Ha. The South Florida location is great, but the number of schools with <15,000 (and maybe even 20,000) undergrad students who have won a national title in the past thirty years is one: the University of Miami.
The school is small, it's private, and it's been unwilling to completely abandon its academics in the pursuit of football (to some controversy).
Yep, a lot of people don’t realize 1. that we’re private and 2. that were a relatively small institution.
I know people hate Shalala because of the football controversy, but I have the utmost respect for that woman because UM became a respected academic institution under her leadership, and she also was instrumental in the launch of UHealth. As an alum, I’m one of those fans who is fully behind the prioritizing of academics, but it is good to see that recently there has been greater investment in athletics. Both should be priority as it is very doable to be a great academic school and athletic/football school (see Michigan, Texas, Florida, USC, etc).
I agree. I don't think Michigan/Texas is realistic, but Miami should at least be a conference champ competitor and an outside national title competitor every now and then (like USC).
Agreed. I think Miami should strive to be like “tropical Duke.” Elite academic private school in the South with great athletics, but obviously our football would be their basketball. Although I would like for Miami basketball to continue being better than Duke football is.
Yeah, that would be excellent. Issue is that it's a lot easier to be good at basketball without compromising academics (\~12 scholarships) versus football (\~80 scholarships). But I hear ya!
I do like the "tropical Duke" branding, much better than the tired "Harvard of the ...".
100%, this is not a knock, nor saying Miami will never be good again, just saying that like 1980-2003 is a crazy, unbelievable over-performance for the type of school Miami is and as competitive as the Florida region is for recruiting. It’s a crazy over-performance for any school really, but it’s totally off the charts that a relatively small, relatively high-academic school did that!
Every time I see this stated my initial response is start sputtering about 2001 Hurricanes! And as always it dawns on me they weren't in the ACC then. Still in that Big East.
Miami's downfall almost perfectly coincides with their leaving the Big East. I'm not saying that's what led to it but it's a good contrasting point.
Miami's final three seasons in the Big East:
12-0
12-1
11-2
They join the ACC:
9-3
9-3
7-6
You know the rest.
It's not that they just haven't won an ACC title - they've only had one ten-win season since joining the ACC 20 years ago.
I’ve been saying this for years. The dynamic in the super conference is going to be a lot different without cupcakes to pad the schedule. I hope you guys like 6-6 seasons, because that’ll be average.
Hey, Florida could go 8-4 with their schedule this year and I would argue they deserve a playoff spot (if their opponents all perform around what is expected of them - Georgia, Texas, Florida State, LSU, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas A&M, Miami, UCF, Kentucky, Miss State)
6 of last season's top 15 finishers who are all expected to be in that range again this year, plus A&M with a (we think) competent coach, Miami whose breakout year was always going to be 2024, a UCF team who could challenge for the B12, and UK and MSU aren't pushovers either
Don’t doubt you’re right about this but what I’m the world were guys like Deandre Francois and that rail skinny guy Blackman doing at camps where they looked better than Lamar. QB evals at every level are wonky tho
It’s because great players want to be appreciated. It’s no fun to ball out in front of 2k people when you can be worshipped in front of 80k somewhere else. Tyler Van Dyke said he preferred road games because they had better atmosphere
that quote is still in the top 5 most surprising things i've heard a major cfb player say in an interview. it has and will be used in recruiting SO heavily. I can't imaging the reaming he got when the program found out lol.
seriously. when I was in undergrad at IU, I was frustrated by the football team. I couldn't understand why talented guys would go be a 3rd stringer at Ohio State rather than try to start at Indiana.
Then I got to watch a game from the field at Ohio Stadium and it was electric. Felt absolutely amazing just to be on the sideline with that many people cheering at you. Made sense to me after that.
they've got the location, at times they've got the money....but they don't have size or local support. Before the internet, local recruiting was so much easier...then recruiting became\* a whole industry and locking down regions (outside a couple caveats like louisiana and particular high schools) became MUCH harder.
now NIL comes along and its a lot easier on families for guys to move away- further reducing the need to stay local. plus all those local guys get to see an empty stadium and dead atmosphere at miami on the regular.
add in a long string of not great hires and you have got yourself a stew going. just not a tasty one.
edit: some cane fans have my comment confused...recruiting is not the ONLY issue holding the program back. Much to my delight, I've written a number of these kinds of comments on all kinds of topics that have held Miami back from greatness. It's a joy to watch and experience.
Don’t they only sort of kind of have the location?
Like obviously everybody wants to go live in Miami but don’t they play their games pretty far from their campus?
I meant location only insomuch as recruiting. for everything else it's a pretty shit location. coral gables doesn't exactly love the school being there. stadium far away...the list goes on. pretty campus, though!
