Florida’s state government is going all in on UCF’s title claim, maybe even including vanity license plates

UCF’s declaration of itself as the 2017 national champ continues to get more attention. One week after the Knights’ season finished 13-0 capped off by a Peach Bowl win over Auburn, Florida Governor Rick Scott formally declared UCF as national champs. This is an official government document, so we aren’t messing around here:

And if you’re driving around the state, you may soon see these popping up:

Scott isn’t the only Florida state politician to get in on the act either. Republican Rep. Bobby Olszewski told our Alex Kirshner that he’s a proponent of both UCF and USF getting into the Big 12.

“I think because of the business analytics of college football, it would be extremely logical for the Big 12 to look at who can give them the most television revenue,” Olszewski adds. “And getting USF and UCF with the media markets they represent in Florida would be a wonderful fit.”

Alabama won the Playoff, but UCF will still claim its title proudly.

Gov. Scott’s decree came on the heels of UCF’s parade held at Walt Disney World over the weekend to celebrate the Knights’ undefeated season.

The campaign started after UCF AD Danny White declared the Knights as national champs following the Peach Bowl victory.

UCF isn’t holding back on social media, either.

Oh, and did we mention there will be a national title banner hung for the 2017 season, too?

UCF’s doing this because they can:

”We’ve got a really mature group of young men who played 13 games and won them all. I think they deserve to be considered national champions,” White said. “We’re really proud of them.

”Hopefully, in the coming days, a lot more people will become believers as well. We feel like we’re deserving of a national championship. By our research, there’s been 36 different years where there have been multiple champions crowned in college football. There’s been years where there were three or four champions crowned. ... There’s going to be a CFP champion, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not a national champion.”

And as Jason Kirk pointed out, there are a lot of really awesome things about UCF declaring itself as this season’s national champion:

-If Georgia wins, UCF won’t have an especially great case, other than being undefeated (just the little matter of not losing at all) against a below-average schedule and beating Auburn, a team Georgia went 1-1 against. If UGA beats Bama, the Dawgs might have six wins over final top 25 teams, while UCF might have two. But if Bama wins, expect eternal arguments.

-This involves ALABAMA. So we could get the spectacle of Bama fans, who are forced to spend some of their time defending several egregious title claims (1941 and 1973, for starters), defending an actually legit claim.

-The Playoff committee bricked its latest apparent attempt to diminish a non-power. Keeping the Knights buried in the rankings despite blatant statistical arguments to the contrary and shuffling them into a non-Playoff bowl would’ve probably tamped the whole thing down ... if the committee hadn’t paired UCF with Auburn, the only team to beat Alabama and Georgia. When those teams won their semifinals after UCF beat Auburn, the argument was simple: UCF went undefeated and beat the only team to beat the two National Championship teams. The committee should’ve just had UCF play Penn State!