Central Florida officially finishes sixth, gets four first place votes
UCF closes the 2017 season ranked sixth in the country after posting a 13-0 record. Central Florida’s coaches now turn their attention to Nebraska football.
After Alabama rallied to topple Georgia in the National Championship game, the final AP Rankings of the season were released. To no one’s surprise, UCF, lead by the Nebraska football staff finished as the sixth-ranked team in the country.
By no one’s surprise, I mean that the AP didn’t have enough support to vote the Knights higher. Scott Frost lobbied the media over the last week.
That lobbying looked quite a bit like the few words he said back in 1997. Back then he was lobbying for voters to find that his Nebraska football team was the best in the land after another undefeated season.
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This time around, Frost was trying to rally support for a kind of voter’s coup after UCF’s first ever undefeated season. In 1997 he and his team prevailed. In 2017 his squad only managed four first-place votes.
To some degree, it’s impressive they got that many, considering they overcame a schedule that wasn’t all that impressive and the stigma of being a Group of 5 school. You have to hope not every single one of those four first-place votes came from inside Nebraska or Florida.
What we do know is that this is the first time since 2009 that an undefeated team didn’t finish the season ranked number one in the AP Poll. That year, 14-0 Boise State finished fourth while Alabama finished first.
The big difference between 2017 and 2009 is that Alabama finished 14-0 as well in 2009. In other words, they had a much more legitimate claim on even being in the National Title hunt. It’s no secret Alabama didn’t even win it’s conference this year.
While Frost and company were slighted this year, he’s going to be at a program in 2018 that won’t get the same treatment. If the Nebraska football team has the same kind of season UCF did in 2017 they’ll be getting ranked quite a bit higher than sixth.