Trumps Plan to Supercharge Inflation

Published

11 months ago

June 7, 2024

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Among prominent economists, no one was more explicit than former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers in warning that President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve Board risked igniting inflation by overstimulating the economy in 2021. Soaring prices over the next few years proved Summers correct.

Now Summers sees the risk of another price shock in the economic plans of former President Donald Trump. There has never been a presidential platform so self-evidently inflationary as the one put forward by President Trump, Summers told me in an interview this week. I have little doubt that with the Trump program, we will see a substantial acceleration in inflation, unless somehow we get a major recession first.

Summers is far from alone in raising that alarm. Trumps greatest asset in the 2024 campaign may be the widespread belief among voters that the cost of living was more affordable when he was president and would be so again if hes reelected to a second term. But a growing number of economists and policy analysts are warning that Trumps second-term agenda of sweeping tariffs, mass deportation of undocumented migrants, and enormous tax cuts would accelerate, rather than alleviate, inflation.

Rog Karma: The great normalization

In an upcoming analysis shared exclusively with The Atlantic, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moodys Analytics, forecasts that compared with current policies, Trumps economic plans would increase the inflation rate and force the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates higher than they would be otherwise. If he got what he wanted, Zandi told me, you add it all up and it feels highly inflationary to me.

In a study released last month, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated that the tariffs Trump says he will impose on imports would dramatically raise costs for consumers. Trump is promising a no-holds-barred, all-out protectionist spree that will affect every single thing that people buy that is either an import or in competition with imports, Kimberly Clausing, a co-author of the study and a professor of tax policy at the UCLA Law School, told me.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, is sympathetic to many elements of Trumps agenda and critical of Bidens. But Holtz-Eakin agrees that Trumps economic plan doesnt bode well for the cost of living, as he told me.

Summers, who served as Treasury secretary for Bill Clinton and the top White House economic adviser for Barack Obama, took substantial flak from fellow Democrats when he repeatedly warned that Biden was risking high inflation by pushing through Congress another massive COVID-relief package in 2021, while the Federal Reserve Board was still maintaining interest rates at historically low levels. The Biden administration and the Fed both did make consequential errors of failing to do macroeconomic arithmetic for which the economy is still paying, he told me.

Summers told me he remains unsure that the policies Biden and the Fed are pursuing will push inflation all the way down to the Feds 2 percent target. But he said he is confident that Trumps blueprint would make inflation worse.

Summers identified multiple pillars of Trumps economic agenda that could accelerate inflation. These included compromising the independence of the Federal Reserve Board, enlarging the federal budget deficit by extending his 2017 tax cuts, raising tariffs, rescinding Biden policies designed to promote competition and reduce junk fees, and squeezing the labor supply by restricting new immigration and deporting undocumented migrants already here. Others note that top Trump advisers have also hinted that in a second term, he would seek to devalue the dollar, which would boost exports but further raise the cost of imported goods.

For many economists, Trumps plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on imported products from all countries and 60 percent tariffs on imports from China are the most concerning entries on that list.

These new levies go far beyond any of the tariffs Trump raised while in office, several of which Biden maintained, said Clausing, who served as the Treasury Departments deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis for Bidens first two years. Trumps proposed tariffs also dwarf the levies Biden recently imposed on electric vehicles and assorted other products from China: Bidens new measures affect about $18 billion in Chinese imports, she said, whereas Trump proposes to raise tariffs on $3.1 trillion in imported goods, more than 150 times as much. Trump has been quite clear that he is envisioning something quite a bit larger than he did last time, Clausing told me.

In the Peterson study, Clausing and her co-author, Mary Lovely, calculated that Trumps tariffs would raise prices for consumers on the goods they purchase by at least $500 billion a year, or about $1,700 annually for a middle-income family. The cost for consumers, she told me, could be about twice as high if domestic manufacturers increase their own prices on the goods that compete with imports.

When you make foreign wine more expensive, domestic manufacturers can sell their wine at a higher price, Clausing told me. The same with washing machines and solar panels and chairs. Anything that is in competition with an import will also get more expensive.

