Continued - Ranking Every Power Five College Football Program Since 1980, highlighting the Unsettling
Jake Wimberly
We love to rank college football teams and we love to compare teams in different eras; compare programs as they pertain to decades and more. Who is the best? Is it Alabama of today, or Nebraska of 1995? Who had the better run in college football? Bobby Bowden’s Florida State teams or Pete Carrol’s USC teams?
Today we continue our journey to look at the 66 Power Five Programs and where their “Respective Program” ranks and stacks up against the rest.
We will look over the last forty years (from 1980 to 2020), and based on multiple criteria we will place every team in different tiers.
The tiers are as follows: Super Elite, First Rate, Top Flight, Passable, Strange, Tolerable, Mediocre, Not good enough, Damaged, Weak, Unsettling and Disturbing.
The criteria we will use is multiple, to give each team a final score in our simple program formula. Number of 6 win seasons, 10 win seasons, Conference Titles, Bowl appearances, Bowl wins, National Championship Appearances, National Championships and Losing Seasons.
We will drop individual articles on each tier, marching our way to the top programs of the last forty years.
We have already covered the disturbing tier and you can read about those teams here.
Today we continue with the “Unsettling” of college football.
NOTE: The scores in each column you see do not necessarily represent actual number of winning seasons, titles, etc. these numbers are calculated off a data set for definition purposes only - to come up with a final score.
59: Wake Forest Demon Deacons - Staying with a negative overall total on our metric in this classification, Wake Forest isn’t Vanderbilt or even Duke, but nobody is ever going to confuse the Demon Deacons with Florida State either. The program only has one ten win season and that was in 2006, but they do have two conference titles since 1980. Major shout out to Jim Grobe and Dave Clausen who have made the program respectable. The Deacons were on a four year run of bowls and winning seasons heading into 2020.
58: Washington State Cougars - The Cougs check in at number 58 on our list and while WSU has played in a Rose Bowl, won a few conference titles and sent several quarterbacks and players to the NFL - it’s not been all Roses either. 23 losing seasons encompass this 40 year stretch, but prior to 2000, the Cougars had gone to six bowl games in the last seven seasons. Mike Leach can take the hat tip for that success and it will be up to Nick Rolovich to get Washington State into the next tier.
57: Purdue Boilermakers- Pop quiz on most popular Purdue Boilermaker and most will say Drew Brees. Throw in Rod Woodson, Mike Alstott and Bob Griese and you have a heck of a cast of players. But, Purdue football as a whole hasn’t been all Super Bowls and MVP’s. The Boilermakers have one ten win season and that was in 1979 - a year before we started this study. They have yet to win a conference title and with the BIG 10 getting better and better it’s gonna get tougher and tougher for Purdue at the rate they recruit annually.
56: Kentucky Wildcats - The Kentucky Wildcats have been to five straight bowl games and recorded their only 10 win season the last forty years, just three years ago. To say Mark Stoops is guiding the Wildcats through the glory days of Kentucky Football would be an understatement. The Wildcats have been to 14 bowls the last forty years, but the Cats haven’t sniffed an SEC title since 1950 when some man named Bryant won one. Kentucky football will never be Kentucky basketball, but Stoops is well on his way to getting the Cats out of this tier and into the next one.
55: Northwestern Wildcats - Much like Stoops and Kentucky, or Leach at Washington State or Dave Clausen at Wake - Northwestern Football the last 15 years under Pat Fitzgerald has seen “Glory” more times than not - especially when compared to the rest of Northwestern football history. The Cats have seen four 10 win seasons and four conference titles over the last forty years. It’s the consistency part that has hurt Northwestern. It is harder to recruit to many of these schools in this tier and if the Cats can continue to use the transfer portal and be smart with recruiting, they are about to head to the next tier above them.
Tier below this one: Disturbing
60 Oregon State
61 Iowa State
62 Kansas
63 Indiana
64 Rutgers
65 Duke
66 Vanderbilt
NEXT UP: The Weak
Editors note: All photos courtesy of 247sports.com
