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Several months ago, our Statistics group
Our goal: to honor the achievements of the groups during 150 seasons and in all divisions, while rewarding the systems of success at the point of maximum competitive era of the sport.
Teams deserve to be judged for winning games and winning championships, as those records have been around since the early years. While some effects at the beginning of the adjustment are even disputed between teams, national titles are the subject of much more debate. Fortunately, the NCAA has this challenge for us with its official list of elementary school champions.
In our opinion, integration and scholarship limitations have made the last 50 years the most competitive the game has ever known. -University teams. And the first 50 years, for everything they gave us, were only a shadow of the current game because of inequality and the great regulation of schedules and a scoring formula that continues to evolve.
With all those considerations, we created a formula (indicated at the back of the page) to rank the most sensible school football systems across all divisions into a single metric. Let the debate begin.
The history of Crimson Tide is one of strength and longevity: from Wallace Wade in 1925 to Nick Saban five times in the last decade, 4 coaches have won a national championship. Seven have won an SEC title. Twelve have at least one 10-win season. Everyone wins: Ears Whitworth (4-24-2, 1955-57). But Bama enthusiasts even love it. Without the ears, Bear Bryant wouldn’t have heard Mom’s call.
If you were to take a snapshot of the halfway point of school football’s life, from its 50th anniversary in 1919 to its 125th birthday in 1994, Fighting Irish would be a mere No. 1. The genius of Knute Rockne has turned the Irish into a national team. in a regional sport. The Hall of Fame coaches who carried the burden of running under its shadow (Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine and Lou Holtz) maintained Notre Dame’s dominance. The last 25 years? Not so much. But Brian Kelly knocks on the Irishman’s door again.
Buckeyes enthusiasts are known to be picky, but that’s because they’ve grown accustomed to excellence. It will be news to Tuscaloosa that the state of Ohio has finished first in our rankings since 1969. That’s because five of the Buckeyes’ six coaches since 1951, from Woody Hayes to Urban Meyer, are in the College Football Hall of Fame or awaiting appeal (Meyer will be eligible in 2021). No pressure, Ryan Day.
Oklahoma has rarely taken a full year since Bud Wilkinson took office in 1947. From Wilkinson and Barry Switzer to Bob Stoops and current head coach Lincoln Riley of Muleshoe, Texas, the Sooners have done a wonderful job of bringing in talent. This is how the state university, which ranks 28th in population, has maintained its prestige among the sport’s elite for three-quarters of a century.
West Coast college football royalty arrives on a white horse named Traveler. Trojans rank among the top 10 most sensitive in 3 of our five categories. Since Howard Jones established USC as the dominant program before World War II, USC’s strength has sunk far more than it has diminished. John McKay and Pete Carroll won a lot and escaped to the NFL, and the NCAA cleaned up afterwards. History tells us that the existing sabbatical year of Trojans at the top of the game would possibly not last long.
The first wonderful “western” force ruled what we now know as the Big Ten in the 1920s, winning seven of its nine national titles between 1901 and 1933. The Wolverines didn’t fare as well amid 50 years of school football, but with the arrival of Bo Schembechler to Ann Arbor for the centennial season in 1969, Michigan re-established itself as one of the sport’s flagship programs. And if the Wolverines manage to beat their rivals in Columbus, Michigan will continue to climb the rankings.
Park your topical bias on the sidewalk just for a moment and that for the first 50 years of school football, the dominant force in sports resided in New Haven. No wonder Yale is in the 10th most sensible: Walter Camp, the father of football. , played here (and yes, he invented the rules on the fly). Once the Ivies took a look at inventory market football after World War II and said no, thank you, Yale ranked first among its peers in this league in the 1970s. Recently, Yale ceded strength from the Ivy League to Harvard. A bitter tablet indeed.
The Huskers have become the top 10 overall based on their good fortune over the past 50 years. Nebraska won the first of its five national titles in 1970 and spent the next 3 decades on the No. 1. The last two decades have More is not unusual with the position of the Huskers in the first hundred years. Nebraskians are confident that sophomore coach Scott Frost will bring his Huskers back to smarter flight. And why does it take so long?
