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Report: UConn to receive $1 million guarantee for playing at UCF in 2021

By Kevin Kelley - October 18, 2019
UConn-UCF

Photo: Reinhold Matay-USA TODAY Sports

The UConn Huskies are leaving the American Athletic Conference and will begin playing as a Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) Independent in 2020. However, it appears that one of their current conference foes will soon return to their football schedule.

According to the latest UConn Board of Trustees agenda, the UConn Huskies will renew their “conFLiCT” rivalry game against the UCF Knights during the 2021 season. The matchup was discovered within the agenda and first reported by Twitter user @DruuuVannn.

Per the document, which can be found here (Page 7), UConn will travel to take on UCF at Spectrum Stadium in Orlando, Fla., on November 20, 2021. The document indicates that UCF will pay UConn a $1 million guarantee for playing the contest.

The contract will be discussed and either approved or denied at the meeting of the UConn Board of Trustees on Wednesday, October 23, 2019.

The UConn at Clemson contest in 2021 was discovered in a similar fashion. The game was later approved and is currently set for November 13, 2021. The Huskies will receive a $1.2 million guarantee for that contest.

If approved, UConn’s contest with the UCF Knights will be the fifth for UConn’s 2021 football schedule. The Huskies are currently scheduled to host Holy Cross (Sept. 2) and Purdue (Sept. 11) and travel to UMass (Oct. 9) and Clemson (Nov. 13) that season.

UConn is also in dire need of opponents for their 2020 football schedule, their first as an FBS Independent. The Huskies currently only have four opponents on the schedule — vs. UMass (Sept. 3), at Illinois (Sept. 12), vs. Maine (Sept. 19), and vs. Indiana (Sept. 26).

There are a few teams that still need one final non-conference game in 2020, or it’s possible their final opponent remains unannounced. Those teams include Air Force, Old Dominion, SMU, Southern Miss, TCU (x2), Texas Tech, UAB, and Virginia Tech.

UConn could also schedule more than one FCS team (only one win counts towards bowl eligibility), or they could add teams that play at Hawaii and are eligible for a 13th regular-season game, which is less likely.

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View Comments (11)

Comments (11)

I hope it works out for basketball because this will be a colossal failure in football. If you want to shut the program down Uconn, just shut it down. No need to let it bleed to death beside the road. Sad.

Can you please remove the American games from the UConn future schedules? Makes it’s difficult to keep track of the new games.

thanks

If UConn were to hire someone like Jim Tressel as HC they just might have a shot at getting better. After all Tressel does deserve a second chance after what happened at OSU.

Tressel just might be the key to improving UConn FB enough to get the entire athletic program into the ACC (men’s basketball will have to improve too, right now only women’s basketball is doing great, they haven’t lost to a conference opponent since the launch of The American).

It’s Civil ConFLiCT, the greatest rivalry in sports. Of course they have to keep it going.

There’s no reason why UCF should be paying that much for a bodybag game, I’m sure they can schedule a Sun Belt team for 50-75% of that (although they’d have a greater chance of losing, too)

The Hartford Courant reports that 10 of 12 games for UConn have be finalized. Interested to see how many will be @ home

Every contract must be approved by the Board of Trustees? Surely this is pro forma. Unless there is some serious problem, boards of trustees should stay out of scheduling football games. They simply are not qualified to micromanage a university athletic department.

I am glad to hear that the local newspaper believes that UConn only needs to schedule 2 more games for 2020. Scheduling 8 games, less than a year before game time, would be a difficult task.

Man, LET THEM COWARDS LEAVE! COWARDS! CAUSE THEY CAN’T WIN! YOU WON A BASKETBALL NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP NOT THAT LONG AGO! SO WHAT’S THE EXCUSE NOW? YOUR FOOTBALL PROGRAM? CAUSE YOU PLAYED IN THE FIESTA BOWL BEFORE! COWARDS! JUST GET OUT NOW!