USF Officially Recognizes UCF Exists

We’ll have more thoughts on this later (mostly Jamie screaming into the sun about it), but the War On I-4 is now honored in perpetuity by an honorific of the Florida Department of Transportation.

TAMPA, SEPT. 21, 2016 – The University of South Florida and the University of Central Florida today announced the official recognition of the “War On I-4” rivalry series, which will begin this week with competitions between the two school’s volleyball and men’s soccer programs.

The “War on I-4” represents a long-standing and passionate rivalry between the fan bases of two of the nation’s largest and fastest growing universities. The Tampa Bay and Orlando metropolitan areas, which form the fourth largest media market in the nation, are connected by a 100 short miles of Florida Interstate I-4. The official recognition of the rivalry and the traditional name, first established by the fans, creates an annual series of scored competitions across multiple sports programs.

The Green & Gold and the Black & Gold will compete for year-long bragging rights with the winners in each of 14 sports scoring toward a final tally for each program. The winning university will take possession of a large trophy shaped like the iconic I-4 road sign, which will be displayed on their campus for the following year. The winner of the annual Thanksgiving weekend, football clash will also receiving a similarly shaped “War On I-4” trophy.

The “War On I-4” will begin with the 2016-17 sports campaigns, with the first event occurring Wednesday with a clash of the volleyball teams in Orlando. The men’s soccer teams will also meet on Saturday in Orlando.

USF and UCF will score head-to-head in 14 sports programs represented at both universities. Nine of those programs will compete head-to-head during the regular season. The programs that don’t compete directly against each other will determine a winner based on the best overall conference post-season performance of each team.

Winning teams can accrue up to six points toward the overall yearlong, school total. The performances of both athletic programs in the annual NCAA Graduation Success Rate will be used as a tie-breaker, if necessary.

Total points will be tallied and announced throughout the year with progress available for viewing on the “War on I-4” website (www.War-On-I4.com). The overall winning school will be presented the “War On I-4” trophy following completion of the last scored competition in the spring semester.

Each sport counts for six points, but one soccer game (since they only play once) will count as much as six baseball games. And of course you can just win the football game and get the same trophy, so really the only way to win is to win both in football and the all-sports series and yeah we don’t like this either.

Those of us that run this here website were raised to believe C.Florida is inferior in all areas and also kinda trashy. Fundamentally tying yourself to them at the hip is just hard for us to accept after decades of indoctrination.

But we get it. It’s a thing now. Whatever.

More later. We need to think about this.