For the second time in as many seasons, UCF has finished the regular season unbeaten. That's impressive in itself, but even more impressive when you consider they also managed to do it with an entirely new coaching staff with Scott Frost taking his staff with him to Nebraska, and Josh Heupel and his staff picking up, and building on where Frost and his staff left off.
With the announcement that Alabama, Clemson, Notre Dame, and Oklahoma ended up being the chosen four for the College Football Playoff, leaving the Knights on the outside looking in again despite their unblemished record, Danny White took a creative jab at the current playoff model, as he's been known to do now.
"It's not a playoff. It's an invitational," he tweeted.
As someone who covers coaching changes for a living, what Heupel and his staff have been able to do this season is nothing short of remarkable, so in a lot of ways many proponents of UCF will think White has a valid point. The difficult parts comes when you've got a pick a team among those four selected in order to slide in UCF. Undefeated UCF, who used a rally with backup quarterback Darriel Mack Jr. leading the way to overcome a 17-point halftime deficit to beat Memphis 56-41 last night, ranked 8th in the final College Football Playoff rankings, behind #5 Georgia, #6 Ohio State, and #7 Michigan, and just ahead of #9 Washington and #10 Florida. If they're able to go undefeated in their bowl game to extend the nation's longest unbeaten streak to 26 games, it's a foregone conclusion that White will declare UCF back-to-back national champions but the fun part will be how he does it, and how other schools clap back. Some haven't waited.... like this from Brian Kelly's presser earlier.