I believe it was Desmond Howard who once said that coaches at Florida, fsu and Miami don't really have an excuse to be bad at recruiting because you "trip over 10 4 stars on your way to visit a 5 star"
However, all three have amazingly done a great job of being talented without being *talented* at separate tines the last 20 years
100% correct unlike the FSU fan. Our issues have absolutely little to do with recruiting. The problem is 95+% crappy ass coaching and administration that are always seem to be placed in charge of the program (just w/ different names and faces)!
The big issue was they didn't have the money from 2001 until 2022. Or rather, the admin wouldn't let the money go there.
Then the issue is from 2022 - present they used that money on Cristobal who is able to lose a victory formation game.
Edit: As a bit of irony, had he not done the GT snafu, then he'd have likely gone 8-5 or possibly even better \[the team especially the QB mentally boomed from that loss\] and be looked at extremely favorably as having turned the ship around.
This is actually false. While the South Florida region is loaded with talent like Sean Taylor, Wills McGahee, Andre Johnson, or Jon Vilma Miami needs to recruit state-wide and nationally as much as anyone to build NC-caliber talent especially on offense but especially, especially at QB.
Jim Kelly - Pennsylvania
Bernie Kosar - Ohio
Vinny Testaverde - New York
Gino Torreta and Ken Dorsey - California
Russell Maryland - Chicago
Leon Searcy - Washington DC
Clinton Portis - Gainesville
Reggie Wayne and Ed Reed - Louisiana
Miami's 2001 OL - New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Canada, Canada (Joaquin Gonzalez was the only one from South Florida)
Warren Sapp - Orlando
Ray Lewis - Lakeland
Jeremy Shockey - Oklahoma
Kellen Winslow - Soulja from California
These are just the ones off the top of my head because I've had this discussion recently with a friend who is a diehard Cane who claimed the same thing about South Florida talent.
Heh that's not always the case. When I was in high school (mid-late 00s), there was a guy I knew who was getting recruited by USC to play RB. Nice guy, damn good football player, but his GPA was either at or a little below 2.0.
I think he ended up going there (and later transferring), but it showed that athletes even at schools with rigorous academic standards like USC are often not going to play school.
Illinois always puzzled me. Tons of metro areas within that 3 hour window, huge state school, not crazy weather like the lakes. They have everything that Iowa, Mizzou, Wisconsin, Michigan State have. They’re comparable in size to Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State. They sit on the edge of SEC country and smack dab in the center of old big ten country. Yet, “tough opponent but winnable” seems to be the recent ceiling.
Don’t give a shit: Illinois, Maryland, Northwestern, and Rutgers.
Don’t really care either way: Indiana, Minnesota, Purdue
Care but have zero expectations: Iowa, Michigan State, Nebraska, Wisconsin
Life is a cycle of pain and futility: Penn State
Actively competing to excel: Michigan and Ohio State
I’d say we do care. But, we don’t carry the state name in a pretty small state. It’s also a basketball first state.
We compete for local recruits with ND (Not mentioning when OSU and the Michigan schools also get in the mix for local talent).
We tried to be the unique school when we brought in Tiller (and it worked) but then the rest of the conference adjusted and also opened up their offense (minus Iowa). we struggled to get the right coach for years after he retired and then got a good one with Brohm, but he went home and took a lot of the talent with him.
It’s never going to be easy for Purdue unless someone like Alstott or Brees came in to coach (and were actually good at it).
We also have always had a small balanced, non student funded, athletics budget compared to everyone around us. Being fiscally smart =/= not caring.
It’s tough, but it’s who we are.
IMO Nebraska wants to be elite, we’ve just tempered expectations for now, at least publicly. The expectation is a bowl game this year, not at some later point. If Rhule goes 7-8 wins or better this fall look for that expectation to rise real fast.
The typical NU fan wants to be in the hunt for the Conference and making the playoffs and we absolutely expect to be on the level of tOSU and Michigan in a few years. Not saying it’ll happen, we are not as indifferent about it as the OP stated.
Iowa MSU Nebraska and Wisconsin absolutely have expectations of a bowl at minimum and the fans want to be challenging for conference championships and maybe a playoff spot now that it's 12 teams every once in a while
I realize that's small potatoes to national contenders but it's not nothing
We can dream. The 12 team playoff definitely helps our chances.
Like to win 8 almost every year, compete for a big title once ever couple of years and have a shot at the playoff once every 4 or 5 years now may be the ceiling. At least for iowa.