If the Longhorns don’t belong to the sport’s elite, ask for one. Texas has reached the elite in having compatibilities and it starts: Just when you think the Longhorns start to have compatibility at the top, they disappear again. But the smart times were very smart: the 1940s under Dana X. Bible; the 1960s under Darrell K. Baking powder; Not to mention if there was a category for mascot and combat song, the Horns struggled with that too.
Talk about higher education: Where else would Saturday America know there’s a “z” in Bison?dominance over Division II for a quarter of a century beginning in 1965. And as we saw when College GameDay visited Fargo in 2013, Bison enthusiasts have juice.
The Tigers bounced back from their Opening Day loss to Rutgers, the actual opening day, November 6, 1869, to take their position among the game’s three most sensitive during the game’s first half-century. In 1877, a sophomore named Woodrow Wilson coached the team. The Tigers had more luck without Wilson at the helm, though things worked out for him too. -0 record and a No. 6 rating in 1951.
Penn State’s good luck tale of football is the story of the latter part of the century. Joe Paterno created a national force at the foot of Mount Nittany. Penn State twice finished in the 10 most sensible APs against Paterno’s head coach in 1966. The constant excellence of his 47 seasons is an all-time record; The same goes for the horror of the scandal that engulfed him and his legacy. The fact that Bill O’Brien and James Franklin rebuilt the program so smoothly is a testament to the groundwork laid through Paterno.
Fans of FBS powers ranked in the next 10 powers would possibly want to smell the salts, but all they really want is a hat tip for Harvard Stadium, the oldest stadium in the sport. Without Harvard and one of its graduates, President Theodore Roosevelt, college football may not have turned 50, let alone 150. After being one of the Big Three for the sport’s first 50 years, the Crimsons of the end took a long-term lease on top of the Ivy League. I know what they say about old habits.
The Volunteers led the Southeastern Conference for the past 50 years of college football, primarily because Gen. Robert Neyland beat Frank Thomas in Alabama and Bear Bryant in Kentucky. in the army. Since Neyland, the Volunteers have spent a lot of time playing with Bryant in Alabama and Steve Spurrier in Florida, with the excellent exception of 1998.
The Tigers are fortunate to be the only public elementary school in a soccer-crazy state. What madness? Huey P. Long, the U. S. Governor and Senator. Born in the U. S. Depression, he expanded the band, co-wrote songs and fired Hall of Fame coach Biff Jones because he wouldn’t let Long speak to the team. Friendliness of the visitors until the visiting team starts to win. There are no more passionate enthusiasts at the Green Bayou of God.
It’s hard to argue with that point of success, even in Division III. The coach with the winning percentage in the game’s history, Larry Kehres, trained at Mount Union. Under Kehres, the Purple Raiders won 54 consecutive games, an NCAA record. , lost one and then won 55 in a row. Kehres retired in 2012, but the Purple Raiders extended their Ohio Athletic Conference title streak to 24 before failing in 2016.
The Hurricanes gave the rest of college football a 67-season lead and still reached the 20 most sensible, thanks to this two-decade streak from the early 1980s to the 2000s. Meanwhile, The U won five national championships with 4 head coaches, a feat no other program would be crazy enough to undertake, let alone talented enough to pull off. Arrogance has diminished; Miami now lives among the waves of the ACC. It carries a billing chain, of course.
It’s not true that Johnnies’ head coach, John Gagliardi, coached in opposition to Frank Leahy. But it’s true that Gagliardi became head coach at St. John’s in 1953, the last season Leahy coached at Notre Dame, and did not retire. until 2012, after 60 seasons and 465 wins. According to our measurements, St. John’s had one of the 10 most successful systems in the last hundred years. That’s the way of saying that Gagliardi has won 27 convention titles and 4 national championships.
