The Top-10 All-Time College Football Programs

[StatesEye]

According to SI back in Feb using an unweighted average ranking over the following categories: winning percentage, national championships, conference championships, bowl games, total wins, bowl record, all-Americans, Heisman Trophy winners, NFL draft picks, first round draft picks, weeks an No. 1 in AP, number of AP Top-25 seasons.
https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/colleg ... v-ratings/
1. Alabama
2. USC
3. OU
4. Ohio St.
5. ND
6. Michigan
7. Texas
8. Georgia
9. Nebraska
10. LSU

Not using a metric as SI did, I would subjectively put forward the following ranking. If I gave it more thought, my ranking might change, though.
1. Alabama
2. Ohio St.
3. OU
4. USC
5. ND
6. Nebraska
7. Texas
8. Michigan
9. Penn St.
10. FSU???

You could switch Ohio St and OU without much argument from me.

[OU Chinaman]

...Mine would be...

1. BAMA

2. OKLAHOMA

3. OHIO ST

4. NOTRE DAME

5. USC

(After the TOP 5, it's a gaggle cluster-F for the next 5.)

[StatesEye]

Sorry for the necro-bump, but I didn't see a reason why a new thread should be started with what follows.

This topic got me to thinking. Which college football programs have been the most consistently good over the years and what objective metric can be employed to determine this consistency. I've mentioned SP+ as a system of analyzing the strength of teams. It's probably the best out there currently. I used to consult it regularly before Bill Connelly, the creator of SP+, made a deal with ESPN. Now the rating system is behind ESPN's paywall. Some lines I cannot cross so I don't get to see the ratings until after the season.
You can read more about how the SP+ ratings are constructed here: https://www.sbnation.com/college-footba ... s-rankings

Anyway, I came across a website that provides retrospective analyses for the SP+ ratings of college football teams going back to 1970. Below is a ranking of college football programs according to their average SP+ rating spanning the years 1970 to 2023 (54 seasons). The SP+ rating can be interpreted as the expected scoring margin over a "perfectly average team" for that particular season. Therefore, according to the list below, on average, Oklahoma has been 21.67 points better than the average team for each year since 1970. As a reminder, SP+ ratings are tempo- and opponent-adjusted within each year.

1. Alabama - 23.68 (20.94 before the Saban run)
2. Ohio St - 21.74 (19.99 before Meyer's arrival)
3. Oklahoma - 21.67 (20.03 before Stoops' arrival)
4. Michigan - 20.49
5. Nebraska - 20.24 (even after more than a decade of being mediocre to flat out bad)
6. USC - 20.07
7. Florida St - 19.28
8. Penn St - 18.91
9. Georgia - 18.47
10. Notre Dame - 18.45 (21.43 at end of 1999 season)
11. Texas - 16.72 (LMAO, something every Sooner knows but is always forgotten by the rest of the country)
12. Miami - 16.49
13. LSU - 15.79
14. Tennessee - 14.84

Looking at a similar list that covers the last 25 seasons of college football (since 1999). The number in parentheses is the number of national championships (AP or CFP only, AP trumps BCS in relevant years, e.g., 2003) won by each program beginning with 1999 and ending with 2023.

1. Alabama - 25.22 (6)
2. Ohio St - 24.57 (2)
3. Oklahoma - 23.57 (1)
4. Georgia - 22.75 (2)
5. LSU - 20.58 (2, 3 if 2003 is counted)
6. USC - 19.9 (2)
7. Florida - 19.34 (2)
8. Michigan - 18.42 (1)
9. Florida St - 18.38 (2)
10. Texas - 18.23 (1)
11. Clemson - 17.47 (2)
12. Miami - 17.13 (1)

