UCF football looking to cash in on $205M worth of media coverage

Enjoying success over the past few years, UCF football has racked up the cash and it’s looking to capitalize on the newfound wealth.

UCF football certainly appears to be on a hot streak these last couple of years and according to a recent report by Joyce Julius & Associates, its success also apparently extends well beyond the field of play and across virtually every type of media outlet.

As the report claims the university received a whopping $205,173,276.94 million of exposure throughout the 2018 football season.

The media coverage tally included $10 million of print media, $82 million worth of internet news articles as well as $32 million in social media. The buzz created by the UCF football team was apparently so widespread it even reached viewers of the MLB Network and Comedy Central.

Although its focus was on the 2018 season, the real story began one year earlier when the Knights went undefeated in a somewhat inconceivable fashion. What made it so unbelievable was the fact the same UCF football team went completely winless just two seasons earlier in 2015. Making the Knights one of the fastest program turnarounds in the history of college football.

Their perfect season involved beating four top 25 teams including an Auburn team in the Peach Bowl, who earlier that season had beaten both of the teams that played in the national title game — Alabama and Georgia. That said, UCF was treated the same way other undefeated non-Power Five schools like Utah or Boise State have been in years past and was snubbed from being able to play in a national championship game.

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What makes the UCF situation different from Utah and Boise state is they went undefeated again in 2018 extending their win streak to 25 games. No team in the history of Division 1 college football has ever had a 25-game winning streak without being crowned national champs. That’s what makes the back-to-back UCF playoff snub truly unprecedented.

After having beaten all those top 25 teams and remaining undefeated through 25 games the only reason they would of be left out of the CFP this second time was because the selection committee didn’t believe they had the name recognition.

In other words, The UCF Knights aren’t a major college football brand, like Notre Dame and Oklahoma — so it might negatively affect the games ratings to include the four-team playoff. After all, the CFP is still a product to be sold and the best way to sell it to TV viewers is to create compelling matchups that create a media buzz.

If UCF is ever going to become a legitimate, name brand in college football, they would first need to figure out where exactly they stood in the eyes of the general public. That’s precisely why the university commissioned Joyce Julius & Associates to provide them with a media analytics report, detailing the various types of coverage and the amount of media exposure they had received in the lead up to the second playoff bowl snub. The report offered a silver lining to an otherwise unfortunate situation and indicated the UCF football program was heading in the right direction.

If these last two years have taught us anything it’s college football is a war with multiple fronts — there’s the game on the field, but there are also ongoing marketing battles with the bowl selection committee as well as with the top-ranked recruits each year.

UCF will always be seen as another Utah or Boise State in the eyes of the powers that be until they prove otherwise. The good news for the Knights is they have one thing going for them that those other teams didn’t and that’s geography. There are more five-star recruits coming out of Florida than any other state in the country. That said, the highest rated 2019 UCF commits are three-star.

If they can first use their newfound name recognition to dominate the recruiting circuit in Florida, building pipelines with recruiting goldmines like IMG Academy and St. Thomas Aquinas — it will only be a matter of time until the Sunshine State has another college football powerhouse on their hands, forcing The U, Gators and ‘Noles to have to move over to make room for one more.

Until UCF is able to use its media buzz as a stepping stone to landing top-ranked Florida recruits and an eventual playoff spot, the status quo in college football will remain in place for the foreseeable future.