on the show with me. As we discovered later, Mike agreed because he thought I was asking him to be a one-time guest. As you all know now, that is not what happened, and despite the fact that we had no clue what we were doing, we just kept on recording episodes. Truth be told, barely anybody was listening in those early days, but I didn’t care, because I was getting to talk about UCF with my friend. And for the next 7 years and 260 plus episodes, that’s exactly what I continued to do. At least once a week I would spend two hours talking with Mike, sometimes about UCF, and sometimes about whatever came to our minds, and while nothing will ever replicate our time at UCF, it was about as close as it could get now that we were both middle aged husbands and fathers.

Which brings me back to now, and whereas I mentioned earlier, life, responsibilities, and other interests are always ever present. When this happens, tough decisions have to be made, and in the case of the Sons of UCF Podcast, that decision is to take a bit of a hiatus right now. When and if the timing works out again in the future, Mike and I will be back with our usual nonsense.

Until then, it is really important to me that I make sure the Sons are providing consistent and timely content, which is why we introduced Sons Today. It is not meant to be a replacement for the Sons Podcast, because, well, that can never be replaced. The Sons Podcast is me and Mike together, and so that name is retired until further notice.

Anyway, for Sons Today the idea is to be able to talk about whatever is happening with UCF at that moment in time. There will be different people involved depending on schedules and topics, but we still want to be your spot for UCF news and entertainment. Also, I need to drop a big thanks to Brian Peterson for joining me on the show over the past few weeks. Oh, and one more thing about Sons Today, to anybody out there trying to paint a narrative that Sons Today was created to compete with some other random fly by night show, get over yourself, you’re not that important.

Something else new and exciting for the Sons of UCF is our partnership with the Nicholson School of Communication at UCF. Beginning with the spring semester in 2025, we will be able to offer internship credits to aspiring print and digital media students. Over the coming months you’ll be seeing some fresh faces as they work with us to get experience in the media space.

We have also formed a partnership with Christian Simmons and Bailey Adams, hosts of the popular Pegasus Podcast. They do a great job providing coverage and content for all things UCF, and we are really excited at the potential of working on projects with them in the future. Nothing will change about what they do on their show, but you can now catch the video version on the Sons YouTube channel.

This past week we launched a new show called To Your Point which will be hosted by our friend Jeff Allen. The show will be a monthly roundtable with different voices in and around the UCF content space. More on this show can be found below.

In terms of the totality of the Sons machine, I’d be lying if I said that I never got burned out or thought about taking a break myself. And who knows, maybe one day I will step away and just return to being a regular fan. But that’s a story for another day.

In closing, I want to sincerely thank any and every body who supports what we do at the Sons of UCF. Our mission has, and always will, remain simple: serve the UCF fan. Period, hard stop. We thank you for letting us do that, and hope we have represented you in the right way.

Charge On,

Adam

Meet the New Guy

Welcome Dwayne Jones, who will be joining the Sons effective immediately as a student intern. Dwayne is sophomore broadcast journalism major at UCF who is originally from Tampa, FL. When not watching sports he’s typically hanging out at the beach, spending time with friends and family or somewhere listening to music. At UCF he is a part of Student Government and an active member of UCF’s Hitting the Field sports production program. Be sure to give Dwayne a follow on X, @dwaynejonesnews

To Your Point

The latest addition to the Sons content offerings is To Your Point, a monthly show fronted by radio veteran and frequent Sons contributor Jeff Allen. The concept for the show was actually born of out of the content curated by Jeff over the years on his own podcast, Jeff Allen Sports Talk. TYP will be a monthly roundtable show featuring voices found in and around UCF sports talking about larger topics. The debut episode featured Chris Boyle from the Daytona Beach News Journal, Christian Simmons from the Pegasus Podcast, and Ben Hazel from Sons of UCF LIVE.

You can find it on the Sons YouTube channel:

Or, anywhere you get your audio content

UCF Football loses again

With a 31-21 loss at West Virginia, the Knights are guaranteed their second straight losing season for the first time since 2015-2016. This loss also snaps the eight year bowl berth streak that started in 2016. However, perhaps the biggest story coming out of the game were comments made by Gus Malzahn in the post-game presser:

As we sit here today, I don’t think anybody truly knows what is going to happen with this situation. It is pretty clear that there is frustration from all sides (admin, coaches, fans, and donors), but there are no clear and easy paths to resolution considering the buy-out money owed to Gus. As it relates to his answer to this question (which was totally fair and a great job by Chris Boyle), it was unlikely that Gus would have announced he was leaving in that setting, but the sentence “I’m not retiring”, does have a vibe of a man who knows he has all of the leverage.

Speaking of the game, big thanks to Trace and Robert Aronoff, who were on hand to get video and audio from players and coaches post-game. This is their final road trip of the season, and hats off to both of those gentlemen, because they attended every UCF road game this year and provided us team coverage that you couldn’t find anywhere else.

You can also catch the Pegasus Podcast instant analysis reaction video on YouTube.

At least we have Basketball

Men’s hoops got off to a winning start on the season, that is until they decided to play in a hotel ballroom in West Virginia. But, despite the ass kicking provided by Wisconsin, we shouldn’t be in panic mode just yet. There is plenty of season in front of us, and this team certainly has the capability to play fast and score the basketball. The next chance comes Sunday at 3pm against LSU, and you can watch it on CBS Sports Network.

Check out some of our latest Men’s Basketball postgame wrap-ups

In case you missed it

As always, it was a busy week around the Sons of UCF universe, with new episodes of Around The Kingdom, Pegasus Podcast, and ATK-Overtime. Plus, our guy Dali Drama dropped another great column on the juxtaposition of UCF Football and Basketball. If you missed any of those, you can always get caught up on demand via YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or SonsofUCF.com

Cow of the Week

It’s back! A Sons of UCF newsletter exclusive, our patented cow of the week award. This week, Kansas DE Dean Miller wins the award by a fairly wide margin for a blatant cheap shot on Colorado QB Shedeur Sanders. You can think however you want about Deion Sanders and the Colorado program, but this hit was dirty, and because these are Big XII officials, no flag was thrown.

The Big XII conference in general might also be cow of the week, because with losses by BYU and Colorado, the College Football Playoff selection committee now has even more ammunition to disrespect the conference in the playoff selection process. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for Brett Yormark to do something shady, but I have to imagine this is pretty close to a worst case scenario. Also, the tiebreaker process seems fairly confusing

That’s all for this week - everybody have a safe, happy, and healthy Thanksgiving holiday.

Go Knights!