Most great rivalries are about the past. This one is about the climb.
A little over a decade ago, Cincinnati and UCF were exactly the kind of programs the college football establishment loved to ignore: ambitious, unproven, stuck outside the velvet rope of the sport’s power conferences. Then they started playing each other, and something clicked. Over eleven wildly competitive games since 2015, the Bearcats and Knights didn’t just build a rivalry. They used it as a ladder, and they climbed it all the way from mid-major afterthoughts to the Big 12, dragging each other up rung by rung.
Two upstarts, a thousand miles apart
On paper, these two have no business being rivals. Cincinnati plays in gritty, historic Nippert Stadium in southern Ohio, one of the oldest venues in the sport and a compact bowl of noise a visiting writer once called a “baby Death Valley,” where autumn means gray skies and cold hands. UCF plays nine hundred miles south in Orlando, in a raucous stadium nicknamed the Bounce House, representing one of the largest universities in the entire country. There is no shared state, no shared border, not even a shared season’s worth of weather.
What they shared was a chip on the shoulder. Both landed together in the American Athletic Conference in 2013, both were desperate to prove that the gap between the Group of Five and the sport’s blue bloods was smaller than everyone assumed, and starting in 2015 they had each other to prove it against. The rivalry was born not out of proximity but out of pure, matched ambition.
The launchpad
Here is what makes this series special: both programs enjoyed the defining runs of their history right in the middle of it.
UCF went first. In 2017 the Knights ran the table, hammered Auburn in the Peach Bowl, and declared themselves national champions, a brash, self-proclaimed title that annoyed everyone outside Orlando and delighted everyone in it. The following year, with UCF still undefeated and ranked, ESPN’s College GameDay set up shop at the Bounce House, and the Knights throttled a ranked Cincinnati team in prime time on their way to another conference crown. For a program long dismissed as a commuter school with a football team, it was a coming-out party.
Then Cincinnati answered in the loudest way imaginable. In 2021 the Bearcats went undefeated through the regular season, rode the momentum built partly on wins in this very series, and became the first Group of Five team ever to reach the College Football Playoff. It was the ceiling everyone insisted programs like these could never touch, and Cincinnati punched through it. Two upstarts, two history-making runs, one rivalry that hardened them both.
Whoever’s hottest wins
The football itself has been a coin flip, and often a circus. The Bearcats lead the all-time series just 6–5 through eleven meetings, and the two have traded three-game winning streaks like they were swapping the lead in a footrace. Neither side has ever pulled away.
It has also produced genuine chaos. In 2017, UCF’s McKenzie Milton was carving Cincinnati up for 374 yards and five touchdowns when a torrential downpour swallowed Nippert Stadium; the game was called after the third quarter and UCF was handed the win, a rain-shortened rout nobody saw coming. In 2023, the first time these two met as Big 12 members, UCF stole it with a game-winning onside kick, snapping a five-game losing streak in the series and grabbing the Knights’ first-ever Big 12 victory. Even the points-per-game numbers are nearly identical. This is about as evenly matched as a young rivalry gets.
It has even spilled onto the hardwood. Both schools brought their basketball programs to the Big 12 as well, and there they have taken to calling each other arch-rivals too. In March 2026, the Knights and Bearcats met in a rubber match at the Big 12 Tournament, and UCF edged Cincinnati 66–65 in overtime to help secure a spot in the NCAA Tournament. Whatever the sport, these two rarely settle it by more than a possession.
They climbed together, then the Big 12 shrugged
The best part of the story is also the strangest. Having chased national relevance side by side, Cincinnati and UCF made the jump to the Big 12 together in 2023, completing the improbable climb from the American Athletic Conference to a genuine power league.
And then the Big 12, in its wisdom, declined to protect the matchup. In a sprawling conference with a rotating schedule, Cincinnati vs. UCF is not a guaranteed annual game, which means the rivalry these two schools built on their way up now has to hope the scheduling computer feels like pairing them. The next meeting isn’t until 2027 at the earliest. It is a peculiar reward for two programs that spent a decade proving they belonged: a seat at the big table, and no promise they’ll get to keep fighting the rival who helped get them there.
The Tale of the Tape
- The rivalry: Cincinnati Bearcats vs. UCF Knights, Big 12 programs roughly 900 miles apart, Ohio to Orlando
- All-time series: Cincinnati leads 6–5 (11 games)
- First meeting: Oct. 31, 2015: Cincinnati 52–7
- Latest meeting: October 2025: Cincinnati 20–11
- Biggest blowout: Cincinnati 52–7 (2015)
- Longest win streaks: three games each (UCF 2016–2018, Cincinnati 2019–2021)
- The launchpad moments: UCF’s undefeated 2017 and Cincinnati’s 2021 College Football Playoff run, the first ever by a Group of Five team
- Beyond football: arch-rivals in Big 12 basketball too, where UCF won a 66–65 overtime thriller in the 2026 conference tournament
- What’s next: unprotected in the Big 12, the next meeting isn’t scheduled until 2027
The send-off
Some rivalries are handed down for a century. This one was built in barely ten years, by two programs who needed each other. Cincinnati and UCF were told, in a hundred small ways, that they were not supposed to matter on the national stage. They spent a decade using this game to prove otherwise, and they both got exactly where they wanted to go.
That is what makes the Big 12’s shrug so frustrating and so fitting. These two clawed their way into the room together, and now they have to lobby for the chance to keep playing. If college football has any sense, it will find a way to keep Cincinnati and UCF on a collision course every fall. Rivalries this hard-earned are the whole point of the sport.
A rivalry built by upstarts runs on the players who show up hungry. Fuel them. Back the Bearcats and the Knights on RallyFuel.
