Next season, this could be you, UCF.
And that’s why there are no ifs, ands or buts about what I am about to write:
If you are a UCF Knight — a fan, a player or a coach — you are absolutely, positively rooting for the Big 12’s TCU to beat the SEC’s big, bad Georgia Bulldogs in the national championship game on Monday night.
The fact of the matter is, there’s not much difference at all — just one letter, in fact — between TCU and UCF.
“There’s no doubt we’re going into a great conference,” says UCF coach Gus Malzahn, whose team, along with Cincinnati, Houston and BYU, will join the Big 12 next season. “The way TCU is playing is very impressive, and that’s great for everything [UCF is trying to accomplish].
“The landscape of college football has really changed over the last two years and it’s going to change even more next season with everything that’s going on,” Malzahn adds. “The old traditional three or four teams that make it [to the playoff] every year — those days are in the past. TCU is one of the up-and-coming teams and there’s going to be more and more of those programs in the Big 12. It’s an exciting time for us moving into this league.”
I’m not saying UCF is going to be in the CFP semifinals next season, but would you really be surprised if it happened in today’s whacked-out, wild-wild-west world of college football where anything is possible on a year-to-year basis?
Before this season, would anybody have considered TCU a national-championship contender in coach Sonny Dykes’ inaugural season? Of course not. The Horned Frogs were picked to finish seventh in the Big 12 after going 5-7 last season. And yet, somehow someway TCU is playing for its first national title since 1938, and Dykes is the first coach since Malzahn himself (at Auburn) to guide his team to a championship-game appearance in his first season.
TCU’s journey to the national-championship game has been a long and winding road of struggle and persistence. When the Southwest Conference dissolved in the mid 1990s, TCU was excluded when its former SWC brethren from Texas (Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor and Texas Tech) merged with the Big 8 to form the Big 12.
A quarter-century ago in 1997, TCU was adrift as a football program. The Horned Frogs were vagabonds and had a 1-10 record in the Western Athletic Conference. Now, four conferences later (the WAC, Conference USA, the Mountain West and the Big 12), TCU has become the first Texas school to advance into the CFP nine seasons into the format.
And it’s not like TCU has done it by recruiting elite-level talent. Over the last five recruiting cycles, the Horned Frogs have never had a top-20 recruiting class, according to the 247Sports.com rankings.
With the CFP getting ready to expand after next season, you would think that UCF being the only Big 12 team in talent-rich Florida would give the Knights some built-in recruiting advantages.
In fact, it’s not just coincidence that UCF’s latest high school recruiting class is considered arguably the best in school history. When you take the average ranking of UCF’s 14 signees, the Knights would rank fourth among Big 12 teams (not including soon-to-depart Big 12 members Texas and Oklahoma) behind TCU, Texas Tech and Baylor.
While the Knights don’t have the sheer number of high school signees as TCU and some other Big 12 programs do, that’s mainly because Malzahn has chosen to commit several scholarships to more experienced talent from the transfer portal as UCF makes the transition to a Power 5 league.
“Whether you’re a recruit or just a casual fan, everybody knows the Big 12 is one of the best conferences in college football,” Malzahn says. “You can see it all coming together, especially with TCU playing in the championship game. That’s huge.”
Of course, Malzahn and UCF’s administration know the Knights have some work to do in the coming years if they expect to build consistent conference contenders. It’s no secret that TCU and the other existing Big 12 members — because of the massive TV money they’ve acquired over the years — have built nicer facilities and have bigger athletic budgets than UCF. Likewise, their boosters are older and richer than UCF’s, making them more capable of donating the mega-millions needed to acquire and keep talent in this NIL/transfer-portal world.
Malzahn hired a new offensive coordinator — former UCF quarterback Darin Hinshaw — earlier this week and admitted that he’s turning over play-calling duties to Hinshaw partly because of all the demands on a head coach moving forward.
“I’ve got to get out there and start fundraising,” Malzahn says. “This is a different day in college football. It’s more like the NFL when it comes to roster management and everything that goes with it. And it’s been accelerated times 100 with NIL.”
Remember what former TCU coach Gary Patterson told a group of his boosters last season before he was replaced? Without naming the player, Patterson claimed there were numerous SEC schools aggressively coming after one his star freshmen and trying to convince the kid to transfer.
“There’s five SEC schools calling him and telling him, ‘Here’s what we’ll give you if you come here and not stay at TCU,’ ” Patterson said at the time. “At the end of the day, that’s just real life. If we don’t do anything about it, within a year we will lose him. The rules have changed. There is no wrong anymore.”
Now Dykes — Patterson’s successor — has his team ready to play an SEC powerhouse and defending champ for the national title.
Take heart, Knight Nation, and cheer loudly and proudly for the Horned Frogs.
Charge on, TCU.
As soon as next season, this could be you, UCF.
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on Twitter @BianchiWrites and listen to my Open Mike radio show every weekday from 6 to 9:30 a.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and HD 101.1-2