The 2017 self proclaimed National Champions are off to a 7-0 record to start this season and have the nations longest winning streak at 20 games. They have a high powered offense with one of the better quarterbacks in the country and had 4 players drafted in the 2018 NFL Draft. With that being said, one of the main questions on the minds of the UCF faithful is “Why haven’t they been receiving any College Football Playoff Buzz?”
The reason that the Knights haven’t received any buzz and will never be in the College Football Playoff is they play in the American Athletic Conference, they have the 89th ranked strength of schedule in the country, and their best win of the season was a comeback effort in which they had to hold a 4-4 Memphis team scoreless in the second half to keep their win streak alive. When talking about UCF, people fail to remember to remember that this is a team that went 0-12 three years ago and 6-7 two years ago, I think that in itself speaks to how good of a coach Scott Frost is, he continuously brought players to UCF that fit the system of playing fast and giving defenses little time to adjust to what they were doing. But how would the Knights fare against the elites in the country like Alabama, Clemson, Michigan, Ohio State, etc?
A common argument to this is, “Well, we beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl and they beat Alabama who beat Georgia in the National Championship, therefore they should be the champs.” As the great Lee Corso commonly says, “Not so Fast.” They beat an Auburn team who was one game away from the College Football Playoff and you have to question their motivation to be in that game whereas UCF viewed the game as program defining and one that would further put them on the national scene. In my opinion, if they want to be put on the national scene, they need to have a strong out of conference schedule and play teams better than Pitt whom they can run up and down the field on them.
Clearly the Playoff committee doesn’t value UCF as they ranked them 12th in their initial rankings. What is significant about this is they were ranked 1 spot behind a 2 loss Florida team. The difference between Florida and UCF is Florida has played the number 3,6, and 9 teams in the nation and UCF has yet to play a team with a winning record. Instead of calling out the College Gameday crew on twitter and calling college football a “popularity contest”, I think that UCF AD, Danny White needs to schedule some respectable teams if he wants his Knights to be relevant on the national stage.
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