College football 2018: Biggest Achilles’ heel for every Top 25 team

16. UCF

Achilles’ heel: Replacing Shaquem Griffin and Mike Hughes

There’s a reason that Scott Frost is now the head coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. The job that he performed with the UCF Knights is one of the most impressive things that we’ve seen in college football in some time. He took the team from being a punch-line just a couple of years ago to going undefeated and (albeit naively) with the confidence to claim that they were the real National Champions of the 2017 season.

Frost is gone now, but the Knights aren’t looking to go anywhere at all in the 2018 season. The biggest reason that they aren’t is undoubtedly quarterback McKenzie Milton. While diminutive in stature, this kid proved last season that he’s an absolute star on the football field. He’s a great athlete with more moxie than arguably anyone in the sport, and he could be a potential Heisman candidate this season if he can replicate both his production and team success from last year.

Where the Knights are going to struggle, though, isn’t on the offensive side of the ball. Milton and their up-tempo system will surely do the work to keep things in-tact there, even with Frost now in the middle of the country coaching.

Instead, this team has to replace two NFL-caliber defenders as they lost both Shaquem Griffin and Mike Hughes to the draft. For many big programs, losing talent of that level is a way of life that they always have to deal with. For UCF, however, it’s hugely detrimental as they don’t have ready-made replacements for Griffin’s pass-rush or Hughes’ coverage ability on the roster. And if they don’t find a way to cope with those losses somehow, going undefeated again is going to be an immense struggle.