While Trumps proposed tariffs would increase the cost of goods, his pledge to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants would put pressure on the cost of both goods and services. Undocumented migrants are central to the workforce in an array of service industries, such as hospitality, child care, and elder care. But they also fill many jobs in construction, agricultural harvesting, and food production. Removing millions of undocumented workers from the economy at once would create massive labor shortages in lots of different industries, Zandi told me. That would force employers to either raise wages to find replacements or, more likely, disrupt production and distribution; both options would raise the prices consumers pay. If you are talking about kicking 50 percent of the farm labor force out, that is not going to do wonders for agricultural food prices, David Bier, director of immigration-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me.

Removing so many workers simultaneously would be disruptive under any circumstances, many economists agree. But it could be especially tumultuous for the U.S. now because the native-born population has grown so slowly in recent years. Bier pointed out that immigrants and their children already account for almost all the growth in the population of working-age adults ages 18 to 64. If Trump in fact extracts millions of undocumented migrants from the workforce, there is no replacement [available] even at a theoretical level, Bier said.

More difficult to quantify but potentially equally significant are the frequent indications from Trump that, as with all other federal agencies, he wants to tighten his personal control over the Federal Reserve Board. During his first term, Trump complained that the Fed was slowing economic growth by keeping interest rates too high, and any second-term move to erode the Feds independencefor instance, by seeking to fire or demote the boards chair, Jay Powellwould be aimed at pressuring the board into prematurely cutting interest rates, predicts Alan Blinder, a former Fed vice chair who is advising Bidens reelection campaign. That would become another source of inflationary pressure, he says, likely spooking financial markets.

In the upcoming Moodys analysis, Zandi estimates the cumulative impact of all these possible changes. He compares a scenario in which Trump can implement his entire agenda with one in which power remains divided between Biden in the White House and Republicans controlling at least one congressional chamber. Inflation, Zandi projects, would be nearly a full pecentage point higher (0.8 percent, to be exact) under the scenario of Trump and Republicans in control than in the alternative of Biden presiding over a divided government. Inflation would be about that much higher under Trump even compared with the less likely scenario of Democrats winning the White House and both congressional chambers, Zandi projects.

Zandi said the only reason he does not anticipate prices rising even faster under Trump is that the Federal Reserve Board would inevitably raise interest rates to offset the inflationary impact of Trumps proposals.

But those higher interest rates would come with their own cost: Zandi projects they would depress the growth in total economic output and personal income below current policy, and raise the unemployment rate over the next few years by as much as a full percentage pointeven as inflation rises. Raising the specter of the slow-growth, high-inflation pattern that hobbled the American economy through much of the 1970s, Zandi told me, It is really a stagflation scenario.

Summers sees the same danger. It is difficult to predict the timing and the precise dynamics, he told me, but it is hard to imagine a policy package more likely to create stagflation than measures that directly raise prices (through tariffs), undermine competition, enlarge deficits, and excessively expand the money supply. There is a real risk during a Trump presidency that we would again see mortgage rates above 10 percent as inflation expectations rose and long-term interest rates increased, he predicted.

Holtz-Eakin, the former CBO director, also worries that Trumps agenda would make it much tougher for the Federal Reserve Board to moderate prices without precipitating a recession. Unlike Zandi and Summers, though, Holtz-Eakin believes that a second-term Biden agenda would also increase upward pressure on prices. Thats partly because of the cost of environmental and other regulations that the administration would impose, but also because he believes a reelected Biden would face enormous pressure to restore new spending programs that the Senate blocked from his Build Back Better agenda in 2021. He also believes that Trumps plans to increase domestic energy production could eventually offset some of the inflationary impact of his other agenda elements.

Kevin Hassett, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, has argued that any inflationary impact from Trumps tariff and immigration agenda would be offset by other elements of his planincluding cutting government spending and taxes, increasing energy production, and slashing regulations. Those four effects would dwarf the effects of any other policy proposals, Hassett maintained in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this year.

Holtz-Eakin isnt convinced. He told me that any moderating impact from Trumps energy and deregulatory agenda would take time to develop, while the inflationary effect of his tariffs and deportation plans would be felt immediately. Tariffs happen fast, Holtz-Eakin said. Deportations happen fast.

Rog Karma: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?