Not bad for a women’s college. The state of Florida did not begin accepting men until all soldiers returned from World War II. Florida refused to play the Seminoles until the legislature forced the rivalry on the Gators’ throat. And once Bobby Bowden arrived as head coach in Tallahassee in 1976, we understood why. With Bowden, the state of Florida finished in the top five for 14 consecutive seasons, won two national championships and bet on 3 more. Jimbo Fisher picked up where Bowden left off. The Noles are lucky to be a public university in a state of ability. But no one has taken credit for this ability like Bowden.
How does it feel to live in the shadow of the greatest successful program in school football history?Wow, it’s a success, thanks for asking, and War Eagle. The Tigers won national titles in 1957 and 2010 and prevented Alabama from betting on national titles with significant upheavals in 1972, 1989 and 2013, and a true Tigers fan would be hard-pressed to tell him what was more enjoyable. Auburn has become a more successful program in the last generation, when the Tigers began betting house games on campus than in Birmingham, a two-hour drive away. The Tigers have waited more than a century for genuine merit on the field.
Like Miami, Florida leveraged an incredible two-decade run to achieve its most productive result on this metric. Prior to 1990, before Steve Spurrier returned to training at his alma mater, the Gators joined Vanderbilt and Sewanee as the only SEC schools. who had failed to earn a name since the league’s inception in 1933. Sewanee, by the way, rescued the conference in 1940. Spurrier earned six SEC names and one national championship; Urban Meyer won two each. The Gators are expected to win. Now the rest of us hope that they will win too.
Football has been a way of life in Athens since the 1890s. Bulldog enthusiasts have enjoyed consistent success; They would like to grow more than occasionally. Wally Butts propelled Georgia to national prominence in the 1940s; Vince Dooley did this during his 25-year tenure from the 1960s to the 1980s; and Mark Richt and Kirby Smart have been doing the same thing since the turn of the century. When Dawgs don’t win, they have the most productive Dawg. Who doesn’t love Uga?
The Broncos are newcomers to national notoriety. But give them credit. As a college, as a small college, as an I-AA school (which includes a national name in 1980) and in Group 5, all the Broncos do is win. They possess one of the wonderful convulsions of this generation or any generation, Oklahoma’s 43-42 loss at the 2007 Fiesta Bowl, and a true Bronco bristles to call that victory a disorder. Very smart coaches (Houston Nutt, Dirk Koetter, Chris Petersen) came out of Boise. But none of them win as much in blue grass as in this one.
Tigers enthusiasts can feel that this race is just when their schedule heats up. The last decade under Dabo Swinney has far exceeded any sustained good fortune that preceded it. Clemson has long worked as the “football school” within the hoop-crazy ACC. But as the strength of intercollegiate athletics became the most productive football programs, the CEC began to lean toward Clemson, S. C. Swinney has taken the Tigers to heights that John Heisman, Frank Howard, Jess Neely and Danny Ford, to call 4 former Clemson coaches. of the College Football Hall of Fame, I wouldn’t even dream it.
Grambling’s good fortune in the postwar era is a tribute to the willing training acumen and sheer will of Eddie Robinson, who served at the school as a football coach and nearly every other administrative job needed to box a football team. Under Robinson, Grambling became the most prominent HBCU of the segregated era from the 1940s to the 1960s. Once SEC schools began recruiting African-American talent, Grambling’s days as an NFL breeder temporarily ended. Progress also has its victims.
Like his Ivy brothers, Penn achieved this qualification thanks to the strength of his team in the sport’s first 50 years. One may have written poetry about the Quaker team going 15-0 in 1897, a feat no FBS team matched until Clemson. season. The 12-0 team in 1904 also attracted them. That said, the Quakers were one of the last Ivies to retain their prestige as a national force in the postwar period. Under head coach George Munger, Penn finished in the top 20 most sensible six times in the 1940s and had such appeal that he signed one. of two national television contracts in the early 1950s. In the Ivy League, Penn has won or shared 17 titles since 1982, more than any other school.
