UCF, your 2017 National Champions!
That's right. National Champs.
Danny White uttered those words immediately after the 34-27 Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl victory against Auburn and reiterated that stance throughout the day on Tuesday, first in an interview with Dan Le Batard on ESPN Radio and later in his own tweets.
If it wasn't clear enough, UCF's official social media accounts made the declaration late Tuesday night along with an endorsement from school president John Hitt.
Sure, the winner of next Monday's Alabama-Georgia "College Football Playoff National Championship" will finish No. 1 in the final AP and Coaches polls, but college football already has a long history of claimed championships.
And why not?
UCF is college football's only undefeated team.
The Knights beat Auburn, a team that knocked off both Playoff finalists during the regular season.
UCF > Auburn > Georgia and Alabama.
UCF would love to prove themselves on the biggest stage, but the deck was stacked against them with a College Football Committee that didn't respect their regular-season accomplishments.
In his postgame Peach Bowl press conference, Scott Frost didn't hold back in calling out the committee led by Texas Tech AD Kirby Hocutt.
"Going through the season, I was afraid to say much about the rankings and everything because I'm a little superstitious," Frost said. "And just when a coach starts running his mouth, that's when you lose the next game. But it wasn't right. I was watching every week, the Committee sitting in a room and decide this two-loss team must be better than UCF because UCF is in the American. Or this three-loss team must be better than UCF.
"It looked like a conscious effort to me to make sure that they didn't have a problem if they put us too high and a couple teams ahead of us lost. And oh, no, now we have to put them in a playoff. But we just beat a team that beat two playoff teams and lost to another one by six points and we beat them by seven.
"And Auburn is a great team. I'm not taking anything away from them. I give them a ton of credit. But these guys deserve everything they get, and they deserve more credit from the Committee than what they got."
