I’ll get to the breakdown of Saturday’s loss to UCF a bit later, but this deserves it’s own spot because it was well, just that good. The latest AP poll came out today and sitting at 9-0, fresh off another 20-plus point win sits UCF at number fourteen. They are a team that has an average margin of victory of 28-points, a team that has a 27-point win over the AP’s 18th ranked team (Memphis) and one that has looked the part every step of the way throughout the 2017 season.

So I asked UConn head coach Randy Edsall if he feels that the American Athletic Conference, with three ranked teams; UCF (14th), Memphis (18th) and USF (23rd), are getting the respect they deserve, especially since UCF seems not to be able to rise above the 18th spot in the College Football Playoff rankings.

“No, I don’t,” Edsall said bluntly. “To me, there’s, I don’t want to say bias, but there’s too much emphasis placed on all this ‘Power 5’ stuff and everything else. Just take a look, people don’t cover anything but the ‘Power 5’ for the most part. They [UCF] have beaten Big Ten teams [Maryland 38-10, when they were still healthy after a 51-41 win at Texas]. They’re undefeated. Their schedule is just as tough as other people’s. Something has to be done.”

“The way we are right now, if you’re going to just say eliminate the other people from the mix, then just let those five conferences have their own deal and let the other guys have it, but right now, that’s not the way it is,” he continued. “I’ve been in the Big Ten, I’ve been in the ACC and it’s a really competitive conference with a lot of very good players. The way it should be, you have a playoff system, not just four teams and not decided by people who just go in and look at certain material. They talk about the student athlete, it’s a joke that they talk about that. Here, student athletes go out, they win their conferences and they don’t even get a chance to compete for a championship nationally. It’s all about beauty points, style points, maybe your name and all those sort of things. You can’t sit here and put stuff on strength of schedule each and every year because you don’t have control over that. When you schedule your non-conference games four, five or six years out, you have no idea how good someone else is going to be. You’re thinking that this team might be pretty good, but then all of a sudden that year they might end up going 3-9 or 4-8, you don’t know that. To put that in it and disregard if you win your championship, I have a hard time with that. You win your conference, you should be involved in the playoff.”

Edsall also shared some thoughts on the current bowl system.

“Get rid of the bowls,” he said. “They don’t serve the purpose anymore when you can go to a bowl at 6-6 or 5-7. We’re rewarding what America is doing, we’re enabling and entitling people on stuff that’s not worthy to be enabled or entitled to.”

What’s his ideal setup?

“Just like the NFL,” Edsall said. “You win your division, you make the playoffs and then you have the wild card teams, two [of them]. If you win your conference, you should be in the picture to compete for the national championship. It’s stupid. UCF is a very good team. They’re undefeated, one of how many in all of college football? They’re playing the schedule that they were supposed to play. If you want to deter from having it with anyone other than those five conferences, then set up a system there and do a playoff like they do in Division 1-AA [FCS], II and III, Make another division if they’re going to exclude and discriminate against people.”

MATT SCHONVISKY / SITE CREATOR