On New Year’s Day, UCF’s 25-game winning streak was snapped by a 40–32 Fiesta Bowl loss to LSU. The Knights were a month removed from being left out of the College Football Playoff after an unbeaten regular season for the second straight year. They enter the fall looking to start a new streak, albeit with a different quarterback under center, while the rest of the AAC and the best teams in the other Group of Five leagues try to mount worthy challengers to UCF’s stranglehold on the G5’s New Year’s Six bowl slot.
If we learned anything from UCF’s 2017 and ’18 seasons, it’s that it will require an act of God to get a Group of Five team into the playoff.