Group of Five Power Rankings: Can Cincinnati push UCF heading into 2019?

As the 2019 season fast approaches, can any Group of Five teams make a run at the College Football Playoff on the 150th anniversary of college football?

Thirty-five years ago, a mid-major rose up and claimed the mythical national championship in a year where no major powerhouses managed to finish the year with perfect records. WAC champion BYU closed the deal with a Holiday Bowl victory over Michigan to ensure they remained at the top of the AP Top 25 and the Coaches Poll at the end of the postseason.

Since then, programs outside the major conferences have found themselves increasingly choked out of any opportunity to play for a national title. The formation of the Bowl Coalition in 1992, then the Bowl Alliance in 1995, and finally the Bowl Championship Series were ostensibly formed with the intent of matching the two best teams in any given season to play for a more definitive national championship. The impact, though, was to shunt off great teams from smaller programs and hand them consolation prizes at best as reward for their spectacular seasons.

With the introduction of the College Football Playoff in 2014, the powers that be included a guaranteed access point for the top Group of Five conference champion to play in one of the half-dozen major bowl games designated as part of the New Year’s Six series.

What that did, however, was make it that much harder for teams to replicate BYU’s success. Now the College Football Playoff selection committee has a ready-made path to scurry away even the most thorny of interlopers from the “Little Sisters of the Poor”.

UCF has run into that dilemma the past two years, as the selection committee ferreted them off to the Peach Bowl and then the Fiesta Bowl for matchups against SEC opponents without ever even dreaming of including them in the four-team playoff field.

Can any team break through and sneak into that bracket? Will the 150th anniversary of college football provide another magic moment like LaVell Edwards and company experienced three and a half decades earlier? Let’s dive in and identify where each Group of Five contender sits in the New Year’s Six pecking order — and whether any could make even bigger waves — before the season begins in earnest.