Being a fan in the landscape of college football is not for the faint of heart, or at the very least, for someone that emphasizes parity.
The worst-kept secret in the sport is that the number of viable title contenders each season can be counted on the palm of your hand. The most dominant football programs have typically been concentrated in just a few conferences, and that statement has rung true for much of the last decade.
But the history of college football is vast, so does that statement carry the same amount of weight in say, the 1920s, as it does today? To answer that question, ESPN and Bill Connelly are turning toward their staple SP+ rankings.
As Connelly notes in his piece, he’s updating his method for crunching these figures that differ from his typical weekly SP+ rankings:
While the version of SP+ presented weekly during a given season is based on a large number of predictive factors, I have come up with a version based solely on points scored and allowed that, at the lower levels of the sport, can serve to make solid projections. I applied those same methods to the games going back to 1883, when football’s scoring rules became mostly what they are now. (You can find all ratings here.)
Starting with the 1920s, I looked at which teams most thoroughly dominated the sport from decade to decade, using SP+ percentile averages for each team and each decade. How much do these lists change over the decades? What can these averages tell us about how things have evolved over the past 100 years and how much things are evolving now?
With Texas A&M football boasting a vast history of success on the gridiron, it should come as no surprise to see them well-represented in Connelly’s decades’ rankings. The Maroon and White are just one of four teams to show up in the top 10 for at least one decade, with much praise handed out to their vaunted defenses over the years.
Let’s dive in and see how the Aggies compare with some of the most successful college football teams over the last 100 years, based on SP+: