College Football Needs to Give Teams Like UCF a Title Shot

by Julian Spivey
Over the years I’ve kind of come to terms with the fact that I’m just not a college football fan. I think I once was when I was younger and didn’t have responsibilities or anything better to do on Saturday afternoons, but not anymore. I haven’t seen a single college football game from start-to-finish all season. I intended to watch the Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn all the way through, and it was on my television the entire time, but other things took my interest away. It just doesn’t matter to me much and this is something that’s hard to admit because it makes me an anomaly in the South and more importantly, I think it hurts my credibility as an all-around sports fan. But, you know I don’t really watch hockey, soccer or tennis either. So, I guess that was already out the window.
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I didn’t see a single college football game this season and due to my work schedule next week I won’t see much, if any, of the national championship game either, but I’m still kind of irritated that UCF (University of Central Florida), recently off their impressive Peach Bowl win over Auburn of the SEC, never had a shot to play in the national championship game.

I will state that I’ve never seen a single UCF football game in my life, so there isn’t some sort of bias here. I just feel like the entire system is wrong.

I believe this is partially why my interest in college football has waned or never reached the interest of the NFL over the years. I don’t believe college football has a format that leads to true champions. All other team sports in professional or collegiate levels do have playoff formats that lead to this. Sure, the recent college football playoff system is better than the old BCS system used to be. But, only taking four teams and those teams seeming to have to come from the SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 or Pac-12 conferences just leaves too many possibly worthy teams out of the picture. It’s not fair and, though I know I’m likely in a vast minority of people, I believe it hurts the sport.

Teams in other conferences like UCF in the American Athletic Conference that have perfect seasons should have the opportunity to compete for a national championship through the playoffs. Will they wind up defeating an Alabama or Ohio State or Oklahoma to make it to or win the entire thing? Likely not, but then again UCF beat Auburn in the Peach Bowl and Auburn beat Alabama and Georgia, the two teams competing next week for the national championship during the regular season.

It just doesn’t seem right for only five conferences to control college football the way they do. I love how every conference gets a shot to win it all in college basketball. In the college basketball tournament, which many call the greatest month in sports, you can see teams in smaller conferences like Butler or Gonzaga have a shot at winning it all. College football truly needs to at least go to an eight-team playoff, which if the playoff committee was doing their job at all, would give a team like UCF a shot. I realize the playoff committee only ranked UCF at No. 12, meaning they would’ve missed even an eight-team playoff, which is dumbfounding to me. Maybe in my wishful scenario they would have been the eighth seed and would’ve had to play the first seeded Clemson, but at least they would have gotten the chance to compete for the national championship. That’s all anybody could hope for.

UCF’s athletic director Danny White caused some controversy on Wednesday, Jan. 3 when he announced UCF were National Champions, as the only undefeated team in the FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) and that the university would be hoisting a national championship banner and would have a championship parade.

White told ESPN: “If you take the long view of the history of college football, there's an awful lot of national championships being claimed by universities that didn't accomplish what we accomplished this year in those respective seasons, so we feel we're more than justified to claim our first national championship, and we think it'll be the first of many. I don't think our kids should be penalized because we weren't respected by the College Football Playoff committee, nor should our program be penalized because we weren't around 20 or 30 years ago when people were claiming national championships left and right.”

I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to consider myself a college football fan again. Even if they made changes to the sport to give other teams a shot at the title I still might find better things to do. But, I do know that if I don’t feel like there’s a true champion in the sport it’s going to be mighty hard to be anything but indifferent toward it.

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