Is UCF becoming college basketball's Last Chance U?

Entering their second season in the Big 12, the Knights have brought in a pair of transfers with violent backgrounds

As the calendar officially turned to July and college basketball charged ahead with what’s routinely one of the slowest times of the year for the sport, there was a bit of news that sent shockwaves over certain corners of the internet.

Word leaked out from various reporters on July 1 that Dior Johnson, a junior-college transfer and former five-star recruit, had committed to UCF. Once a promising prospect, Johnson has for years been a well-known figure who’s often assigned the kinds of labels – “mercurial,” “troubled” – that get affixed to a player because it probably wouldn’t be right to describe a teenager in more blunt, explicit terms.

At the prep level, he was associated with nine different high schools, an average of more than one per semester. He had committed to three different colleges – Syracuse, Oregon and Pitt, in order – and left his ultimate destination, Pitt, after having never logged a minute for the Panthers. 

When the Orlando Sentinel wrote about Johnson’s commitment to the Knights, his exit from Pitt and subsequent move to the juco ranks was attributed perhaps too succinctly to “legal troubles.” It’s certainly one way of putting it.

Johnson was the latest addition in what has been an eventful seven months for coach Johnny Dawkins’ UCF program, which is coming off an encouraging 17-16 finish in its first season in the Big 12. Like Johnson, though, some of those new arrivals come with checkered backgrounds, whether it was a suspension at their previous stop, a dismissal from their prior program or pleading guilty to actual crimes.

After Johnson’s commitment, the jokes came quickly and easily about how the Knights looked less like a program vying to compete in the sport’s top conference and more like the subject of the Netflix documentary series Last Chance U, which has chronicled football and basketball teams at junior colleges, where players like Johnson end up for one inglorious reason or another. 

(I can’t act like I’m above those jabs, either, though I’d argue “Last Chance U(CF)” is a quality joke.)

Beyond that low-hanging fruit that fits neatly into 280-character messages, let’s take a deeper look at UCF’s offseason and some of the players it has brought in.

Benny Williams and JJ Taylor

We’ll get Williams and Taylor out of the way here early because not all messy exits from programs are created equally and compared to some of their future teammates, whatever missteps they had were incredibly minor.

Williams, a top-50 recruit nationally in the 2021 class, was in his third season last year at Syracuse, but had seen his minutes dip under first-year head coach Adrian Autry. In what would be his final act in an Orange uniform, he was assessed a technical foul in a 29-point loss at Wake Forest in February and when he was subbed out of the game, he brushed past Autry. When the game ended, he headed straight for the locker room rather than taking part in the postgame handshake line.

Fewer than 72 hours later, Syracuse put out a 20-word statement announcing he was dismissed from the program.

Taylor comes over from Memphis, where the former four-star recruit transferred after totaling just six minutes in three games. Ahead of a Dec. 23 matchup against Vanderbilt, it was revealed that Taylor had been suspended for “unspecified disciplinary reasons.” About two weeks later, he entered the transfer portal.

Again, all of this is comparatively meaningless, but for the sake of comprehensiveness, it’s still worth noting.

Mikey Williams

Williams was a public figure long before he ever stepped foot on a college court.

In Oct. 2021, he signed a contract with Puma, making him the first American high school basketball player to ink an endorsement deal with a global shoe company. That deal was made possible by an immense social media following he had amassed over the years. By the time he committed to Memphis in Nov. 2022, he had four million Instagram and two million TikTok followers. Before his 18th birthday, he was a millionaire.

As a four-star recruit and a top-50 prospect in the 2023 class, Williams’ future was unmistakably bright. Rather suddenly, though, that rosy outlook became murky.