Most rivalries exist because two fan bases care too much. This one is worth telling because only one side cared at all.
UConn and UCF became conference partners when the Knights joined the American Athletic Conference in 2013. The campuses sit 1,214 miles apart and share no meaningful history. Their first meeting, in October 2013, was a 62-17 UCF win. They would play eight times in all, and UCF leads the series 6-2.
How a rivalry gets invented
Bob Diaco took over at UConn in 2014. That November, the Huskies beat UCF 37-29, which was Diaco’s first FBS win as a head coach and, from the other direction, the end of an 11 game conference winning streak for the Knights.
He had actually raised the idea privately first, approaching O’Leary at a conference meeting to suggest a rivalry. There was logic to it. The American had just formed out of the remnants of the Big East and had few natural rivalries, and UCF had capped the 2013 season by winning the Fiesta Bowl, so Diaco was reaching for the league’s best program. O’Leary did not take the notion seriously. So after the 2014 upset, Diaco floated it publicly instead and suggested calling it the Civil Conflict. He riffed on what the loser might have to hand over, proposing nutmeg from Connecticut and a sack of oranges from Florida. Reporters laughed. He was not joking.
The following June, UConn posted a photograph of a commissioned trophy alongside a countdown clock to the next meeting. It was the first many people at UCF had heard of any of it. The school issued a statement noting it had no involvement in creating either the trophy or the rivalry, and head coach George O’Leary told reporters he knew nothing about it, adding that rivalries tend to work better with teams nearby and that UCF already had one in South Florida, about 90 miles away.
Diaco was unmoved, asking why he would need another athletic department’s approval to designate his own team’s rival.
The trophy itself
He did take some feedback. The name became the ConFLiCT, dropping the Civil War echo and leaning into the postal abbreviations for Connecticut and Florida. After critics pointed out that the trophy listed only the 2014 UConn win, the 2013 UCF blowout was added as well.
By the time it reached Orlando in 2015 the top plate had quietly been changed to read simply The Conflict. UCF’s mascot greeted it with a sign quoting Mean Girls, telling UConn to stop trying to make Civil Conflict happen. UConn won that game 40-13 and hoisted the trophy anyway. Asked whether he would commission trophies for other conference games, Diaco said he was open to anything that helped his team win.
The moment it ended
Before the 2016 game, new UCF coach Scott Frost asked UConn not to bring the trophy and said the Knights were formally opting out. UConn brought it anyway.
UCF won 24-16 in East Hartford, then walked off without it. It sat out in the rain until a UConn staffer, unsure what else to do, moved it to a bench and draped a towel over it. A local reporter photographed it there roughly ten minutes after the whistle, near the 40 yard line. That is the last confirmed sighting of the original.
Diaco said afterward that he was setting the whole venture aside. He was let go at the end of that season after going 11-26 in three years, and his successor Randy Edsall did not continue the tradition. Asked in 2017 where the trophy had gone, UConn athletic director David Benedict said he did not know, and believed Diaco had commissioned and paid for it himself. UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma later called the whole thing <cite index=”34-1″>”the dumbest thing in the history of sports.”</cite>
What the scoreboard said next
Freed of the trophy, the series turned lopsided in a hurry. A sixth ranked UCF won 49-24 in 2017, an eleventh ranked UCF took the 2018 opener 56-17, and the Knights added a 56-21 win in 2019. The last meeting came on November 20, 2021 in Orlando, a 49-17 UCF win. Four straight, none of them close.
Where is it now
The trophy resurfaced in August 2018 on an anonymous Twitter account that posted photos of it at the beach and on drives around Central Florida. UConn fans immediately called it a fake, pointing to a different font on the top plate, thicker border lines, and a vs. that was no longer italicized.
Chris Vannini of The Athletic spent a summer chasing the truth and published his findings in 2023. The trail he assembled runs like this: a UCF fan heard from family in Connecticut that a UConn donor who wintered near Orlando had the trophy, talked that donor into handing it over, kept it at his house long enough to show friends, and delivered it to UCF in January 2020 under a pillowcase. The donor’s explanation for the altered appearance was that the wood had been water damaged from its night in the rain and was repaired. The fan conceded the donor might have invented that.
Diaco declined to help with the search, saying by text that the legend tends to be better than the truth. Trophy shops near Storrs had no record of building the original, and it carried no maker’s mark. UConn athletic director David Benedict, who once told a fan by email that the school would not sell it, doubts anyone would bother faking something that large and heavy.
Today it sits on a shelf in the office of UCF associate athletic director Eric DeSalvo, who locks his door. Athletic director Terry Mohajir added the 2021 score to it in ballpoint pen. The 2018 and 2019 scores are written on in pen too.
The afterlife
Here is the twist. The joke outlasted the rivalry, and then it stopped being entirely a joke.
UConn fans adopted the ConFLiCT on their own terms. The UConn Blog produced a three part documentary series on it in 2018, published all time standings between the schools across every sport, and sold merchandise under the banner Long Live the ConFLiCT. UCF came around too. The night before the 2021 game the school posted a video of the trophy sitting on its own field, and UConn’s account fired back with a crack about where UCF gets its championship hardware made. The Knights brought it to Storrs again in 2022 for a women’s basketball tournament game.
It has even been preserved in software. Players noticed the matchup listed as a rivalry inside EA Sports College Football, complete with the capitalized state abbreviations, which is a level of recognition most century old trophy games never receive.
Tracking today’s stars
Rivalries cannot be manufactured, but attention can now be measured. Since the NCAA’s interim policy took effect on July 1, 2021, athletes have earned from their name, image, and likeness through endorsements, sponsorships, social content, and appearances. RallyFuel’s Heisman NIL Power Rankings weigh performance at 35 percent, NIL visibility at 20, social reach at 20, and fan demand at 25, and the NIL Trophy Case applies the same method across ten awards.
Curious how the two programs compare today? The School Rivalry tool puts them side by side on NIL, fan engagement, rankings, and championships. Compare UConn and UCF.
The lesson
Trophy games work when both sides opt in. The Little Brown Jug, the Illibuck, and the Paul Bunyan’s Axe all began as agreements. The ConFLiCT began as an announcement, which is why it produced one of the best stories in college football and none of the rivalry. Browse upcoming matchups.
