All’s fair in love and college football.
While Old Dominion may not have any connections to UCF, the Monarchs are happy to welcome Knights’ fans to come out and support them when they take on USF in the StaffDNA Cure Bowl on Wednesday.
“I always tell people, I have no problem being somebody else’s second favorite team,” ODU coach Rickey Rahne said. “If they want, we can be the second-favorite team for this week. Monarchs are very close to a knight, right?”
However, the 44-year-old Rahne does have a personal connection with UCF coach Scott Frost. The two were roommates while serving as graduate assistants on the Kansas State staff during the 2006 season.
“He was the defensive GA when I was the offensive GA,” Rahne told the Orlando Sentinel. “We actually lived in Raheem Morris’ house. He was the defensive coordinator, while James Franklin was the offensive coordinator. You would have thought we would have won more games.”
Kansas State would finish the season 7-6, losing to Rutgers in the Texas Bowl.
“Scott’s obviously an incredibly hard worker. He’s very intelligent and I liked being around him and learning from him,” said Rahne. “This was back in the days when a team only had one offensive GA and one defensive GA, so you were grinding.
“We also had to take classes, which neither one of us really wanted. I remember us both grinding through our entire class load in the week after the regular season, before the bowl game.”
Frost went on to serve as linebackers coach at Northern Arizona the following season, then at Oregon, UCF, and Nebraska, before returning to the Knights’ program last December.
Rahne spent four more seasons at KSU after being promoted to an assistant coach, working first with the running backs and then the tight ends. He moved on to Vanderbilt and Penn State before being hired as Old Dominion’s head coach in 2020.
“I’m terribly proud of what he’s been able to go on and accomplish,” said Rahne.
But as a roommate, both were opposites, much like the dynamic between the perverbially messy Oscar Madison and the neat freak Felix Unger from the television show “The Odd Couple.”
“He was very meticulous,” Rahne recalled. “I don’t know which one’s Oscar and which one’s Felix, but whichever one the sloppy one is — that was me.”
Please find me on X, Bluesky or Instagram @osmattmurschel. Email: mmurschel@orlandosentinel.com. Sign up for the Sentinel’s Knights Weekly newsletter for a roundup of all our UCF coverage.
