Lou Holtz arrived at Notre Dame for the 1986 college football season, and even though the Irish finished the season 5-6, the close losses to several top teams seemed to indicate that Holtz had the program on the way back. The 1987 Notre Dame football season confirmed those indications, as the Irish reached their first major bowl game since 1980.
It was looking like the end was near for Penn State’s legendary, but aging coach, Joe Paterno. After a career that had seen national titles in 1982 and 1986, plus four other unbeaten and uncrowned teams, Paterno’s program had fallen on hard times. Four of the previous five seasons had been sub-.500 and the calls for him to step down were getting louder.
It’s rare in college football for a team to start the season #1 and finish it there. It’s even rarer for the two teams ranked 1-2 in the preseason to hold serve all the way and then play a classic national championship game to end the year. That’s what happened in a 2005 college football season that ended with an epic USC-Texas Rose Bowl battle.
College football’s core problem was not the lack of a playoff, as critics always assume every time there’s a problem, but to flawed methodology in selecting the top two teams. The issues were twofold.
The 1986 Notre Dame football team was first go-around in South Bend and while you could clearly see the progress, there was a lot of heartbreak along the way.
2000 was the year of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that settled the controversy over how to count presidential votes in the state of Florida, and ultimately decided the election itself. Miami and Florida State didn’t have quite the same stakes, but their own debate came right on the heels of the presidential battle.
The Oklahoma Sooners were no strangers to competing for national championships and doing it at the Orange Bowl, but when they arrived in Miami following the 2000 college football season, it had been a while since Boomer Sooner had been on top.
Two electric college football players came to the Sugar Bowl to play for the national championship following the 1999 season. Peter Warrick, a wide receiver at Florida State, might have been in consideration for the Heisman Trophy if not for a two-game suspension earlier in the year. Michael Vick had burst onto the scene with Virginia Tech and the freshman quarterback took what was a good, competitive program and lifted it to new heights.
It was a new era for the Notre Dame football program in 2005. The school and the alumni base, feeling that the talent base was in decline, made a coaching change and brought in Charlie Weis, the offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots. Weis arrived with much fanfare, as the Patriots had just won their third Super Bowl in four years. The new coach said he had a “decided schematic advantage” over the competition. The 2005 Notre Dame football season made it look like the new coach might have a point.
1991 was a year when people that had gotten close to a championship, but not yet sealed the deal, finally broke through. Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski won his first ring, as did Chicago Bulls’ star Michael Jordan. Through much of the 1991 college football season, it seemed certain that Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden would join them.
The bad blood even spilled into American culture, with a “Catholics vs. Convicts” paradigm, named after a T-shirt sold on the Notre Dame campus prior to the 1988 game and meant to further the White Hats vs. Black Hats image the two teams had—an image, that like most stereotypes wasn’t accurate on either side, but in which neither side—including black-hatted Miami—backed away from.
The 1990 college football season started with defending national champion Miami being upset by BYU and its soon-to-be Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Ty Detmer. That should have told us we were headed for a year that would be on the bizarre side. The BYU-Miami game unleashed a year of upsets and upheaval not seen since the seminal year of 1981.