25 Reasons Why UCF is So Salty Toward Power Conference Teams

Like I’ve said before, UCF Knights Football has a truly unique history among all of the 130 FBS schools. It’s easy to forget now, but there was a time when UCF was the “Sleeping Giant” of college football, and the reason for it was they went toe-to-toe with some of the greatest traditional powers in the game, but always seemed snakebit.

In the seven years from when UCF joined FBS (then Division I-A) in 1996 to its first season in the Mid-American Conference in 2002, UCF played 24 non-conference games against teams in what were then considered the Power Six (#P6 BABY!) conferences.

Of those 24 games, 12 of them were decided by one possession, and UCF lost all but one of them (2000 at Alabama). In 11 of them, UCF was either leading, tied, or had the ball down one possession in the second half, but couldn’t close the deal.

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Maybe it was an ill-fated 4th quarter decision, or a critical turnover, or yes, even a horrendous call in a clutch moment on the road, but the result was always the same. Hence the old cliche among grizzled Knight fans: “Same old UCF.”

For the teams that won these games, none of them meant 0.000001% of what they would have meant to UCF to win them. That’s when another corrosive term - “moral victory” - started following around UCF Football whenever it traveled to an SEC/ACC/Big East venue in the late 90s or early 2000s.

And that’s also how you get stuck with annoying monikers from those on the outside looking in, like “The Best 0-3 Team in the Nation” or “College Football’s Sleeping Giant.” Or “UCiF.”

But the other thing that does is harden your fan base for at least a generation or two. UCF’s Napoleonic Complex is not some newfangled marketing strategy cooked up by Athletic Director, Mad Genius and Breaker of Chains Danny White. It’s a mindset forged by watching your school come thisclose to showing the world it belongs, but coming up short time after time, and then getting damned with faint praise for it.

And even after George O’Leary took the helm, the same things happened, albeit with slightly less frequency. Still, fans were treated to the same empty feeling more than a few times, but now it was in conference championships, bowl games, or (gulp) against USF.

Recent successes have helped even some of those old scores, but the scars remain. And the pain resurfaces every time fans of those schools punch down at UCF for whatever reason. It’s because those guys know damn well the gap between them and UCF is a lot smaller than they think on the field, and it has been for years - even those seasons when UCF’s football program was held together by butcher’s twine and duct tape.

So forgive us, Big Time College Football, for being so salty. It’s just because we’re sick and tired of your crap and have been for almost a quarter of a century now. And we have the scars to prove it.

As promised, here’s that list of UCF’s most agonizing, heart-breaking, spleen-rupturing FBS losses. Relive them if you dare:

I’d ask you which one hurt the most but why? That’s just mean, and I’m not that kind of a guy.

But if some Feinbaum caller on Twitter asks you why UCF and its fans are so angry toward power conference teams, now you have a list that’s 25 reasons long.