What I find interesting about this list is that excepting for Auburn (2010), every other national championship over the last 25 years is claimed by a program that ranks in the Top-14 of the SP+ rating average over those same years. It is also frustrating, disappointing and anger-provoking that OU is the ONLY program ranked within the Top-7 that doesn't have multiple titles. I've said it many times. Over the last quarter century, OU has stayed consistently near the top and the program has fielded at least TEN teams (according to the SP+ ratings of teams that win titles) with the talent-level to win a national championship during this time......why there isn't at least one more national championship during those 25 years is bewildering, at least to me. Of course, eight of those ten teams came before the 2013 season. I know we (including me) like to believe that the 2017 team was capable of winning it all, but according to these SP+ rating numbers over the last 54 years, if OU had won it in 2017 then it would have been an extreme outlier second only to Georgia's 1980 team. Honestly, I get a little concerned sometimes thinking about the fall off over the last 10 or so years as compared to Bob's first ten years and how this may have impacted perception of the program in recruiting. It's been far more difficult to land highly rated classes since 2010 or so. Sure, we've landed some big classes since then, but only recently (last 5 years) and only for the last couple of years defensively. OU needs to break through soon or I fear a slide to permanent second-tier status much like what happened to ND since the early 1990's onward. It doesn't help that OU has one of the three toughest SEC schedules for the inaugural season. It's a critical year, IMO.....and our backs may be up against the wall more so than we want to believe.

A few more tidbits.....
The average SP+ rating over all national champions (AP or CFP) from 1970 to 2023 is 30.80, and the average season SP+ national rank for national champions over this time is 2.69.

The highest SP+ rated national championship teams over this time were 1971 Nebraska and 2013 Florida St at 38.5.
The lowest SP+ rated national championship team, which also has the worst SP+ national ranking for a season, is 1980 Georgia (19.2, #17). Note: Florida St was ranked #1 in the SP+ at the end of 1980 and Oklahoma (#8) thrashed them in the Orange Bowl.

Of the 54 national champions over this time period, 19 (35.2%) were ranked #1 in the SP+ ratings, 14 (25.9%) were ranked #2, 9 (16.7%) were ranked #3, 4 (7.4%) were ranked #4, 4 (7.4%) were ranked #5, 3 (5.6%) were ranked #6 and only 1 (1980 Georgia) ranked worse than #6.

During the CFP era (10 national champions), two championship teams had a SP+ national rank worse then #2 (2014 Ohio St at #4 and 2018 Clemson at #3).

The last five national champions (LSU #2, Alabama #2, Georgia #1, Georgia #1, Michigan #1) have had either a #1 or #2 national SP+ rank. This is the longest such streak since the 1974 thru 1979 seasons when six consecutive national champions had a national SP+ rank within the Top-2 (Oklahoma #1, Oklahoma #1, Pitt #2, Notre Dame #1, Alabama #2, Alabama #2).

During the CFP era, the national SP+ rankings for the four teams in each playoff have been......
2014: Alabama #1, Florida St #2, Ohio St #4, Oregon #5
2015: Alabama #2, Clemson #4, Oklahoma #7, Michigan St #20
2016: Alabama #1, Clemson #2, Washington #3, Ohio St #10
2017: Alabama #1, Georgia #4, Clemson #5, Oklahoma #7
2018: Alabama #1, Clemson #3, Oklahoma #4, Notre Dame #13
2019: Ohio St #1, LSU #2, Clemson #3, Oklahoma #8
2020: Ohio St #1, Alabama #2, Clemson #4, Notre Dame #5
2021: Georgia #1, Alabama #3, Michigan #4, Cincy #5
2022: Georgia #1, Michigan #2, Ohio St #3, TCU #6
2023: Michigan #1, Texas #6, Alabama #7, Washington #13

Over the last 25 seasons, Oklahoma has finished in the Top-4 of the SP+ rankings, which seems to be the realistic cutoff to win a national championship, 10 times:
2000, #3
2002, #3
2003, #3
2004, #2
2007, #2
2008, #4
2011, #3
2012, #4
2016, #4
2018, #4

Since the SP+ only looks at play-by-play and drive data for each game to calculate ratings (i.e., after the first five games of a season, it does not consider team rankings, W/L, scoring margins, etc.), I'm very impressed with how well the SP+ rating system tracks team strength going all the way back to 1970. The games were played much differently then.