Our previous post looked at where this year's FSU ranks all-time in terms of accomplishment for going 14-0 against the schedule they played. This post attempts to look at a more difficult problem: where they stack up in terms of quality against teams of the past 50 years.
It's a tougher question because now you're really comparing different eras. It's one thing to ask how impressive it was for a team to win 14 games; it's another to say, how good are they, really?
Most people believe that today's teams would easily defeat teams of the distant past. The only question is, how distant? Certainly today's FSU would beat 1892 Yale. And 1945 Army. The 1950s Oklahoma dynasty? Sure. Doubt probably creeps in somewhere in the last 50 years. But today's players are far bigger and faster than the great 1970s...what about the 80s? 90s? 10 years ago?
We aren't even going to make guesses, but instead look at teams' Strength ratings, which basically tell how strong a team was relative to the current Division I-A scene at the time. Truly dominant teams will score high, while those that didn't dominate as much don't score as high. Winning all the games doesn't necessarily matter that much, but winning by a lot does, and beating good teams by a lot is critical. After we list the top 20 teams of the last 5 decades, we can speculate about how much "time-correction" should be applied.
Here are the top 20 teams of the last 50 years in our Strength power rating (offense and defense ranks are for that particular year):
# Year Team Rec Rating Offense[rnk] Defense[rnk]
1. 1972 Nebraska 9-2-1 44.92 46.01 [ 1] 1.09 [ 2]
2. 1974 Oklahoma 11-0 44.30 48.17 [ 1] 3.86 [ 2]
3. 1995 Nebraska 12-0 42.66 54.30 [ 1] 11.64 [ 2]
4. 1973 Oklahoma 10-0-1 42.37 45.62 [ 2] 3.25 [ 4]
5. 1973 Ohio State 10-0-1 41.37 43.06 [ 4] 1.68 [ 2]
6. 1971 Nebraska 13-0 41.19 43.00 [ 2] 1.81 [ 1]
7. 2005 Texas 13-0 41.07 53.74 [ 1] 12.66 [ 4]
8. 2013 Florida St 14-0 40.91 53.23 [ 2] 12.32 [ 4]
9. 1970 Texas 10-1 40.89 47.19 [ 1] 6.29 [ 5]
10. 1989 Houston 9-2 40.50 54.28 [ 1] 13.78 [ 15]
11. 1980 Nebraska 10-2 40.20 44.37 [ 2] 4.17 [ 3]
12. 1991 Washington 12-0 39.99 44.56 [ 1] 4.56 [ 2]
13. 1973 Alabama 11-1 39.97 44.73 [ 3] 4.75 [ 5]
14. 1986 Oklahoma 11-1 39.90 44.71 [ 1] 4.81 [ 1]
15. 1972 Oklahoma 11-1 39.82 38.69 [ 5] -1.12 [ 1]
16. 2001 Miami (Florida) 12-0 39.26 46.80 [ 2] 7.54 [ 1]
17. 1971 Oklahoma 11-1 38.75 49.79 [ 1] 11.04 [ 17]
18. 1969 Ohio State 8-1 38.66 44.48 [ 1] 5.82 [ 8]
19. 1966 Notre Dame 9-0-1 38.48 39.76 [ 1] 1.27 [ 2]
20. 1996 Nebraska 11-2 38.38 45.55 [ 2] 7.17 [ 2]
This past season's FSU team ranks 8th best by this measure, the best of the decade so far and 2nd best in this century to the 2005 national champion Texas squad. They're 3rd-best over the last 20 years. So if you believe today's teams would clean up against teams of the 70s, the only question is whether today's teams can beat teams from 10 years ago, or even 20 years ago. If so, then Florida State has a claim to perhaps being the strongest team of all-time (though realistically, their nail-biting win over Auburn won't win many converts to that idea).
There are some big surprises at the top. The early 70s saw a lot of great disparity in college football as the rich got richer and the strong got stronger—you could have 100+ players on scholarship back then and teams like Nebraska, Oklahoma, Ohio State, and Alabama took full advantage.
First on the list is an unlikely team: 1972 Nebraska, a team with 2 losses and a tie. They fell to 11-1 Oklahoma (#15 here), 8-3 UCLA, and tied 5-6-1 Iowa State! But they also had a 5-game run where they beat opponents a combined 278-7. They were erratic but on average, pretty incredible. After beating everyone so badly in 1971 (see 1971 Nebraska at #6) we have to assume some overconfidence set in from game to game the next season.
At #2 is 1974 Oklahoma, who finished 11-0 but couldn't go to a bowl game due to probation. So the best team that actually won a national championship is 1995 Nebraska at #3. That team is legendary for blowing out opponents including previously undefeated Florida 62-24 in the title game.
1973 had several dominant teams, including 1973 Oklahoma at #4 and 1973 Ohio State at #5. Each team had a single tie, but not to each other. The Sooners tied 9-2-1 USC that year while Ohio State tied Michigan, then went to the Rose Bowl and beat USC 42-21. 1973 Alabama also comes in at #13.
At #6 is a team often cited as the best of all time, 1971 Nebraska, whom we covered in the last post. 2005 Texas with Vince Young is #7 and rates the best of the century so far. Then 2013 Florida State, who dominated some very good teams and obliterated the bad ones, until Auburn took them to the wire. Before that game, they rated even higher, at #5 with a 42.20 rating, but the narrow 34-31 qin took them down a bit.
Now, from this list you can see that teams that have an incredible average game-performance rating often screw up in a game or two, which should disqualify them from being considered "the best". And from yesterday's post, it's clear that sometimes teams that aren't really the best get lucky and go undefeated. So in the next post we'll rank the top 20 teams in our Overall power rating, which adds the two results, combining Strength and Success to see who should really be considered the top teams of our era. Since FSU was in both lists they'll show up in the top 20 for sure, but where?
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