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

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Well the state of Florida underwent a dramatic population shift in the 20th century that you can't really foresee happening anywhere else again. They had the resources and had been recognized as a sleeping giant for decades. Miami broke out in the 80s, it took the right coaches for the state schools to do so a decade later. It wasn't exactly a surprise.

As far as teams like Wazzu and Colorado being relevant, again many of your elite programs were down, a lot of it due to NCAA stuff, and it left a power vacuum that had to be filled by someone

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Yeah, and with all that population both are garbage now.

And Clemson, a smaller school with fewer alum and less money than us has been one of the top 3 programs over the last number of years. If they can do it, I don't buy any reason we can't.

It is the very, very thin silver lining to them winning the national title while we were 3-9.

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I don't know if Taggert is that bad or if Jimbo was that good.

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I have no idea why they're so bad right now. It's not like the cupboard is bare.

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These are somewhat self imposed and can easily swing but “cyclical” isn’t the right word.

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That’s exactly what happens. And it occurs in nearly every industry. A company, or in this case “college football teams” reach a level of success and get complacent/plateau. They begin to divert resources elsewhere while a competitor begins to invest in a new idea or capital.

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Sort of

For a team like Nebraska or to a lesser extent Tennessee they don’t have strong recruiting bases and no longer have the “our games are always on tv!” angle to sell out of state recruits. Nebraska also can’t game the scholarship system as easily today. Not saying those teams can’t get good but I seriously doubt Nebraska will get anywhere near 3 NCs in 4 years again in any of our lifetimes.

Michigan has had a dramatic population downswing in their state over the last 30-40 years which has really hurt their recruiting base and they too no longer have the TV angle to sell.

Florida State is not paying their assistant coaches or building facilities those coaches want/need. Florida also has a facility deficit. These are somewhat self imposed and can easily swing but “cyclical” isn’t the right word.

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Honestly not sure I totally agree on Michigan or the big Midwestern programs in general.

Alabama, as an example, is a very good high school football state, but it's neck and neck with Michigan as far as the number of NFL players from the state at the moment (and Illinois actually isn't too far behind, and Ohio and Pennsylvania are ahead).

Alabama hasn't been great because they've locked down the state or the surrounding states - they've been great because they recruit from New Jersey to California better than anyone in America. And a lot of these big Midwestern powers aren't sharing their recruiting bases in-state with other big programs like Alabama/Auburn, South Carolina/Clemson, Florida/FSU/Miami, Texas/A&M/everyone else under the sun, etc., etc.

Alabama has been great - and the SEC was great from 2006 through about 2013 or so - because it had the best coaching in the country. The SEC, outside of Alabama, has just been another blah conference for at least five or six years because they lost that core group of title-capable coaches that shepherded it through the mid to late 2000's and early 2010's (Meyer, Spurrier, Fulmer, Richt, Petrino, Miles, etc., etc.) and their slew of extremely capable assistants.

It really all comes down to coaching in college football. Has always thus been and will always thus be. I can't imagine that anyone would look at Texas' or Florida's recent struggles and would conclude otherwise, as an example. Put a dominant coach at Tennessee or Michigan or Nebraska, and they will win and win big. shite, even Notre Dame still pulls in top 10 or top 15 classes basically every single year with the occasional #1 or #2 overall class (on par with the Clemson's and Oklahoma's and Auburn's of the world) and pump out NFL players at a top 10 or whatever clip, and we still largely kinda suck on the field and have ever since we let Holtz go. It all comes down to coaching.

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Oklahoma, USC, Bama (92 notwithstanding), Texas (4 greatest programs of all time?) were all pretty down.

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Oklahoma really sucked. Sucked bad. People wondered like Nebraska today if they would ever make it back.

They made it back after like 1 year with Stoops...winning a Natty with Heupel.

Coaches mean everything.

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Alabama hasn't been great because they've locked down the state or the surrounding states - they've been great because they recruit from New Jersey to California better than anyone in America. 

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Uh, go look at Bama's roster. 85% at least are from the South - especially Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. The 2009 undefeated Natty team had one player on the entire roster not from the South - Mark Ingram who was from Michigan and had a personal connection, his father had played for Saban at Michigan State

Bill f'ing Callaghan

FSU can be good again anytime. Nebraska was getting kids from Florida, Cali, etc and having them live at the Hilton. Who knows what school work they were completing. That shite got shut down and they are now trying to get those same kids to go to school in NEBRASKA. It ain't happening.

I think it’s a little bit of taggart being a bad coach and the inmates running the asylum. Short of Arizona State, there probably isn’t a university in the country that can match the party atmosphere combined with the overflowing amount of wild, hot, poontang. So their coach leaves and a lot of these guys probably just stopped putting football first.

On taggarts end- one of my best friends is an FSU guy. He has a buddy in Tallahassee that’s lives right by the practice facility and told my friend that he rarely sees them out there practicing.