Zandi is even more skeptical. He told me that with domestic oil and gas production already at record levels, Trump has little room to open the spigot even further, or to affect prices much if he does. On regulation, Zandi said he is hard-pressed to see how Trumps plans would translate through to less inflation, at least in a meaningful way.

As with many issues, the potential impact of Trumps second-term plans for inflation has drawn little attention in the presidential race. Instead, the former president so far is benefiting from voters awareness that prices increased much faster under Biden, as the American and global economies emerged from the pandemics disruptions, than they did while Trump was in office.

Apart from concerns about Bidens age, that discontent over inflation appears to be the greatest threat to his reelection. In a recent survey across the seven most closely contested swing states published by the Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, a majority of voters said they considered their cost of living the most important measure of the economys performance. But a daunting three-fifths of voters in the poll, conducted by a bipartisan team of Republican and Democratic pollsters, said inflation is unlikely to be brought under control if Biden is reelected. In contrast, nearly three-fifths of voters said they believed that the cost of living would improve under Trump.

Even though experts such as Summers and Zandi are warning that Trumps economic agenda would have precisely the opposite effect, it wont be easy for Biden to convince voters to weigh those prospective risks more heavily than their retrospective judgments about prices under each mans tenure. But Biden may have no choice but to try. Raising awareness of the inflationary dangers in Trumps agenda may be Bidens best chance of winning a second look from the voters who are now moving toward the former president primarily because they remember gas, groceries, and other necessities costing less while he sat in the Oval Office.

Entertainment

P Diddy: Everything you need to know about the Sean Combs trial

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3 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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P Diddy: Everything you need to know about the Sean Combs trial

Seven months after his high-profile arrest, the trial of hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs is set to get under way today.

A three-time Grammy winner and one of the most influential hip-hop producers of the past 30 years – also known variously as Puff Daddy, P Diddy and “Love” in the years since he rose to fame in the 1990s – the rapper and founder of Bad Boy Records is now facing serious criminal charges in the US, as well as several civil lawsuits.

He has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, said his sexual relationships were consensual, and strenuously denied all allegations of wrongdoing.

Combs, 55, was arrested and charged in September 2024, six months after raids by federal agents on two of his properties in Los Angeles and Miami. He has been held in detention in New York since his arrest, having been refused bail as he awaits trial.

Jury selection is set to begin this morning and will potentially take several days. Opening statements by lawyers and the start of the testimony are expected to begin next week.

Here is everything you need to know.

What is Combs on trial for?

Combs is facing five felony charges:

• Racketeering conspiracy
• Two counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion
• Two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution

The rapper was initially charged with three offences – racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution. Two extra counts – one each of sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution – were added earlier in April.

Combs has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Racketeering broadly means engaging in an illegal scheme or enterprise, and the charge falls under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act (RICO) in the US.

According to the US justice department’s definition of RICO statute, it is also illegal to “conspire to violate” the laws.

The indictment against Combs alleges that between 2008 and 2024, he “led a racketeering conspiracy that engaged in sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson, bribery, and obstruction of justice, among other crimes”, the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said following his arrest in September.

Who are the accusers?

Prosecutors expect four accusers to testify against Combs during the criminal trial.

Three have requested their identities not be revealed to the press or the public and that they instead be referred to using only pseudonyms.

One accuser, who is referred to as Victim 1 in court documents, is prepared to testify under her own name, prosecutors have said.

When did allegations begin?

In November 2023, Combs’ former girlfriend, R’n’B star Cassie – full name Casandra Ventura – filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was trafficked, raped, plied with drugs and viciously beaten by the rapper on many occasions over the course of 10 years.

The lawsuit was settled the following day. Terms of the agreement were not made public but there was no admission of wrongdoing from Combs, and he issued a statement saying he “vehemently” denied the “offensive and outrageous” allegations.

Six months later, footage recorded at a hotel in Los Angeles in 2016 emerged, allegedly showing Combs hitting and kicking Cassie in a hallway.

Shortly afterwards, he released a video apology, saying his behaviour in the video was at a time when he had “hit rock bottom” but nonetheless was “inexcusable” and that he was “disgusted” with himself.

