There are lot of ways to define eras in sports. The domination of certain teams, rule changes that impacted style of play, the prominence of certain players or coaches are all valid ways. OUAT Sports tends, however, to learn toward the structures of a league, and its postseason—in other words, how the championship is pursued. To that end, the starting point for our modern era of college football is set at 1974.
It was 1974 when both major polls—the AP writers and what was then the UPI coaches—decided to wait until after bowl games to vote on their national champion. Prior to that, bowls were seen as simply exhibitions and did not alter the final regular season vote. While the AP changed course in 1965, it took nine more years for the UPI to follow suit. That makes 1974 the first year that bowls were a true postseason in both polls.
Over the next two decades, the major conferences all had tie-ins to specific bowls. A guaranteed matchup between the top two teams was not only *not* guaranteed, it wasn’t even the norm. A great day of New Year’s Day bowl watching usually concluded with debates—many of them still not settled—over who was #1.
While it was a less than fair way to crown a champion, it was also a lot of fun and that period of college football history is marked by any number of great rivalries, colorful characters, and epic battles. Barry Switzer’s renegade Oklahoma teams won the first two titles of the new era in 1974-75 and took home another ten years later. OU routinely broke the hearts of Tom Osborne’s Nebraska.
The Michigan-Ohio State rivalry, always at a fever pitch, was going through its most famous era, with Bo Schembechler and Woody Hayes on the sidelines. USC was a powerhouse. So was Notre Dame. Alabama had the legendary Bear Bryant on the sidelines. Penn State’s pursuit of a title for Joe Paterno was a pre-eminent storyline in all of sports. The Lions finally got there in 1982. And for good measure, did it again in 1986
College football was still mostly an old-boy network, with major bowl wins and national titles generall going to well-established programs. The University of Miami’s rise in the 1980s shattered the club. The Hurricanes’ stunning upset of #1 Nebraska in 1983 remains a seminal moment in the history of the sport. Miami went on to win four national titles over the next decade, and they came within one play of winning two more.
One of those near-misses came to Notre Dame. After a brief fall from prominence in the early 1980s, Lou Holtz took over in South Bend and set the Irish on an 11-year run of excellence that they have not matched since. This 1986-96 era of Notre Dame football is captured in my book The Last Golden Age.
Holtz won one national title, and one of those ferocious arguments of the era involves Notre Dame’s joust with Florida State in 1993. Bobby Bowden first put the Seminoles on the national stage in 1979-80, when he got consecutive Orange Bowl bids. After a brief decline, Bowden brought FSU roaring back in 1987. It began a stunning string of excellence, where the ‘Noles finished in the national top 5 fourteen straight years. But Bowden had his own problems getting to the #1 spot. In 1993, he won a hotly contested vote over Holtz’s ND team to get the brass ring. In 1999, under a less ambiguous system, Bobby won one of which there was no doubt.
The clamor for a clear-cut national title game was getting harder to ignore by the mid-1990s. Several of the major bowls—Sugar, Orange, and Fiesta—got together and agreed that the top two teams in the conferences committed to them would play in a bowl that would rotate. The Rose, with the Big Ten and Pac-10 contractually obligated, did not participate.
It was an era where Nebraska finally broke through for Osborne. They won three national titles from 1994-97. While Penn State disputed ’94, as a fellow unbeaten team, and the Cornhuskers had to share the ’97 title with Michigan due to the lack of a 1 vs. 2 matchup, there was no denying this—Nebraska was overwhelming. And their 1995 national championship team is on the short list of the greatest teams of all-time.
In 1998, the Rose gave in and joined the party. Over the next 16 seasons, the regular season would be about determining the 1 vs. 2 spots. In 2006, a tweak to that system was made—the bowl designated as host of the championship battle, would actually host two games. The first would be the bowl under its traditional name. The second, scheduled for the first Monday after New Year’s, would be the formal National Championship Game.
This 1998-2013 era saw a resurgence from Miami, who had their own all-time great national champion in 2001. USC, under Pete Carroll produced some great teams, won a national title, and came up just short of another in an all-time classic against Texas in 2005. The Longhorns’ revival as a national contender came along with that of Oklahoma, as the Red River Rivalry got a fresh jolt of life.
Perhaps most notably, this was the era when the SEC went from arguably the best conference to the clear-cut dominant league on the national stage. From 2006-12, they not only won the title each year, but several different schools took their turn. Alabama took more turns than most, as Nick Saban assumed his place as the greatest college football coach of all-time.
2014 was when the Playoff Era finally began, as the top four teams were designated for bowl games that would serve as national semi-finals. While Alabama, and the SEC generally, continued to be dominant, and Ohio State returned to glory under Urban Meyer, there was a new national powerhouse. Dabo Swinney turned Clemson into a machine, made several Playoff appearances and won two national championships.
The four-team era ended in 2023, with a 12-team bracket now on the horizon, and a tournament that will begin prior to Christmas. It will be a very different look and feel for college football than we’re used to.
Generally speaking, I’ve used 2020—the strange COVID year whose impact did not spare the sports world—as sort of a cut-off point for how far we’ll go here at OUAT in chronicling each season. But with college football, it’s going to be a little different. The dramatic change in postseason structure means that 2023 is the best choice for the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.
When you click the drop-down menu, you can be taken to the main page for each individual season. Within that article will be links to articles about the specific teams that made that year special. As you can see, we’ve still got a lot of work to do in completion but getting through 2023 is the goal. Then, we want to add more and more individual team articles. Right now, our pages from the late 1970s to the early 1990s have a lot of sub-articles within them. We want to keep strengthening that. And in some very ideal world, I hope to eventually go back to 1965, when the AP began treating bowls like postseason games.
College football has a rich history, and we aim to preserve as much of its modern age as possible in this space.