UCF tops out with first top-10 ranking

The 2013-14 UCF Knights football team is now the highest ranked team it has ever been. The final Associated Press Top 25 poll came out Tuesday with the Knights slotting in at No. 10 after a convincing win over Baylor in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 1.

The Knights had steadily risen in the polls from midseason onward after surprising voters with a near-victory over South Carolina (which would finish No. 4 in the AP poll) and beating Louisville, ranked No. 7 at the time.

But Sports Illustrated’s Ben Glicksman wrote Tuesday that the Knights may have a grievance with the national pollsters for getting slighted after dominating Baylor, which had been in the top 10 of every national poll (as high as No. 4) for eight straight weeks before losing to the Knights.

“Despite clinching the school’s highest-ever AP Poll finish, UCF…seems ranked a bit low at No. 10,” Glicksman wrote. On sports website Bleacher Report, a poll of users asking about whether UCF was over or under-ranked was more pointed. Only nine percent of voters thought the Knights were overrated, versus 54 percent who thought the Knights should have been ranked higher.

The final USA Today College Coaches Poll, which had consistently ranked UCF worse than the other major polls from the AP, Bowl Championship Series and ESPN.com, put the Knights at No. 12, just ahead of No. 13 Baylor and No. 15 Louisville, and well behind the No. 4 South Carolina team the Knights lost to by only three points.

The win over Baylor had been a convincing one, notably for how the Knights went about it by getting into an offensive shootout, which every Baylor opponent had lost this season. The 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.

"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 then-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 10 years since the UCF Knights went 0-17 in the worst losing streak in the NCAA at the time, they're now 12-1. Like every ascension to a new ranking in the polls so far this season, the Knights’ No. 10/12 showing in the AP and USA Today polls was yet another all-time high.

Bortles announced Monday that he would pursue the NFL draft a year early. 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.

The Knights’ top quarterback since Daunte Culpepper filled pages of the team’s history books, giving the Knights their first ever shot at a BCS Bowl victory, and a historic shocker upset win.