Were you referring to Satterfield's hiring here, or Rhule's?
Satterfield. Rhule was expensive, but the Big Ten sorta has a 'tax' now because agents and potential candidates know teams in the Big Ten have gobs of money. As I said at the time, you could argue a few different coaches were roughly equivalent in potential quality but it's hard to argue anyone was
clearly superior to Rhule. I don't think anything has happened since the hire to do anything but strengthen that statement.
Frost never got this in his time as a coach here. Whether it was because of pride to just go out there and play "2017 UCF ball" or whether it was ignorance, hard to say. Probably the former.
You're right, he never really did. Look at his propensity, especially the first several years, for taking the ball first if he won the coin toss. Football is an alternate possession game, except that pattern doesn't repeat at halftime...whomever deferred has the choice at the start of the second half. If you can score last before halftime and get the ball first in the second half, you can 'double up'. Not surprisingly, as teams have access and trust in more analytics, the number of coaches deferring greatly increases over the years.
The same can be said about his infatuation with play count. It's an alternate
possession game, not an alternate
play game. A lot of the advantages of running a very high tempo have either been legislated out and/or teams have found ways to counter it. The game comes down to how efficient you are on each drive and there are times you want to increase or decrease the number of drives each team gets.
Once Rhule got his teams up and running he typically won the games he was supposed to win because he understood the above, whereas Frost almost seemed to master the ability to lose winnable games.