{"id":200912,"date":"2026-03-22T00:58:30","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T00:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/200912\/"},"modified":"2026-03-22T00:58:30","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T00:58:30","slug":"its-time-for-ucf-to-pay-johnny-dawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/200912\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s time for UCF to pay Johnny Dawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Give Johnny Dawkins a raise and a nice new contract.<\/p>\n

And do it now.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t care<\/a> that UCF lost 75-71 to storied UCLA on Friday night<\/a> in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. What matters is 10th-seeded UCF was actually in the tournament against UCLA and made the blueblood Bruins sweat until the final buzzer.<\/p>\n

Certainly, UCF athletic director Terry Mohjair and the school\u2019s leadership are smart enough to know Dawkins deserves a decent extension. Not a one-year deal. Not a two-year deal. Give him three years. He deserves it.<\/p>\n

Dawkins has now completed a decade at UCF, and what he has constructed is not flashy or fragile; it\u2019s steady and stable.\u00a0This season, the Knights didn\u2019t just survive their ongoing transition into the meat grinder known as Big 12 basketball; they competed in it. They won nine conference games in the toughest league in college basketball. They secured five Quad 1 wins, beating programs like Kansas, Texas Tech, BYU, Cincinnati and Texas A&M. Those aren\u2019t opportunistic victories. They are the product of preparation, belief and execution.<\/p>\n

And it all happened in spite of a reality Knight Nation cannot ignore: That their team is operating at a severe financial disadvantage.<\/p>\n

In a conference increasingly shaped by NIL spending, UCF sits near the bottom. That\u2019s not an excuse, but it is a constraint. The teams Dawkins faces can retain their own stars and reload rosters annually with high-profile transfers and proven scorers.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, UCF lost Keyshawn Hall, its leading scorer from last year\u2019s team, to Auburn. The Knights lost their leading rebounder and shot-blocker, promising 7-foot-2 freshman Moustapha Thiam, to Cincinnati. Dawkins had to replace his entire roster through the transfer portal, going bargain shopping and identifying players who fit not just a system, but a culture.<\/p>\n

All you need to know is this: UCF went on the road near the end of the season and thumped then No. 19-ranked BYU, whose star player AJ Dybantsa reportedly has an NIL deal worth nearly twice as much as UCF\u2019s entire roster.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoing more with less\u201d gets thrown around so often it risks losing meaning, but at UCF it is measurable. This isn\u2019t a program winning because it outspends its competition. It\u2019s competing\u00a0 because it outworks, out-prepares and, increasingly, outperforms expectations.<\/p>\n

Even in a loss to UCLA, that truth doesn\u2019t change. If anything, it reinforces it. UCLA, after all, is a program with much more tradition, talent and, yes, money than UCF.<\/p>\n

Mohajir has already made it clear<\/a> that discussions about a potential Dawkins\u2019 extension are underway. He has also emphasized a preference for avoiding situations where a coach enters the final year of a contract without clarity. Dawkins is already in that exact scenario, with a non-guaranteed final year looming.<\/p>\n

So the question becomes simple: What more does UCF need to see?<\/p>\n

If the answer is \u201ca deeper tournament run,\u201d then the evaluation is flawed. Because tournament results are inherently volatile. One bad matchup, one bad shooting night, one unfortunate stretch of five minutes can define a season\u2019s ending. That\u2019s the nature of March. It\u2019s not a reliable measure of program health.<\/p>\n

What is reliable is consistency. Growth. Competitiveness in a power conference.<\/p>\n

Dawkins has delivered all three.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also something to be said for how he has delivered it. In an era where college sports has become increasingly slimy, Dawkins has maintained a program built on continuity and trust. Players develop under him. They improve. They buy into something larger than themselves. That is harder than ever to achieve, and it speaks to a leadership style that values substance over shortcuts.<\/p>\n

He is also, quite simply, respected.<\/p>\n

Within the program. Across the conference. Among recruits and their families. Dawkins, a Duke legend, represents UCF with a level of professionalism that aligns with the university\u2019s broader identity. That may not show up in analytics, but it matters in ways that extend beyond wins and losses.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where this decision becomes bigger than basketball. Giving Dawkins a decent contract extension is not just about rewarding a coach; it\u2019s about affirming a philosophy. It\u2019s about deciding that credibility, stability and integrity are worth investing in; even in a landscape that often prioritizes quick fixes.<\/p>\n

There is also a practical reality: coaches who win in difficult circumstances become attractive elsewhere. I\u2019m not saying Johnny Dawkins is looking to leave UCF or has any job offers, but it certainly wouldn\u2019t be out of the question for a struggling program to look at what he\u2019s done with less and wonder what he could do with more. At 62, Dawkins is the same age as Curt Cignetti when Cignetti became the head football coach at Indiana. In today\u2019s college sports landscape, proven program-builders don\u2019t stay overlooked forever.<\/p>\n

None of this means ignoring areas where UCF could improve and grow. But growth is not linear, and expecting dominance \u2013 especially in the Big 12 \u2013 is simply unrealistic. What matters is direction.<\/p>\n

And UCF\u2019s direction under Dawkins is undeniable.<\/p>\n

A four-point loss to bigger, better UCLA program doesn\u2019t change that. It doesn\u2019t erase the victory over tradition-rich Kansas and its bloated basketball budget. It doesn\u2019t diminish the significance of five Quad 1 wins. And it certainly doesn\u2019t negate the reality that UCF hoops is competing in arguably the toughest basketball\u00a0 conference in America, while UCF football is still struggling in a far less demanding Big 12 football landscape.<\/p>\n

The fact is, Johnny Dawkins has already done the hard part; he has built a Big 12-caliber program with Big 12-caliber wins while operating with a not-so-Big-12-caliber NIL budget.<\/p>\n

Now the only question left is whether UCF is as committed to basketball as its basketball coach has been to UCF.<\/p>\n

Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my new radio show \u201cGame On\u201d every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com\/listen<\/p>\n

\"HeadUCF head coach Johnny Dawkins gathers his players against the UCLA Bruins during the second half in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at Xfinity Mobile Arena on Friday in Philadelphia. (Emilee Chinn\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Give Johnny Dawkins a raise and a nice new contract. And do it now. I don\u2019t care that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[92798,92797,139,141,140,92799,7219],"class_list":["post-200912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-contract-extension","tag-johnny-dawkins","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-terry-mohajir","tag-ucf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}