A trend I've noticed (long)

I did a little Wikipedia research to find out when several universities had their best decade of college football. The very simple method I used was "total wins by decade". That obviously leaves out other factors like championships and strength of schedule, but that gets subjective. This is a simple measure, and it's not necessarily supposed to be an apples-to-apples comparison; it's supposed to be an indicator of a trend which I'll get to later.

For each decade, you'll see the teams that had their winningest decade during that time, as well as their placement on the list of wins in that decade. I only placed each team on this list once, in their best decade. In case of a tie (for example, they were #3 twice), I went with the more recent decade, as I think college football has gotten more competitive, so placing higher more recently is somewhat more impressive.

I only counted teams that placed in the top 20 in at least one decade. If a team was playing in a 2nd-tier conference during the majority of the decade, I gave them an asterisk. I had to make some judgement calls for pre-WWII conferences.

Here are the results (from Wikipedia):


1900s
1. Penn
2. Princeton
3. Yale
5. Cornell
7. Brown


1910s
1. Harvard
2. Washington & Jefferson
4. Pitt
14. Navy (Naval Academy)
18. Washington & Lee
20. Lehigh


1920s
1. USC
3. Cal (Berkeley)
5. Army (West Point)
6. Furman*
7. Vanderbilt
9. Stanford
10. Dartmouth
12. Syracuse
14. VMI*
15. Lafayette*


1930s
1. TCU
4. Duke
6. Tulane
11. Duquesne*
14. Centenary*
15. SMU
16. Detroit Mercy*
18. Villanova*
19. Fordham*


1940s
1. Notre Dame
3. Georgia
10. Tulsa*
11. William and Mary*
12. Rice
20. Mississippi State



1950s
1. Oklahoma
2. Ole Miss
3. Georgia Tech
4. Arizona State*
5. Wyoming*
7. Michigan State
8. UCLA
10. Maryland
20. Kentucky


1960s
2. Texas
3. Arkansas
6. Missouri
12. Memphis*
17. Utah State*
19. Purdue
20. Oregon State


1970s
4. Michigan
11. San Diego State*
12. Miami (OH)*
13. Houston*
17. Rutgers*
19. East Carolina*


1980s
1. Nebraska
2. BYU*
10. Auburn
13. Washington
16. Fresno State*
20. Iowa


1990s
1. Florida State
3. Florida
4. Tennessee
5. Penn State
6. Texas A&M
8. Miami
10. Colorado
11. Kansas State
17. North Carolina
18. Virginia
19. Air Force*


2000s
1. Boise State*
4. Ohio State
6. LSU
7. Virginia Tech
13. Boston College
15. Utah*
16. West Virginia
18. Texas Tech
20. Louisville*


2010s
1. Alabama
2. Clemson
7. Wisconsin
8. Oregon
12. Oklahoma State
14. Northern Illinois*
16. UCF*


The pattern I've noticed: The average academic quality of the universities listed seems to get a little worse with each passing decade.

Early on, it was the Ivy League (in large part because they were the only ones playing football for a while). Then you see other highly-regarded private schools, probably because it spread from the Ivy League to there.

Next, you see schools like USC, Berkeley, Stanford, Duke, Notre Dame, Syracuse, Vanderbilt, and a few top military academies.

In the few decades after WWII, Georgia Tech, Texas, Rice, Michigan, UCLA, all of which are generally considered excellent schools.

Starting with the 1980s or so, not a whole lot of schools where you apply and hope you might get in. Currently, the top football programs are at universities that are...not bad, but not great. Alabama, Georgia, OU, Clemson (this season excepted), Penn State, Ohio State, and yes, Texas A&M.

Nearly every top American university either doesn't play football at all (MIT, Caltech, and others), plays in a less competitive division (Ivy League), or had their heyday decades ago (Michigan, Texas, Georgia Tech, Cal, Virginia, USC, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, and so on).

Sadly, I see this as a general trend, and in a few more decades, schools like Michigan, Notre Dame, USC, and our beloved Texas will fall into the category of "They used to be pretty good," similar to Syracuse and Georgia Tech. A few more decades after that, the current powers might start to slide and get replaced by the likes of UTSA.

 

If Texas State and SFA become the dominant powers in this part of the country, then you'll know you were right.

 

I think that with the modernization of college football and even more significantly the integration of college football there is an argument that the best decade of Texas football was not the 1960's but the 2000's. Consider that in the 2000's (2000-2009) Texas had nine straight 10 plus win seasons, winning 110 games (average of 11 wins a year for the decade), finished ranked in the top 5, five times, won one NC and played for another. Texas only won 2 conference titles but winning the Big XII is very different than winning a bunch of SWC titles in a segregated and top heavy SWC, college football was an entirely different world. I would argue that the 2000's is way more impressive than the 60's and certainly than the 70's with the only argument for those two decades being conference championships and of course two NC's in the 60's.

 

That was my first thought as well. The 2000s Mack Brown teams were outstanding.

 

It's not surprising, although I doubt it'll go that far down the ladder.

Amateurism for its own sake was an English industrial-era import. Take a look at all of those schools you mentioned from the early part of college football history: Ivys, private schools, and service academies. The student athletes there were expected to "hold the line," meaning that by sacrificing your body for the school and sanctity of sport, it was more honorable than those who went off to lesser institutions and eventually would work with their hands. It was basically saying "look, I know I have no future in football because I'm going to be a lawyer, but for the time being, my devotion to sport will mirror my future endeavors."

The English were trying to keep the riff-raff out of soccer, and the very creation of the training programs that evolved into teams like Man U and Chelsea was based in "eliteness." It doesn't take a degree to understand that race had a lot to do with it too.

Everything always trickles down from the elites in society. Even sports rules. So when the lowly state schools got better at football than the Ivys, the elites were still controlling the behind-the-scenes interests, like money stuff and governance.

At this point, with the TV contracts and merchandising and NIL and all that stuff, I don't think there's much of a need for "trickle down" any longer because the playing field is more level than college football's heyday. If anything, it's just getting us to reexamine amateurism and possibly get rid of it before allowing the UTSA's of the world to take over college sports.

 

I don't disagree, but the point of this wasn't to make judgement calls. As explained, I simply went with win totals.
1960s: #2, behind Alabama
2000s: #3, behind Boise State and OU (in that order)

Then you could start arguing about how much conference titles and national championships should count, how the game has changed, how recruiting has changed, was their schedule tougher then or now, and it becomes a very long conversation. And you'd have to do it for every team, for every decade. We'd be here forever.

For the point of this exercise, it was easiest to use the simplest measure: Who won the most games, and when?