The rapper’s lawyers argue the footage was nothing more than a “glimpse into a complex but decade-long consensual relationship”.

Details of ‘freak offs’

The charges include details of alleged “freak offs” – described as “elaborate and produced sex performances that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during, and often electronically recorded”.

He allegedly induced female victims and male sex workers into drug-fuelled sexual performances, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors allege victims were given controlled substances during the sometimes days-long events to keep them “obedient and compliant” and Combs subjected them to “physical, emotional, and verbal abuse” to get them to engage.

The indictment also alleges Combs “engaged in acts of violence, threats of violence, threats of financial and reputational harm, and verbal abuse” including kidnapping and arson when witnesses of his alleged abuse threatened his authority or reputation.

What happens first?

The hearing is set to begin with jury selection at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in Lower Manhattan.

After the two additional charges were added, Combs’ legal team requested a delay of two months, saying they needed more time to prepare his defence. However, Judge Arun Subramanian, who will hear the trial, denied the request, saying it had been made too close to the start date.

So, the trial will go ahead as planned, starting with jury selection. This is currently scheduled to take a week, but as a high-profile case, this process may be complicated and take some time.

If jury selection goes to plan, the opening statements from the prosecution and defence are set to begin on Monday 12 May.

Lawyers for Combs have requested for potential jurors to be asked about their views regarding sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence in a questionnaire.

In a letter submitted to the judge, the rapper’s legal team said: “Because this trial involves content that is sensitive and private in nature, many individuals are uncomfortable speaking about these issues in front of others and would be more candid writing about them in a questionnaire.”

Examples of areas “requiring inquiry” are potential connections to “drug or alcohol abuse… domestic violence, their willingness to watch videos with physical assault and videos that are sexually explicit, and their views towards people with multiple sexual partners”, they said.

They also want potential jurors to say if they have watched documentaries released about Combs since the charges were announced.

Prosecutors criticised the defence’s proposed questionnaire – with 72 questions – as too long and touching on subjects that would be better asked in person by the judge, if at all.

What has Combs said?

The rapper has strongly denied all the allegations against him.

Following his initial court appearance in September, one of his lawyers, Marc Agnifilo, said the rapper would “fight this to the end,” that he was “not afraid” of the charges, and was “looking forward to clearing his name”.

“Eventually he’s going to be shown to be innocent,” Mr Agnifilo said.

In a document submitted in February, Combs’ legal team argued for the transportation charge to be dismissed, saying he had been subject to a “racist” prosecution “for conduct that regularly goes unpunished”, and that he was being “singled out” as “a powerful black man” over the use of escorts.

They argued that “no white person” had ever “been the target of a remotely similar prosecution” and said that while the rapper had “complicated relationships with significant others as well as with alcohol and drugs… that doesn’t make him a racketeer, or a sex trafficker”.

Are the criminal charges separate to the lawsuits?

Yes. Combs has also been hit with dozens of civil claims – a few filed before the criminal charges were announced, but the majority afterwards.

These include accusations of sexual abuse by men and women, from alleged victims who were as young as 10 at the time of the alleged incidents.

Many of these have been filed by Texas lawyer Tony Buzbee, whom Combs’ team have accused of seeking publicity.

One particularly high-profile lawsuit, involving rapper Jay-Z as well as Combs, was voluntarily dropped with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again, by the accuser in February.

Another lawsuit accuses Combs of raping a woman as alleged payback for her saying she believed he was involved in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. Combs is suing the lawyer involved in this case for defamation, over other allegations that have been made against him.

What sentence does Combs face?

The US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York announced details of potential sentences when Combs was charged, but said the decision would ultimately be determined by the judge.

Racketeering conspiracy carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, the attorney’s office said, as does sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion – which also carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.

The charge of transportation for purposes of prostitution carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Sports

This time at UCF, Scott Frost won’t need to catch lightning in a bottle

Published

3 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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This time at UCF, Scott Frost won't need to catch lightning in a bottle

Andrea AdelsonMay 3, 2025, 09:58 AM ET
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- ACC reporter.
- Joined ESPN.com in 2010.
- Graduate of the University of Florida.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Scott Frost walks into the UCF football building and into his office, the one he used the last time he had this job, eight years ago. The shades are drawn, just like they used to be. There are drawings from his three kids tacked to the walls. There are still trophies sitting on a shelf.

He still parks in the same spot before he walks into that same building and sits at the same desk. The only thing that has changed is that the desk is positioned in a different part of the room.

But the man doing all the same things at the University of Central Florida is a different Scott Frost than the one who left following that undefeated 2017 season to take the head coach job at Nebraska.

UCF might look the same, but the school is different now, too. The Knights are now in a Power 4 conference, and there is now a 12-team College Football Playoff that affords them the opportunity to play for national championships — as opposed to self-declaring them. Just outside his office, construction is underway to upgrade the football stadium. The same, but different.

“I know I’m a wiser person and smarter football coach,” Frost said during a sit-down interview with ESPN. “When you’re young, you think you have it all figured out. I don’t think you really get better as a person unless you go through really good things, and really bad things. I just know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

Out on the practice field, Frost feels the most at home — he feels comfort in going back to the place that has defined nearly every day of his life. As a young boy, he learned the game from his mom and dad, both football coaches, then thrived as a college and NFL player before going into coaching.

He coaches up his players with a straightforwardness that quarterbacks coach McKenzie Milton remembers fondly from their previous time together at UCF. Milton started at quarterback on the 2017 undefeated team, and the two remained close after Frost left.

“I see the same version of him from when I was here as a player,” Milton said. “Even though the dynamic in college football has changed dramatically with the portal and NIL, I think Coach Frost is one of the few coaches that can still bring a group of guys together and turn them into a team, just with who he is and what he’s done and what he’s been through in his life. He knows what it looks like to succeed, both as a coach and a player.”

Since his return, Frost has had to adjust to those changes to college football, but he said, “I love coming into work every day. We’ve got the right kids who love football. We’re working them hard. They want to be pushed. They want to be challenged. We get to practice with palm trees and sunshine and, we’re playing big-time football. But it’s also just not the constant stress meat grinder of some other places.”

Meat grinder of some other places.

Might he mean a place such as Nebraska?

“You can think what you want,” Frost said. “One thing I told myself — I’m never going to talk about that. It just doesn’t feel good to talk about. I’ll get asked 100 questions. This is about UCF. I just don’t have anything to say.”

Frost says he has no regrets about leaving UCF, even though he didn’t get the results he had hoped for at his alma mater. When Nebraska decided to part ways with coach Mike Riley in 2017, Frost seemed the best, most obvious candidate to replace him. He had been the starting quarterback on the 1997 team, the last Nebraska team to win a national title.

He now had the coaching résumé to match. Frost had done the unthinkable at UCF — taking a program that was winless the season before he arrived, to undefeated and the talk of the college football world just two years later.

But he could not ignore the pull of Nebraska and the opportunities that came along with power conference football.

“I was so happy here,” Frost said. “We went undefeated and didn’t get a chance to win a championship, at least on the field. You are always striving to reach higher goals. I had always told myself I wasn’t going to leave here unless there was a place that you can legitimately go and win a national championship. It was a tough decision because I didn’t want to leave regardless of which place it was.”

Indeed, Frost maintains he was always happy at UCF. But he also knew returning to Nebraska would make others happy, too.

“I think I kind of knew that wasn’t best for me,” he said. “It was what some other people wanted me to do to some degree.”

In four-plus seasons with the Cornhuskers, Frost went 16-31 — including 5-22 in one-score games. He was fired three games into the 2022 season after a home loss to Georgia Southern.

After Frost was fired, he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where his wife has family. He reflected on what happened during his tenure with the Cornhuskers but also about what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He tried to stay connected to the game, coaching in the U.S. Army Bowl, a high school all-star game in Frisco, Texas, in December 2022. Milton coached alongside him, and distinctly remembers a conversation they had.

“He said, ‘It’s my goal to get back to UCF one day,'” Milton said. “At that time, I was like, ‘I pray to God that happens.'”

If that was the ultimate goal, Frost needed to figure out how to position himself to get back there. While he contemplated his future, he coached his son’s flag football team to a championship. Frost found the 5- and 6-year-olds he coached “listen better than 19-year-olds sometimes.”