The Tigers are the classic Ohio Division III powerhouse not located in Mount Union. There are many Division III schools that can boast of having a former NFL coach at the helm of their program. Bill Edwards, who coached the Detroit Lions in 1941 and 1942, won two national titles in Wittenberg from 1955 to 1968. There are also not many Division III schools that have sent 3 head coaches to the College Football Hall of Fame (Edwards, Ernie Godfrey, Dave Maurer). Existing coach Joe Fincham has done it all, but won it all (210-45, Array823, since 1996). It can be tricky to live in the world of Mount Union and its state.
When the Spartans emerged on the national scene after World War II, they made their presence known in a hurry. Under head coach Biggie Munn, the Spartans gained national name in 1952, a year before the Big Ten let them in. Under the direction of head coach Duffy Daugherty, they finished again as No. 1 in 1965 and 1966, thanks to Daugherty’s enlightened perspectives on integration. In recent years, under coach Mark Dantonio, the state of Michigan has re-established itself as a force within the Big Ten.
To be ranked so high when it’s been 52 years since he shared a Big Ten title, left a national championship, tells you how smart the Golden Gophers once were. sport. In the decade leading up to World War II, under the direction of taciturn head coach Bernie Bierman, Minnesota used a brutal taste for the game to win 3 of the Associated Press’ first six national championships.
The Huskies first drew attention to coach Gloomy Gil Dobie, who coached in Washington for nine seasons and never lost a game (58-0-3) from 1908 to 1916. No wonder Husky enthusiasts are picky. Washington did not enjoy another era of sustained good fortune until the arrival of Don James in 1975. James won six convention titles and a percentage of the 1991 national title. The Huskies won 22 consecutive games with James in 3 seasons. He retired after the 1992 season. Washington has not yet succeeded in the heights, but under Chris Petersen, they have become closer.
They’ve been used to winning in Whitewater from the beginning. The Warhawks won or shared the first two Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference titles (1913 and 1914), and have won 34 more since. For more than half a century, Whitewater has continued to raise the bar and jump on it. Since 2007, the Warhawks have won six Division III championships and nine convention titles. Coach Lance Leipold turned his good fortune at Whitewater (representing five of the national titles) into a jump to FBS (Buffalo).
The Aggies had a long history of timing changes in Texas in the Southwest Conference and Big 12 South, so they rose up and made the jump to the Southwest Conference in 2012, as Arkansas had done two decades earlier. And that made all the difference. At SEC West, the Aggies play a moment in Alabama. Y LSU. Et Auburn. Texas A
From 1915 to 1938, under the direction of the legendary Pop Warner and Jock Sutherland – coach considered by General Robert Neyland as the most productive of all time – the Panthers marched among the elite of school football. despite a draw with Fordham; they may have won first, in 1936, were it not for a draw with Fordham. (The groups were also tied in 1935, but there was no AP poll. )But Sutherland resigned in a dispute with the university after the 1938 season. . And for a decade under the direction of Johnny Majors and Jackie Sherrill, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the Panthers were just another show. It’s hard to win in the shadow of an NFL team; Pitt is a tenant of the Steelers’ Heinz field.
You shouldn’t have to blame a Mountaineers fan for being frustrated because the school football public thinks App State football began in 2007 with this impressive upheaval in Michigan. The Mountaineers have virtually won since entering the box in 1928. just skip the 1970s. ) His most important career was positioned for almost a quarter of a century with Jerry Moore, a coach who in the past had washed up in five seasons at Texas Tech. Moore arrived in 1989 and did very well, which led App State to 10 Southern Conference titles and 3 I-AA/FCS titles, which the Mountaineers made the jump to the FBS. Some enthusiasts still wonder if it was a smart idea. But App State has been winning time and time again.
Attention, knowledge enthusiasts. Linfield made this list for the undeniable explanation for why the Wildcats extended their winning streak last year to 63. They had one last futile crusade in 1955, when Dwight Eisenhower was president and no one had heard of Elvis Presley. Rutschman earned 3 NAIA Division II names from 1982 to 1986, but only after leading the Wildcats to a national name in 1971. Under Jay Locey, Linfield added an NCAA Division III name in 2004. You attend an adjustment in Linfield where, on adjustment days, the two blocks leading to Memorial Stadium are renamed to “Streak Street”.
