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Rivalries are what make college football great.
There’s “The Game” between Ohio State and Michigan. “The Iron Bowl” between Alabama and Auburn. And who could forget the “Red River Rivalry” between Oklahoma and Texas.
But one rivalry stands above all the rest.
That, friends, is “The Civil ConFLiCT” between powerhouse programs UConn and Central Florida.
Surely you’ve heard of The Civil ConFLiCT.
You know, the legendary rivalry between two schools located over 1,200 miles away who only began playing one another in 2013?
The “rivalry’ began in 2014 thanks to then-UConn head coach Bob Diaco. Diaco picked up his first win as UConn head coach, 37–29 over UCF in November 2014. It snapped a 11-game American Athletic Conference winning streak for UCF.
“We’re excited about this game. I mean it. I’m excited to continue this game,” Diaco said afterward. “With all admiration and respect. All admiration and respect for Central Florida and Coach O’Leary. They’re spectacular. But we’re excited about this North/South battle. You want to call it the Civil Conflict?
Thus a rivalry was born. At least, that’s what UConn thought.
O’Leary and Central Florida refused to indulge the Huskies and said they didn’t see UConn as a rivlary.
Despite this, Diaco had a trophy created for the game.
The Huskies retained the trophy with a 40-13 victory in 2015, which proved to be O’Leary’s final season before retiring.
Things all changed in 2016, however.
Scott Frost took the helm the Knights and when his team topped UConn 24-16 in East Hartford, he told the team to leave the trophy on the UConn sidelines.
And so the rivalry died. Or so we thought!
Chris Vannini of The Athletic went hunting for Civil ConFLiCT trophy recently.
Vannini’s story reveals that the trophy currently resides “on the second floor of UCF’s Roth Athletics Center, in the office of longtime associate athletic director Eric DeSalvo.”
There’s just one, very important, catch.
The trophy in DeSalvo’s office is not the real trophy.
The original trophy disappeared following the 2016 matchup and has not been seen since.
It appeared to resurface in 2018. But in actuality, what we really had was a cheap imitation.
“Immediately, eagle-eyed UConn fans online called this trophy out for being a fake,” Vannini writes. “The words at the top were in a slightly different font, and the border lines around the words were thicker. The “vs.” in the middle was also no longer italicized.”
A UCF fan claims to have acquired the original trophy after it was salvaged by a UConn donor following water damage. That fan then claims to have donated it to Desalvo.
“The fan would not share the name of the donor with The Athletic, saying the donor was adamant he not be identified,” Vannini reports. “The fan also admitted the donor could be making up the repair story, but he didn’t see a reason not to believe him.”
Sounds fishy.
So there we have it.
The Civil ConFLiCT Trophy, perhaps the best rivalry trophy in all of college sports, appears to have lost forever. Much like the beloved rivalry, which ended in 2021 when UConn went independent.