The debut College Football Playoff rankings placed Central Florida at No. 12, a position that indicates both progress and the insurmountable distance between the Knights and a berth in the national semifinals.
Begin with the good news. Last year’s team was ranked 18th in the first rankings and slowly climbed to a final ranking of 12th, falling well short of the top four yet earning the access-bowl bid to a New Year’s Six game afforded to the best team from the Group of Five — an eventual 34-27 Peach Bowl win against favored Auburn.
This year’s team brought into the first rankings the same record, a perfect 7-0, but a weaker résumé. By this point in 2017, the Knights owned one win against a Power Five opponent, Maryland, and an additional three victories against teams with a winning record. Through seven games of 2018, UCF has defeated a Power Five team, a 31-point romp against Pittsburgh, but own no wins against an opponent currently holding a winning record.
The Sagarin Ratings ranks UCF’s schedule as the 125th-toughest in college football; this puts the Knights one spot ahead of Football Championship Subdivision power North Dakota State – the Bison are ranked higher overall than UCF, 22nd to 27th, per Sagarin. Ranking teams by past opponents’ winning percentage slots the Knights at 119th out of the 130 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision. It’s a résumé for the Bahamas Bowl, not a semifinal.
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"They are the only team in the country that has not played a game against a team that currently has a winning record," said College Football Playoff selection committee chairman Rob Mullens, the athletics director at Oregon.
Even still, here we are: UCF begins its fruitless quest to reach the playoff six spots ahead of the pace set by last year’s team.
It’s a sign of the growing respect for UCF on a national level and, most importantly, among the selection committee. Teams that blazed the path for Group of Five programs — such as Boise State, TCU and Utah — followed a similar script; each program accumulated goodwill among voters in small chunks, year by year, and each nearly parlayed this sort of approval into a shot at the national championship.
"Data is one piece of it,"' Mullens said of the committee's deliberations over UCF. "However, when you watch them play … that goes into the mix when you add it up. It’s part of the data, including the strength of schedule, but it’s also part of what you see in the eye test."
There may come a year when UCF plays its way into the playoff, either due to the acceptance of the American Athletic Conference into the Power Five structure or an expansion into an eight-team postseason format. Both seem like long shots, at least in the immediate future.
That the Knights' debut ranking matches its high-water point from a season ago is still progress, and the sort of that may pay dividends for a program with aspirations far more epic in scope than a mere conference championship.
In 2018, however, and as was the case in 2017, the Knights’ odds of cracking into a national semifinal are infinitesimal. Too much needs to happen for UCF to even be included in that conversation. The SEC needs to implode. The Big Ten, too, and the Big 12. In fact, every major conference would need to not only have its current front-runner fall off the map but the next tier of contenders as well. The scenario is so far-fetched that it’s unproductive to even consider.
Even if the impossible does happen, keep in mind how the selection committee will inevitably view UCF: in the end, as a team with the sort of résumé the playoff format was supposed to purposefully snub rather than reward. It didn’t happen for the Knights in 2017. And it won’t happen in 2018, either.
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