And one reason the Knights should do it anyway, if they can beat LSU in the Fiesta Bowl.

UCF has come nowhere near two different College Football Playoff fields despite winning 25 games in a row, as your Twitter mentions will frequently remind you, somehow even if you aren’t on Twitter.

The 2017 Knights up and declared themselves national champs after beating Auburn in the Peach Bowl, but what if the 2018 edition beats the other SEC West Tigers in the Fiesta?

There are a few reasons it’d be different this time around.

1. For the legalists, UCF’s 2017 claim was perfectly fair. It’s in the NCAA record books and everything. (We’ll get to how this relates to 2018.)

As I wrote in January 2017, UCF finishing No. 1 in the Colley Matrix — a former BCS computer that the NCAA lists among dozens of entities that have picked each season’s best teams over the decades — meant the Knights’ championship would end up recognized by NCAA standards whether UCF claimed it or not.

“Recognized” is key. It’s different than “awarded”. The NCAA does not crown an FBS champion and never has. It merely acknowledges the champions chosen by a specific group of polls, computers, and matchups.

Still, when the official 2018 FBS record book came out, there UCF was in the rundown of each season’s national champs:

NCAA

If it’s in the books, go ahead and claim it. Plenty of power conference big boys have used even more dubious justifications when ordaining themselves champs, so why not the little guys too?

Having said all that, 2018 UCF has no real chance of finishing No. 1 in any NCAA-recognized selector, even with a potential win over LSU.

There’s no way any of the big polls will have UCF No. 1 at season’s end, so it’s again down to the machines. The Knights entered bowl season with the following rankings in computers listed by the NCAA, and there’s almost no way they can jump to the top of any:

• Anderson & Hester: No. 7
• Billingsley: No. 7
• Congrove: No. 8
• Colley, whose jersey hangs in the rafters at Disney World: No. 7
• Dunkel: No. 8
• Massey: No. 9
• Sagarin, banished to the America section of the Epcot World Showcase: No. 18
• Wolfe: No. 8

(S&P+ has UCF at No. 8 as well.)

If UCF beats LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, it can do all the parades, banners, and rings it wants, but there’ll be nothing official to back any of it up, not that paperwork ever matters all that much in Florida anyway.

2. The way the season played out would make a 2018 claim trickier to sell than 2017’s.

UCF had an easy argument in 2017: it beat the only team that beat Alabama and the only team besides Alabama that beat Georgia. The Knights therefore had a tidy transitive victory over the entire National Championship.

2018 UCF, despite again being undefeated, can’t build anywhere near that narrative by beating LSU. Beating these Tigers would give UCF another transitive win over Georgia (LOL), but Georgia didn’t make the Playoff anyway. If the National Championship is an undefeated Alabama vs. an undefeated Clemson, fewer people will listen to UCF’s pitch than the year before, when everybody was mad about an all-SEC title game anyway.

However, if an Oklahoma that lost a game wins a Playoff that didn’t include an undefeated UCF? That’d be an easier sell.

Counterpoint to all that: nobody beat UCF. Again.

If the Knights beat LSU, they can call themselves whatever they want. I think every team that finishes a season unbeaten should call itself a national champ. (Shit, if Bama’s still good with including its slapstick comedy 1941 claim in its modern recruiting materials, then any team that finishes with only two losses might as well do the same.)

As we continue the five-year debate over whether to expand the Playoff, huge chunks of the country agree with UCF’s argument that every team should have a realistic path to compete for a title, whether they like throwback-style, self-awarded claims or not.

So if the Knights end up throwing themselves another parade, expect praise from people around the country who just want to change college football’s postseason yet again, no matter the catalyst.

(But first, they have to actually beat LSU.)