Ultimately, he decided on a career reboot in the NFL. Frost had visited the Rams during their offseason program, and when a job came open in summer 2024, Rams coach Sean McVay immediately reached out.

Frost was hired as a senior analyst, primarily helping with special teams but also working with offense and defense.

“It was more just getting another great leader in the building, someone who has been a head coach, that has wisdom and a wealth of experience to be able to learn from,” McVay told ESPN. “His ability to be able to communicate to our players from a great coaching perspective, but also have the empathy and the understanding from when he played — all of those things were really valuable.”

McVay said he and Frost had long discussions about handling the challenges that come with falling short as a head coach.

“There’s strength in the vulnerability,” McVay said. “I felt that from him. There’s a real power in the perspective that you have from those different experiences. If you can really look at some of the things that maybe didn’t go down the way you wanted to within the framework of your role and responsibility, real growth can occur. I saw that in him.”

Frost says his time with the Rams rejuvenated him.

“It brought me back,” Frost said. “Sometimes when you’re a head coach or maybe even a coordinator, you forget how fun it is to be around the game when it’s not all on you all the time. What I did was a very small part, and we certainly weren’t going to win or lose based on every move that I made, and I didn’t have to wear the losses and struggle for the victories like you do when you’re a head coach. I’m so grateful to those guys.”

UCF athletics director Terry Mohajir got a call from then-head coach Gus Malzahn last November. Malzahn, on the verge of finishing his fourth season at UCF, was contemplating becoming offensive coordinator at Florida State. Given all the responsibilities on his desk as head coach — from NIL to the transfer portal to roster management — he found the idea of going back to playcalling appealing. Mohajir started preparing a list of candidates and was told Thanksgiving night that Malzahn had planned to step down.

Though Frost previously worked at UCF under athletics director Danny White, he and Mohajir had a preexisting relationship. Mohajir said he reached out to Frost after he was fired at Nebraska to gauge his interest in returning to UCF as offensive coordinator under Malzahn. But Frost was not ready.

This time around, Mohajir learned quickly that Frost had interest in returning as head coach. Mohajir called McVay and Rams general manager Les Snead. They told him Frost did anything that was asked of him, including making copies around the office.

“They said, ‘You would never know he was the head coach at a major college program.” Mohajir also called former Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts to get a better understanding about what happened with the Cornhuskers.

“Fits are a huge piece, and not everybody fits,” Mohajir said.

After eight conversations, Mohajir decided he wanted to meet Frost in person. They met at an airport hotel in Dallas.

“He was motivated,” Mohajir said. “We went from coast to coast, talked to coordinators, head coaches, pro guys, all kinds of different folks. And at the end of the day, I really believe that Scott wanted the job the most.”

The first day back in Orlando, Dec. 8, was a blur. Frost woke up at 3:45 a.m. in California to be able to make it to Florida in time for his introductory news conference with his family.

When they pulled into the campus, his first time back since he left in 2017, Frost said he was in a fog. It took another 24 hours for him and his wife, Ashley, to take a deep exhale.

“Rather than bouncing around chasing NFL jobs, we thought maybe we would be able to plant some roots here and have our kids be in a stable place for a while at a place that I really enjoyed coaching and that I think it has a chance to evolve into a place that could win a lot of football games,” Frost said. “All that together was just enough to get me to come back.”

The natural question now is whether Frost can do what he did during his first tenure.

That 2017 season stands as the only winning season of his head coaching career, but it carries so much weight with UCF fans because of its significance as both the best season in school history, and one that changed both its own future and college football.

After UCF finished 13-0, White self-declared the Knights national champions. Locked out of the four-team playoff after finishing No. 12 in the final CFP standings, White started lobbying for more attention to be paid to schools outside the power conferences.

That season also positioned UCF to pounce during the next wave of realignment. Sure enough, in 2023, the Knights began play in a Power 4 conference for the first time as Big 12 members. This past season, the CFP expanded to 12 teams. Unlike 2017, UCF now has a defined path to play for a national title and no longer has to go undefeated and then pray for a shot. Win the Big 12 championship, no matter the record, and UCF is in the playoff.

But Frost cautions those who expect the clock to turn back to 2017.

