FRISCO, Texas — Eight years ago, as UCF won the American Athletic Conference championship, then-Knights coach Scott Frost was in tears on the field. He would soon leave for the Nebraska job, and everyone knew it. UCF’s stadium had Nebraska fans littered throughout.

Frost said after that 2017 game he didn’t really want to leave, but his alma mater was calling. UCF was undefeated and rolling, but he couldn’t turn down a chance to return home.

Now Frost is back at UCF for a second chance at the right place. He lasted just more than four seasons at Nebraska, with a 16-31 record, then spent 2024 as an analyst with the Los Angeles Rams. Frost said Tuesday that he didn’t want to talk about his time at Nebraska, but questions were impossible to avoid with how it connects to his UCF story.

“I didn’t want to leave UCF,” he told The Athletic. “I always said I would never leave unless it was some place you could go and potentially win a national championship. I got tugged in a direction to go try to help my alma mater, and I didn’t really want to do it. It wasn’t a good move. I’m lucky to get back to a place where I was a lot happier.”

Frost has said in previous interviews that he felt pressure to coach Nebraska at the urging of his ex-teammates, as well as his college coach and mentor, Tom Osborne. Frost led Nebraska to a share of the national championship as a quarterback in 1997.

Frost was hired at Nebraska by Bill Moos, the athletic director who retired in 2021. Frost and Trev Alberts, the AD hired to replace Moos, were known to have had a strained relationship, according to sources close to the program, before Alberts fired Frost. After he hired Matt Rhule as Frost’s replacement, Alberts left Nebraska in March 2024 to run the Texas A&M athletic department.

“Don’t take the wrong job, that’s what I learned,” Frost said. “Make sure you’re working for and around good people.”

During his re-introduction at UCF last year, Frost declined to talk directly about Nebraska, saying only that it was difficult to leave Orlando in 2017.

“We had it rolling in a good direction,” Frost said Tuesday. “I’m proud of that whole group, and what they did positioned us in a place where we could be considered to move up a league.”

Frost’s UCF teams were loaded during his first stint. After the undefeated 2017 season, the Knights had four players selected in the next NFL Draft, three in the first three rounds. He admits that keeping that team together would’ve been hard in today’s transfer portal era as a Group of 5 team. But now, in the Big 12, that dynamic has also changed.

“We’d have lost half that team, but that’s because we were in the American,” he said. “We’re (in) the Big 12 now. Kids are leaving other Power 4 schools to come back to Florida and come play for us. When kids come to UCF, they don’t want to leave.”

Frost knows that feeling all too well.

(Photo: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)