There is no way around it.

After concluding a regular season where they finished with an undefeated 11-0 record and had eight wins by at least three touchdowns, all the Knights could get from the College Football Playoff committee was to be ranked 14th in the country.

If you’re going to play that well for an entire season and still not even get a whiff of the playoff’s hindquarters, why even pretend that “every team” has a shot?

Playing the Schedule That’s In Front of You

The problem that we run into here is in how teams are evaluated. Those who knock UCF’s resume will say “sure, they went undefeated, but who did they beat?”

This is what we call a bit of revisionist history. Coming into the season, the Knights had a decent schedule. They had home games against Memphis and South Florida, aka the rest of the top dogs in their conference, as well as a home game against Georgia Tech and a road game against Maryland.

They then had to adjust on the fly during the season thanks to a little thing called Hurrican Irma. The adjustments that created in their schedule were as follows:

Have a double-bye in weeks 2 and 3 instead of a bye in week 9

Lose out on a home game against Georgia Tech

Play 10 straight games

Replace your original FCS opponent (Maine) with a better FCS opponent (Austin Peay)

The Miami Hurricanes got all sorts of hand-waving apologetics for their narrow wins against Florida State (not a great team) and Syracuse (also not a great team) and North Carolina (an even less great team) due to the chaos that Irma caused in their lives.

The UCF players weren’t immune to these problems, yet this never gets brought up.

So they went 11-0 against a schedule that ended up a bit weaker than it started through no fault of their own, but dominated almost every team they faced.

I still have a hard time believing that, in a season where only 18 teams finished with less than three losses, going undefeated doesn’t get you into at least the top ten teams in the country. As many a wise man has said, going undefeated is extremely difficult no matter how hard your schedule is.

You say they should schedule harder opponents? Sure, but it’s not that simple.

Quality Losses > Worthless Wins

Just about every team you see ranked ahead of UCF today is not about to pick up the phone when Danny White calls and tries to schedule a one-off, let alone a home-and-home, and that problem is largely perceptual.

They see playing a game against a tough Forgotten 5 opponent as a lose-lose situation, but they’ve not been paying close enough attention to their college basketball counterparts.

Where do you think these early season invitationals come from? Wichita State is a strong mid-major program, but most P5 coaches know that – especially if Wichita is having a good year – a loss against the Shockers does almost as much for their resume as a win over Bethune-Cookman would. It’s time for these football teams to be seen the same way.

Do you really think that the risk/reward equation is so bad for Alabama if they were to schedule UCF that scheduling a home game against Mercer is really a better idea?

For the Crimson Tide, a win over Mercer does absolutely nothing to move the needle, and while a loss would be devastating it is a virtually impossible outcome.

If they schedule UCF, the odds of them losing increase significantly, but I can assure you that them losing a game against UCF will look a whole lot better on their resume than a loss against Kentucky.

The “Power 5” schools need to start considering the best Forgotten 5 schools as worth scheduling as a potential quality win or quality loss. Can you say that having a win over an otherwise 10-1 UCF or 9-2 Memphis team wouldn’t look better than a win over Mercer or Citadel?

If you go down, would you not regain a good chunk of the ground you lost due to half your conference opponents being ranked?

Scheduling Conflict

Even with that shift in mindset, you’re left with one other problem; it’s impossible to tell how difficult your schedule is going to be. As coaching expectations and turnover accelerate, especially at the P5 level, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell how good your schedule looks.

UCF is a perfect example. When they signed a deal in August of 2016 to play a home-and-home with UNC in 2018 and 2019, the Tar Heels were coming off an 11-3 season where they finished 15th in the CFP.

Last year they slid to 8-5, and now the Knights will face off next year against a North Carolina team that needed a late push just to finish 3-9. What looked like a great matchup at the time has devolved into a creampuff matchup without a big jump in performance from the Tar Heels next season.

The list of programs that is of above-average quality on a year-to-year basis is pretty short, and the list of programs that is predictable enough to count as a quality opponent both now and three years from now is even shorter. Unless you’re scheduling some of those teams, why even make these comparisons?

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The UCF Knights are doing the best they can. They make an effort to schedule the best opponents from among the teams that are willing to play them, and whether that schedule still looks as good by the time they play it, they go out and dominate and are rarely even challenged on the way to an undefeated season.

The College Football Playoff committee needs to start doing the best that they can by rewarding a team for turning in the best performance they could given the scenario they had in front of them.

If you can’t consider an undefeated team that scores an average of 48 points per game and wins by an average of 24 points per game to at least be one of the ten best teams in the country, what are we even doing here?