RollTide1987

My Oxford Yellow Jackets crushed Gadsden City 56-28 last night.

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Herschel Walker and Bo Jackson waaay over Derrick Henry

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The nostalgia trip regarding these two needs to end.

Are they among the best backs to ever play in the SEC and college football at large? Yes. But the idea that they were so good that no back can ever challenge them is absurd. Derrick Henry is the only running back in the history of the sport to rush for over 2,000 yards in a season at the high school, collegiate, and professional level. The power of his stiff arm is the stuff of legends. And once he gets to the second level it's almost impossible to stop him due to his power and deceptive speed.

When does it break even though?

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The 1995 team played the season on easy mode by old school Nebraska standards. No Switzer, no McCartney, no conference championship, no one OOC, and no bowl defenders with a bust in Canton. Just put another notch in the 36 game winning streak against “top ten” Kansas and 29 game winning streak against “top ten” KSU (and all the legendary badasses those two teams had) and run over a finesse bowl opponent a year away from its peak.

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A few things in this argument don't hold up as well as they seem to on first read.

The dominance itself is understated, not overstated. Nebraska's full 1995 season was 638 points scored to 174 allowed. That's 53.2 a game to 14.5 allowed, which equates to a 38.7-point average margin of victory, and no opponent came within 14 points all year. Florida entered the Fiesta Bowl 12-0 and ranked #2 in the country and still lost 62-24, at the time the second-largest margin ever in a 1-vs-2 matchup in the poll era. That's not a resume built on padding a stat line against nobody.

And you wanna talk about coaching or lack thereof on Nebraska's '95 schedule?

Nebraska's second game that season was Nick Saban's very first game as Michigan State's head coach and Nebraska won 50-10. That's the same Saban who'd go on to win seven national titles and land in the College Football Hall of Fame; he just hadn't gotten there yet.

Kansas State that year was Bill Snyder's best team to date: 10-2, the program's first ever Top 10 finish, less than a decade removed from a 27-game losing streak, under a coach now in the Hall of Fame and credited with the greatest turnaround in the sport's history. Nebraska beat that team 49–25 while they were ranked #8.

And "no McCartney" is technically true only because McCartney had retired. His replacement, Rick Neuheisel, went 10–2, finished #5 nationally, and won the Cotton Bowl in his rookie season. Nebraska beat that team 44-21 while they were ranked #7. Counting a coach's legacy retroactively rather than what his team actually did that year isn't really "context." It's cherry picking the data that gets the answer you already wanted.

Nebraska beat three different Top 10 teams in a four-week span that season - #8 Kansas State, #7 Colorado, #10 Kansas - then closed with #2 Florida in the bowl. All three of those Big Eight teams finished that specific season in the final national polls. Using the modern reputation of Kansas football to wave off a team that was legitimately Top 10 caliber in 1995 isn't engaging with that season, it's importing a punchline from a different era.

The "no conference championship game" dings Nebraska for a game that didn't exist. That structure didn't exist for anyone in that conference that season as the Big 12 didn't form its championship game until 1996. Faulting the '95 team for not playing in a game nobody in their league was scheduled to play isn't a fair knock on what they did, especially considering the fact that Nebraska played EVERY team in its conference in 1995 just as it did every year before that.

And get out of here with that Hall of Fame BS. Whether an opposing player eventually gets a bronze bust in Canton depends on NFL career length, team fit, and induction politics decades later, not how good he was as a 20-year-old in a specific game. You can gerrymander any endpoint (future first-rounders, future Pro Bowlers, future Hall of Famers) to make any season look artificially strong or weak in hindsight.

And finally, the "year away from its peak" line in regards to Florida does more work than the facts support. Florida's 1995 offense was already, by the program's own account, arguably the finest in SEC history to that point. They set conference records for total yards, points per game, and touchdowns, with Wuerffel leading the entire NCAA in TD passes that season. Ike Hilliard put up over 1,000 yards and 15 scores as a sophomore; Chris Doering set an SEC record with 17 TD catches, and Fred Taylor (a future 11,000-yard NFL back) was already on the roster as a backup. This wasn't a team still finding itself. It walked into the Fiesta Bowl 12-0 having just defeated Arkansas 34-3 for the SEC title.

More importantly, the 1996 "peak" team was mostly the same players from 1995 but a year older. Florida returned 16 starters, eight on offense, headlined by the same Wuerffel, Hilliard, and Anthony that Nebraska had already beaten. So if 1996 is the peak, Nebraska had already dismantled the core of that peak team a year earlier.

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Werent they the ONLY team without a Covid player lost the whole year?

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Saban had to be quarantined for almost the entire week of Georgia prep due to a false positive and was at home sitting on his couch for the Iron Bowl after an actual positive test.

I actually spoke to a Sailor who is currently serving aboard the Lincoln. They said that everything the media is reporting right now happened a month ago. Conditions aboard the ship have improved since then.

And this is where we are in today’s college football world. Before the transfer portal and NIL, could you picture a former Heisman winner cutting all ties with his former team simply because another player is wearing the jersey he sported in college? It’s insane.

Saw this fact on social media this morning and couldn't believe it was true. Auburn's only 3,000-yard passers were Dameyune Craig in 1997 and Jarrett Stidham in 2017.

They have had some good QBs come through that university over the years and it's very surprising to me that only two of them managed to reach that milestone in a season.

I love me some Denzel but he's much too old to play Hannibal Barca. He's going to be 72 this year and Hannibal was likely not even 65 when he died.

Many saw him as a system player.

The 2010 Iron Bowl and 2011 LSU game.