From 1904 to 1966, Georgia Tech hired only 3 coaches, each of whom won at least one hundred games and ended up in the College Football Hall of Fame. After John Heisman, Bill Alexander and Bobby Dodd, who are also after Tech left the SEC in 1964, Ramblin’s fortune ‘Wreck’ was more ruined than Ramblin. Bobby Ross won a percentage of the 1991 national title, and under George O’Leary, Georgia Tech made the state of Florida sweat to win the ACC in the late 1990s. Now it’s Geoff Collins’ turn to live up to a mythical legacy.
The Big Green (but not the NCAA) claims the 1925 national championship, which fights words in Tuscaloosa, but Dartmouth can also make other historical claims for what it didn’t do. Dartmouth didn’t beat Yale until 1935; in 1937 he did not settle for an invitation to the Rose Bowl; and in 1940, he scored no more problems than Cornell and still won the game: the famous “Fifth Chance Game,” which Cornell lost after learning that his 7-3 victory hinged on a landing scored on the fifth attempt. All this happened under the supervision of Red Blaik, who left for the army after the 1940 season. Since becoming a founding member of the Ivy League in 1956, Dartmouth has won or shared 18 convention titles with five other coaches. No Ivy team has won more.
The Hokies, born the Gobblers, would possibly be known for the roast turkey legs they sell at Lane Stadium, but the food that best describes their story is a donut. Virginia Tech played 18 seasons before having a losing record (1920), then played 10 more seasons before having another. The less we say about the next 60 years, the better. But the arrival of former Hokies defensive back Frank Beamer as head coach meant Virginia Tech’s arrival as a national force. Beamer led the Hokies to seven convention titles (four ACCs, 3 Big Easts) and introduced the electrifying Michael Vick in an unsuspecting nation. That’s a kind of legacy.
Few systems have experienced higher peaks or endured lower minimums than those brave ancient army groups. The Black Knights might have had unfair merit at times; In its early years, generals in rank rarely allowed the Army to play a game away from West Point, and during World War II, the Army had, uh, abundant recruiting merit. But in the 1940s and 1950s, the Army also had abundant merit as a head coach. He shaped disciplined and winning groups even as the generals reduced his ability to box on a competitive team. The six decades since Blaik’s retirement have been at times bleak. Road to victory.
The program is known as the birthplace of coaches because luminaries such as Red Blaik, Paul Brown, Carm Cozza, Paul Dietzel, Weeb Ewbank, Woody Hayes, Sid Gillman, Ara Parseghian and Bo Schembechler have played or trained here. among those legends, Schembechler, the recent high, controlled his final season in Miami in 1968. That’s when the RedHawks’ fortunes changed, roughly Ben Roethlisberger as quarterback. But Miami won or shared 11 of the first 30 of the Mid-American Conference. Championships, a clever indication of what the program likes, and it can be again.
From the end of World War II until the early 1990s, you can count on the Chippe to be like a tough guy. It has something to do with their coaches. Wild Bill Kelly led Central Michigan to seven convention names. Roy Kramer replaced him and led Central Michigan to an NCAA Division II name in 1974, before deciding he would prefer to be a world-class athletic director and SEC commissioner. Herb Deromedi replaced Kramer and won 3 MAC names and 110 games in 16 years on his road to college football. In recent years, Brian Kelly and Butch Jones have used the Chippewas to climb the ladder. In some schools, it’s less difficult to win.
The Buffaloes had their moments, but not enough. Fred Folsom earned so much a century ago (21 in a row from 1908 to 1912) that they named the box after him. From the end of World War II until the twenty-first century, Colorado had the misfortune of playing in the same convention as Oklahoma. Take 1971, when the Huskers and Sooners finished third in the country. Bill McCartney led the Buffs to a percentage of the 1990 national championship, a feat few have matched anywhere; and Rick Neuheisel and Gary Barnett continued to gain at a peak until 2005. Since then, it has been a struggle, a struggle that adherence to Pac-12 has failed to mitigate.
