My Collection of College Football's Most Influential Programs: Preview
You will not find other collections that look like mine, I promise.
As someone who loves both history and college football more than words can adequately articulate, I find myself frequently looking into random facts about college football’s past, and how it has led us to where we are now. In my endless dives and article reads, I have found myself always yearning for something that one would think someone would have come up with by now: A collection of the most influential college football programs of all time!
Now, there are lists out there of winningest programs, or programs who people with a very shallow view of college football history will deem influential. As such, they will often mention the usual suspects of Alabama, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Oklahoma, USC, Michigan, Ohio State…predictable. It’s not that these programs aren’t in my collection as well, however I take a deeper dive. A lot of GOAT “lists” will throw in an NDSU, Grambling, Princeton to say they are unbiased, but are they really taking into account how they and other programs in their orbit truly impacted the sport?
Well, spoiler, all the programs I mentioned above, and more are in my collection, but I won’t be ranking strictly by record, national championships, Heisman Trophy winners, etc. A program can be incredibly influential but have a losing overall record and therefore feature in the Sickos Committee BSOATFTWAB500AT. I have 1, maybe 2 such programs in my collection. Can a program be influential without national championships or a Heisman Trophy winner? I think so.
So, how many programs do I have in this collection? I wrestled with 25, 40, 50? At the end of the day, I came up with 39. Wait, 39? That came out of a random number generator, right? Well, no. 39 is 15 percent of all current Division 1 college football programs (both FBS and FCS). And since my list does feature more than a handful of FCS programs, it seems only fair I widened the field slightly. Also, 50 felt like I was making the collection too bloated in terms of core worthy programs but 25 seemed too thin. Therefore, 15 percent and 39 is where we arrived. That said, I have a lot of programs I will likely do supplemental articles on to accompany the core collection. There’s just too much to cover (in a good way).
Now, how did I come up with these programs? Here’s a list of some of the criteria I came up with as guidance:
Sustained success throughout the years
National Titles
National Rankings
Contributions and innovations
Corruption/Scandal
Brand
Big Games
Adding to the Overall Story of College Football
*All rankings and records will be prior to the 2023 season*
What does success throughout the years look like? I broke it up into these 10 eras as we stand now, with honestly starting in 2024, we’ll be in a completely new one:
Pre NCAA (1869-1905)
Non-AP (1906-1935)
WW II Era (1936-1946)
Postwar, Pre-Civil Rights Act (1947-1963)
Post Integration Phase 1 (1964-1969)
Post Integration Phase 2 (1970-1979)
Post Integration Phase 3 (1980-1989)
Pre BCS (1990-1997)
BCS (1998-2013)
FBS Playoff (2014-Present)
When ESPN did their list, they simply divided college football into incredibly basic blocks that didn’t appreciate the nuance and shifts that happened with what was going on with the country and how it affected the sport. They broke it into pre-modern (1869-1918), pre-integration (1919-1968), and since integration (1968-2018). Needless to say, I think that is a WAY too basic and an unsophisticated way to break down the phases of college football, especially when it comes to integration. It’s not like as soon as Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Ole Miss became a squad that was half black, half white overnight. Hell, even in the 70s as we will explore, integration, especially in the SEC was a painful process due to recent horrors and traumas on one side, and great trepidation on the other. Hence, we break integration into 3 phases. Don’t worry, I’ll put a content warning on the supplemental article that talks about college football integration for those of you who can’t handle talking about history.
I must admit, while I write this and have 39 teams listed and their information gathered, I am not sure that will be what gets published. As I said, there’s about 60 or so programs I am considering and the back end of the list will garner much debate, as will the front. Rankings like these are always somewhat subjective and therefore flipping programs a couple spots usually isn’t a big deal. But this is college football, and as such everything is life and death. Regardless, this has been incredibly fun to research, and I can’t wait to share my work with you.
As you take it all in, think of the collection in these terms. If you were to write a book about the story of college football, which programs are going to get a chapter, and which programs/games/big moments would get short essays of a couple pages? Or in modern terms, which programs get a series on a podcast, and which get supplemental episodes? Who knows, if the right person reads this series, maybe either or both are in my future.