Knights to remember
Giving UCF crown puts attention on gridiron unfairness
UCF’s Wyatt Miller (78) high-fives 3-year-old Remington Delgado during a block party Monday in downtown Orlando as Knights fans celebrated the nation’s only unbeaten college football team. Columnist Mike Bianchi says giving UCF a national title is befitting of sports journalism, while in Atlanta, Alabama rallies to knock off Georgia in overtime in the College Football Playoff finale.
Go ahead and denounce me for being a pandering pom-pom-waving publicity-seeker if you want.
Go ahead and accuse me of trying to get more people to read my sports column in the Orlando Sentinel or listen to my sports radio show on FM 96.9.
Believe me, this is not why I filed my Sentinel column a couple hours after the Peach Bowl a week ago and declared UCF as the “real college football national champions.” This is not why I got up on stage Monday night at the city’s massive downtown block party and presented UCF with a national-championship trophy commissioned by my radio show.
Admittedly, it did feel kind of nice to actually be cheered by
thousands upon thousands of UCF fans at the downtown national-championship celebration instead of fielding the usual array of complaints grumbling that I write more columns about the Gators and the Seminoles than I do about the Knights.
But being a homer has never been my motivation.
Declaring UCF as national champions is steeped in one of journalism’s most noble missions: “To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
The afflicted is UCF — an incredible football team that did everything it could possibly do this season to at least be considered for a spot in the national playoff. The Knights were the only undefeated team in the country and the highest-scoring team in the nation and yet they were ignored by the College Football Playoff Cartel, er, Committee. What a sham that the committee put unbeaten UCF at No. 12 — five spots below three-loss Auburn — heading into the Peach Bowl.
The comfortable, of course, is the Power 5 conference commissioners who run college football and who have essentially deemed the Knights as unworthy and eliminated UCF and other non-Power 5 programs from ever qualifying for the national-championship playoff.
I don’t know if the Knights could beat Alabama or Georgia, but declaring them national champions and presenting them with a trophy shines a bright light on the darkest, most discriminatory endeavor of any major sport in the world. Can you imagine if the NFL eliminated the Jacksonville Jaguars from a chance at competing for the Super Bowl because they don’t have the history, tradition or fan base of the Pittsburgh Steelers or the New England Patriots?
This is why UCF athletics director Danny White should be commended for scheduling the downtown celebration on the same night as Georgia and Alabama played for the Power 5 national championship. White, one of the few administrators who have the audacity to speak out against college football’s ruling class, has been comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable at every turn. He has kept alive UCF’s national-championship narrative by scheduling a national-championship parade, paying coaches their national-championship bonuses and ordering players their national-championship rings.
His whole crusade has been a marketing boon for UCF — a team nobody except Orlandoans would be talking about if not for White going toe-to-toe with the Power 5 on the national stage. During the past week, ESPN, the SEC Network, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo Sports and every other national media outlet has been endlessly discussing UCF. Alabama coach Nick Saban and Georgia coach Kirby Smart were even asked about UCF’s national-championship claims on the eve of their own Power 5 title game Monday night.
But it’s not just the national media that has taken notice; it’s regional media, too — publications like the Prince George Journal in Prince George County, Va. The editorial board of the small newspaper met after the Peach Bowl and decided it, too, would name UCF as its national champion. Chad Harrison, the publisher of the newspaper, was at the national-championship celebration Monday to present the Knights with the original metal plate from the printing press used to crank out the national-championship edition.
Harrison, ironically, is an Alabama graduate and said his publication’s decision to back UCF is also based upon traditional journalistic values.
“We’re trying to basically do what the traditional newspaper business has always done,” Harrison said. “We want to hold leaders accountable and expose things that aren’t right inside of government and outside of government as well. And what has happened to UCF isn’t right. This team deserves better. We hope this sparks a greater debate on expanding the playoff to make it fair for teams like UCF.”
UCF fans cheered raucously for Harrison Monday night.
They cheered Mayor Buddy Dyer when he presented the team with the key to city. They cheered their team. They cheered their town. They even cheered me. The afflicted have not only been comforted; they’ve been empowered. Mission accomplished. “The sleeping giant,” White said, “is wide awake!”
Not only that, but he just had his first cup of coffee.