“I don’t think there’s many people out there that silly,” Frost said. “People joke about that with me, that they’re going to expect you go into undefeated in the first year. I think the fans are a little more realistic than that.”

The game, of course, is different. Had the transfer portal and NIL existed when Frost was at UCF during his first tenure, he might not have been able to keep the 2017 team together. The 2018 team, which went undefeated under Josh Heupel before losing to LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, might not have stayed together, either.

This upcoming season, UCF will receive a full share of television revenue from the Big 12, after receiving a half share (estimated $18 million) in each of his first two seasons. While that is more than what it received in the AAC, it is less than what other Big 12 schools received, making it harder to compete immediately. It also struggled with NIL funding. As a result, in its first two years in the conference, UCF went 5-13 in Big 12 play and 10-15 overall.

Assuming the House v. NCAA settlement goes into effect this summer, Mohajir says UCF is aiming to spend the full $20.5 million, including fully funding football.

“It’s like we moved to the fancy neighborhood, and we got a job that’s going to pay us money over time, and we’re going to do well over time, but we’re stretching a little to be there right now, and that requires a lot of effort from a lot of people and a lot of commitment from a lot of people,” Frost said. “So far, the help that we’ve gotten has been impressive.”

Mohajir points out that UCF has had five coaching changes over the past 10 years, dating back to the final season under George O’Leary in 2015, when the Knights went 0-12. Frost says he wants to be in for the long term, and Mohajir hopes consistency at head coach will be an added benefit. Mohajir believes UCF is getting the best of Frost in this moment and scoffs at any questions about whether rehiring him will work again.

“Based on what I’m seeing right now, it will absolutely work,” Mohajir said. “But I don’t really look at it as ‘working again.’ It’s not ‘again.’ It’s, ‘Will it work?’ Because it’s a different era.”

To that end, Frost says success is not recreating 2017 and going undefeated. Rather, Frost said, “If our group now can help us become competitive in the Big 12, and then, from time to time, compete for championships and make us more relevant nationally, I think we’ll have done our job to help catapult UCF again.”

You could say he is looking for the same result. He’s just taking a different route there.

Sports

Ex-Cougar Haulcy, top transfer safety, picks LSU

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3 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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Ex-Cougar Haulcy, top transfer safety, picks LSU

Max OlsonMay 4, 2025, 11:06 PM ET
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- Covers the Big 12
- Joined ESPN in 2012
- Graduate of the University of Nebraska

Houston transfer safety A.J. Haulcy committed to LSU on Sunday, his agency, A&P Sports, told ESPN.

Haulcy, the top player still available and No. 1 safety in ESPN’s spring transfer portal rankings, committed to the Tigers after taking an official visit Sunday. Miami, Ole Miss and SMU were also contenders for his pledge.

The 6-foot, 215-pound senior defensive back has started 32 games over his three college seasons and earned first-team All-Big 12 honors in 2024 after producing 74 tackles, 8 pass breakups and 5 interceptions, which tied for most in the conference.

LSU has assembled one of the top incoming transfer classes in the country this offseason with 18 signees, including six players — wide receivers Barion Brown (Kentucky) and Nic Anderson (Oklahoma), linemen Braelin Moore (Virginia Tech) and Josh Thompson (Northwestern), cornerback Mansoor Delane (Virginia Tech) and defensive end Patrick Payton (LSU) — who ranked among the top 60 in ESPN’s winter transfer rankings.

The Tigers also landed USF transfer Bernard Gooden, one of the most coveted defensive tackles in the spring transfer window.

Haulcy began his career at New Mexico in 2022, earning a starting role as a true freshman and recording 87 tackles, including a career-high 24 against Fresno State, and two interceptions. The Houston native entered the transfer portal at the end of the season and came home to play for the Cougars.

As a sophomore in 2023, Haulcy recorded a team-high 98 tackles and received votes for Big 12 Defensive Newcomer of the Year from the league’s coaches.

Haulcy chose to re-enter the portal April 21 after Houston’s spring game, as did starting cornerback Jeremiah Wilson, who’ll continue his career at Florida State. Wilson and Haulcy were the Nos. 11 and 12 players, respectively, in ESPN’s spring transfer rankings.