During Conferencepocalypse, Orlando Sentinel columnist Mike Bianchi questioned the justification of multiple non-blue-blood teams, including Iowa State, in major-college football. Well, more than questioned. He railed to anyone who would listen (and those of us in existential angst) that teams that “could not compete” should be expelled in favor of the University of Central Florida — a place that barely over 30 years prior was known as Florida Technical University and didn’t have a football program.
In 2014, as the realignment dust was settling, Bianchi outright called on the SEC to “get[] rid of the irrelevant schools” — specifically, Ole Miss and Mississippi State — and, purely on the basis of media markets and “growth potential”, pick up one team that less than 20 years prior was playing in Division I-AA and another that 20 years prior didn’t exist. That came four years after he had apologized to the state of Mississippi when Mississippi State defeated a ranked Florida team in the Swamp.
As the 2010s come to a close, Bianchi, now with the sword of UCF’s pillowy-soft alleged national championship at his disposal, refuses to stop taking massive dumps on Iowa State and its undistinguished-on-the-football-field compatriots.
It’s no secret that many of these bottom-feeding Power 5 programs are simply taking up a spot that would be better suited for UCF — a burgeoning university in a major metropolitan TV market.
He also plays fast and loose with timelines, saying “those Power 5 leagues were formed nearly 100 years ago.” But:
- The ACC didn’t exist until 1953.
- The primordial ooze of the Pac-12 can be traced to 1916, but along the way, the conference ceased to exist in a pay-for-play scandal, only to be reconstituted in a way that the only university that really got screwed was Idaho.
- Texas Tech — one of his go-tos for a team that doesn’t belong — didn’t start football until 1925, was in the Border Conference along with the Arizona schools until the mid-’50s, and then shifted to the Southwest Conference.
- The Big 12, though it disavows the existence of anything before 1996, is for all intents and purposes a descendant of the Big Six/Seven/Eight. I’ll grant that. But I’ll also point out that politicking in the Texas Legislature as SWC schools fought for lifeboat space is how it got to where it was in 2010.
According to the 2019 U.S. News & World Report rankings, UCF is tied for the 165th-best national university in the country, lower than every member of a power conference except Louisville, Mississippi State and Texas Tech. (Iowa State is 119th.) If there is any bulwark against the view I was seeing a decade ago (and Bianchi continues to trumpet) about how it is all about the football eyeballs, it’s that UCF remains where it is.