re: Jags would be 17.5 pt favorites over Alabama

Your 50 year old example is bad because of a few things. It completely falls to mention the growth in talent pool and talent evaluation since that time.

A good (albeit extreme) modern analogy is women's college basketball and the WNBA. Every year in college and in the pros, a freshman or rookie comes in and does very well. This is because the talent available for that sport is very narrow and not very deep. This allows skilled players to play against less skilled players that are just filling out rosters who aren't even in the same stratosphere as some of their peers.

This has been exacerbated in the well developed football machine, which now taps talent in every portion of the country. If the NFL is still missing players today, how many do you think they missed in 1976?

This well oiled machine goes down all the way to the high school level. I can guarantee my high school in south Mississippi didn't have the type of weight training equipment it does now. You may think, this helps the college team argument, as a rising tide raises all ships, but it just isn't how it works. Instead, that rising tide raises potentially one ship who had the talent to make it in the first place.