538: The Best College Football Programs Of The 1990s Are All Suddenly Terrible

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When I was growing up in the 1990s, it was hard to imagine the football programs at Florida State and Nebraska ever losing steam. The Huskers won national championships in 1994, 1995 and 1997;1 FSU took its own titles in 1993 and 1999 (plus went to two more BCS Championship Games, in 1998 and 2000). The two dynasties edged out Florida and Tennessee for the most victories in Division I-A in the ’90s, winning 218 games combined2 during the decade.

Those halcyon days are a distant memory now, after a weekend that saw Florida State lose to Syracuse for the first time since 1966 — and saw Nebraska do the Seminoles one better, starting a season 0-2 for the first time since 1957. Now they’re part of a group of formerly great teams that have started the 2018 season as badly as any version of their programs have in the past several decades.

Some of these teams will get a chance to start turning things around soon … against one another. Florida and Tennessee play on Saturday, while Nebraska will play Michigan — a fellow titan of college football history that, while not quite on the same historically bad trajectory as the teams above, also finds itself out of sorts over Jim Harbaugh’s record against top opponents. For all of these programs, a rich history can also be a burden that weighs down future teams, forcing them into the constant pursuit of their own past.

Before that can happen, though, these once-great teams need to end their current slides. At their ’90s peaks, the Seminoles and Huskers made winning look so effortless that a collapse seemed impossible. Now that they’ve proven even the most storied programs aren’t invincible, perhaps the rebuilding process for the next great dynasties can finally begin in earnest.

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