Knights shock Baylor in historic upset

An electrified UCF did what no football team had done all season Wednesday night: Get into a shootout with Baylor and win. The No. 15 Knights stormed the gridiron with a game plan unlike anything fans had seen this season as they spun, scrambled and raced their way into the history books in an explosive 52-42 win over No. 6 Baylor in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl.

"There's not many outside of us who believed we had a chance, but we did and I think we showed what UCF football is all about," UCF quarterback Blake Bortles told Sports Illustrated after the game.

Until UCF entered University of Phoenix Stadium and scored two touchdowns and forced a three-and-out on Baylor in the first three drives of the game, the Knights had been billed 17-point underdogs. That changed quickly after Bortles stole the pregame momentum ceded to the Bears by sports pundits and kept it for a touchdown.

After an eye-opening first quarter in which the Knights blew open a 14-0 lead, they did have their struggles, giving up three straight turnovers on three consecutive plays — not drives, plays — to give Baylor a chance at a comeback.

The Bears would oblige, scoring with terrifying ferocity in two rapid drives that nearly evened the score. But after the Bears tried to capitalize on their own momentum to attempt a two-point conversion against a seemingly overmatched Knights defense, they watched their chances of redemption batted out of the air.

From the start of the game the Knights would never trail Baylor, allowing the Bears to only tie them once at 28-28 with 10 minutes left in the third quarter. Then the Knights did what they've done twice more this season - upset a team that was a heavy favorite.

Bortles would feed running back Storm Johnson and watch him lurch and sprint to the end zone twice. He would hit wide receiver Rannell Hall on field-spanning bombs that turned into foot races that Hall would always win. He would connect with receiver Breshad Perriman on a laser beam strike in the end zone that renewed the Knights' confidence. And he would keep the ball himself for a touchdown among a career-high 93 rushing yards to keep the momentum going.

The Bears would score easily on a few drives that seemed to offer a spark of what they'd become famous for this season with a no-huddle offense packed with NFL-prospect running backs and receivers. But penalties, light in coming early on in questionable pass-interference situations, hit them heavily by mid-game and then kept coming, adding up to 17 by the end. The Knights would capitalize on many of them, turning gifts of penalty first downs into game-shifting scores. Then they piled on.

Johnson, despite a fumble early on, would race to 130 yards rushing and find the end zone twice - nearing career highs in the game. Hall would snag just four receptions, but turned them into a wild 113-yards worth of highlight reel footage as he evaded Bears defenders and left them for the end zone twice more. Perriman would catch just three passes, but made the big one count with a touchdown. Receiver Jeff Godfrey would snag a 38-yarder en route to 60 total. Receiver J.J. Worton grabbed five for 56 yards.

And Bortles, who entered the game after a lackluster season on the ground compared to a more mobile 2012 carried the ball 11.6 yards per attempt en route to 93 yards and the end zone. He would account for 394 total yards in the game, pushing the Knights to 556. Baylor would amass 550 yards in response. But they had no response for UCF's dismantling of their defense.

It would be called the biggest BCS Bowl upset ever by sports media outfit SBNation, with the No. 15 Knights trashing a No. 6 team the whole game. In a season in which the Knights narrowly escaped losses to teams with sub-.200 records, they never trailed and never let Baylor score more than twice in a row as the Bears' explosive offense tried desperately to catch up.

Less than ten years since the UCF Knights went 0-17 in the worst losing streak in the NCAA at the time, they're now 12-1. They head toward the final BCS Standings with an upset and a heavily rumored shot at a top 10 finish. Like every ascension to a new ranking in the BCS Standings so far this season, whatever the Knights end up with after the voting is in will be yet another all-time high.

"It's awesome to be a part of this," Bortles told UCFKnights.com after the game. Now the Knights await his decision whether their junior quarterback will stay with the team. Having led the Knights to a wild bamboozling of a top 10 team, Bortles is expected to be drafted as the No. 2 quarterback in the NFL's 2013-14 recruiting class.

If he leaves, he'll have left an indelible mark in Knights history in the team's first ever shot at a BCS Bowl victory, and a shocker upset win for the record books.