Any school whose head coaches include Pop Warner, Clark Shaughnessy, John Ralston, Bill Walsh, Jim Harbaugh and David Shaw has achieved its winning percentage. But living with educational criteria of height means that Stanford has also lost its percentage. It’s a dilemma Stanford has embraced, from the glories of the two decades before World War II (seven Rose Bowls in 17 seasons) to the nadir of the early 21st century (when the university contemplated leaving the Pacific-10 Conference) to the excellence of the decade beyond (when the Cardinal won 3 championships and finished in the top 12 most sensible in six of the seven seasons from 2010 to 2016).
WHO?Pig’s smile? For nearly 8 decades the Razorbacks in the Southwest Conference, they fought Texas A.
There is no “h” in Pittsburg, Kansas, but there is one in champion. The gorillas have won 4 national championships (two NAIA, two NCAA Division II), 31 convention championships in total, and 12 Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletic Association titles. Most of them (nine) made it to the 20 seasons directed by Chuck Broyles (1990 to 2009). Pittsburgh state’s most prominent former football player, Dennis Franchione, coached his alma mater with a 53-6 record from 1985 to 1989, before finally going on. moving to TCU, Alabama and Texas A.
The Sun Devils landed on the national school football map thanks to paintings by two Hall of Fame coaches. Dan Devine made the state of Arizona a powerhouse in the former Border Conference, but left the desert after 3 seasons (1955 to 1957, with a 27-3-1) to climb the ladder of his career. His successor, Frank Kush, stayed for 22 seasons (from 1958 to 1979), won 176 games and methodically turned the Sun Devils into a national powerhouse. By the time the state of Arizona fired him in 1979 for physically abusing a player, Kush had brought the Sun Devils to the protection of the Pac-10 conference.
Mountaineers have been intelligent and rarely the right ones for most of their lives, an explanation as clever of this qualification as any other. The last 50 years have been the best, starting with the arrival of a young Bobby Bowden at his first FBS head training concert. . Don Nehlen brought West Virginia to the breaking point of national names in 1988 and 1993. After Nehlen’s retirement in 2000, Rich Rodriguez put the Mountaineers at the forefront of the accelerated transmission revolution and brought them back to the breaking point of a name. in 2006. They have not yet crossed that last border.
The Eagles suspended play at the start of World War II and did not resume operations until 1981. Legendary Georgian assistant Erk Russell moved to Statesboro to revive the show. By 1984, the Eagles had been promoted to Division I-AA; The following season, they won the national title. They won it in 1986 and 1989 and became the first team of the 20th century to go 15-0. The Eagles won back-to-back national championships in 1999 and 2000 under Paul Johnson. . Georgia Southern has such a forged reputation that it’s a food source for the FBS: In the last two decades alone, Johnson, Jeff Monken and Willie Fritz have turned earning at Georgia Southern into bigger jobs.
The Utes consistently won in their neck of the country in the early part of the twentieth century. They spent the next 40 years wondering how to overcome mediocrity. With the arrival of Ron McBride in 1990, Urban Meyer (!) in 2003 and Kyle Whittingham in 2005, the Utes were once again a consistent winner. Of the schools that switched leagues at the time of the wave of realignments (2011 to 2012), Utah made the smoothest transition. The Utes won the Pac-12 South last season, and Whittingham has quietly established himself as one of the most productive coaches in the country.
If you’re twenty or younger, you’ve never realized that the Badgers aren’t fighting for the Big Ten Championship. Since the arrival of Barry Alvarez in 1990 and during the tenure of Bret Bielema and coach Paul Chryst, Wisconsin has been a winner. It’s a story that becomes even more surprising if you’re old enough for past iterations of football Badgers, who signed a long-term lease at the back of the Big Ten. Wisconsin had good fortune after World War II, going to 3 Rose Bowls in 11 seasons from 1952 to 1962; however, as of 1993, only USC (seven) celebrated more New Year’s Day in Pasadena than in Wisconsin (six).