The UCF-USF gridiron rivalry comes of age
If you want to cook up a real football rivalry, certain things are a must. UCF vs. USF always has been missing one key ingredient.
It’s had the geography because the schools are just 82 miles apart. It’s had the animosity, enough that the athletic directors at both schools have asked fans to behave this week.
It’s even had the name: “War on I-4.”
The problem is that outside the I-4 corridor, the game had less appeal than a Spam turkey. That will change this afternoon.
The Knights and the Bulls will stage the most consequential event since man landed on the moon.
(Hype is also a necessary ingredient in a rivalry.)
Their football game will actually be one small step for man, one giant leap for two schools that barely had a kicking tee between them 20 years ago.
Now they have a combined record of 19-1 and both are ranked in the AP Top 25.
The winner will advance to the American Athletic Conference championship game and stay in the hunt for a big-time New Year’s Six bowl game.
The UCF-USF game now rates a wager between mayors, with the loser promising to fly the rival team’s flag over city hall and send local goodies to the winning mayor.
The victorious coach will stay on track for being hired away by Florida or Tennessee or perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court.
But most of all, the loser will have its sterling season essentially ruined.
“I think it’s one of the best rivalries in college football,” UCF tight end Jordan Akins said.
For the first time in Florida history, a UCF player can say that and not be laughed at by two other schools in the state which shall remain nameless until one qualifies for the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl.
What a difference 20 years, millions of dollars and decent coaching makes.
If you’ve been stuck on I-4 without a radio for that long, you’d probably crash your car into a construction crane if you learned what’s happened at the state’s leading directional schools.
By directional, we mean schools with “Central” or “Western” or “North” in the name. That means they came along after the primary state name was taken, along with the primary state fan bases, donations, prestige and wide receivers.
UCF was just an idea that sprang up after John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 Moon Speech, where he laid out plans for a lunar landing before the end of the decade.
Local bigwigs thought NASA could use an engineering school within driving distance of Cape Canaveral, so Florida Technological University — know called UCF — was born.
USF was inspired by Dwight Eisenhower’s famous 1956 Snipe Speech, where he laid out plans to build a school for Americans dumb enough to go snipe hunting.
(Media outlets taking cheap shots at the other city is also a rivalry ingredient.)
The fact is UCF and USF both rocketed into huge academic bastions where thousands of students spent countless hours becoming Rhodes Scholars and looking for somewhere to park.
In order to shed their commuter-school reputations, both hitched their images to college football.
Geography dictated they become rivals. So did USF looking down its nose at its neighbor to the east.
The Bulls enjoyed early success and decided they had nothing to gain by playing the Knights. The upsetting thing for UCF was that USF’s arrogance was justified.
When they finally got around to playing in 2005, the Bulls won four straight games. About the best UCF fans could do was acquire USF quarterback Matt Grothe’s cellphone number in 2008 and bombard him with not-so-well wishes.
The schools didn’t start playing regularly until 2013 when UCF finally won and USF athletics director Doug Woolard couldn’t take I-4 home because his tires had been slashed.
This week has seen the requisite Internet trashtalking. UCF fans brag about having an on-campus stadium and America’s hottest coaching heartthrob, Scott Frost.
USF fans brag about the snipe they almost hunted down last week.
UCF AD Danny White and USF AD Mark Harlan put out a joint statement asking fans to “show great sportsmanship and conduct yourselves in a manner befitting our wonderful institutions and teams.”
The wonderfully unbeaten Knights are 11-point favorites over Charlie Strong’s Bulls, but you can throw the record books out the car window onto I-4 with this one.
More than a half-century after JFK first proposed putting a football rivalry in Tampa and Orlando, the world can finally proclaim: “Mission Accomplished.”