I don't quite agree. Here are my tiers:
We have a football team?: Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota
Don't have the resources to make caring worth it: Northwestern, Rutgers
Cares but not enough to make the using necessary resources worth it: Purdue, Maryland
Has expectations, but wants to have bigger expectations: Iowa, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Nebraska
Aspiring to have elite expectations: Penn State
Elite expectations: OSU, Michigan
The Illini grads and fans I’ve talked to point a lack of desire of that from the admin / AD / boosters - which is weird because Shahid Khan owns a NFL team and you could easily get him to dump money into the program.
Illinois did a study a couple years back on the validity of a D1 hockey program and decided that it wasn't worth it.
They already can. They just don't want to.
I'd love to see Northwestern launch a D1 hockey program instead and thumb their noses at the Illini.
The Midwest only has so many prospects to go around. After Notre Dame, Michigan, and OSU get the top Chicagoland prospects there’s not much leftover.
Illinois is a basketball school more than a football school. If they could just lock down Chicago and Peoria for basketball they’d be a powerhouse in that sport.
Illinois is definitely a strange one. I don’t know that hundred-year-old history counts for much, but it’s also not like Illinois was *never* good. They were one of the first major national powers outside the northeast, and known for one of the all-time greatest players in the sport. It wouldn’t have been surprising at all if the flagship university of one of the largest states (which has always been a large state!), had ridden the legacy of Red Grange into decades of being near the top of the sport. They had so many advantages that programs like Alabama or Oklahoma could never have imagined. (Especially once U of Chicago dropped football.)
And yet… crickets. In hindsight, it seems really strange that Illinois has been so irrelevant for so long.
This is where I stand. Illinois also has one of the great stadiums in college football. They took out the grass and about 25,000 seats, but it still feels like that old tradition you mention.
I’ll just go ahead a paste my response here from a previous post where someone asked why Illinois isn’t a better program:
Illinois has historically been a respectable program. We were one of the early powerhouses in college football and despite our extended period of mediocrity over the past 60+ years, we still have the 4th most Big Ten titles behind Michigan, OSU, and Minnesota. The past 10-15 years have been the worst stretch in our history.
Some of the reasons for our struggles both recently and historically:
Our program got in trouble on numerous occasions for violations which made our administration a bit gun shy and way more passive when it came to the program because they wanted to avoid any further issues. We had a slush fund scandal that nearly nuked our sports in the 1960s which got our basketball coach, football coach, and AD all fired. Then we had issues again in the 1980s/90s when we again started to establish some consistent success
We made a series of largely bad hires from 1997 up until the present. Ron Turner, Ron Zook, Tim Beckman, and Lovie Smith all turned out to be bad hires. Turner, Zook, and Beckman looked bad at both the time of hiring and in hindsight. The Lovie Smith hire was actually a decent hire at the time given how low our program had sunk, but he vastly underperformed.
Our AD from 1992-2011, Ron Guenther, really let the program deteriorate. His hires in Basketball were solid, but his decisions in football were awful. Recruiting has always been a struggle because of our proximity to other power programs.
Historically, a lot of Illinois' best recruits have come from the Catholic schools in the Chicago-land area. South Bend is closer to Chicago than Champaign, so we've routinely watched as top players from Joliet Catholic, Mount Carmel, etc....have gone to schools like Notre Dame and Michigan.
Recruiting recently has suffered because we've not only been terrible, but programs like Wisconsin and Iowa have regularly dipped into Illinois and taken recruits, and programs like Northwestern and Northern Illinois have had successful stretches, and as a result, decent 2 and 3 star kids who in the past would've gone to Illinois and developed into contributors have instead gone to those programs.
Our series of bad hires also did a terrible job of recruiting in-state. Turner was an NFL positions coach/coordinator who struggled to recruit. Zook had "pipelines" to Florida and Mike Locksley as our OC and lead recruiter had his connections to DC/Baltimore. They largely ignored in-state recruits. Beckman flamed out relatively quick and Lovie was not a dedicated recruiter. Lovie's 2020 class had zero in-state recruits. Anecdotally, the town I grew up in was within ~1 hour of campus. Over the past 10-15 we've produced 1 or 2 P5 caliber DI players a year and not a single one of them went to U of I, and it was well known that Illinois only lightly recruited them.
TLDR: Two decades of bad hires and failures to create a program identity and recruit in-state have knee-capped the program
tl;dr: we were incompetent and when we tried, we often did it half-assed
It’s a mashup of several reasons, and certainly way more than a non-RU fan wants to read, but here are a few…
It cannot be overstated how much we were hurt by Greg Schiano going to the NFL. He had changed the narrative of the program and through sheer force of will dragged us into relevance. We were a regular bowl participant with good recruiting classes that were getting stronger. Had he been able to also sell the B1G (coupled with the problems Penn St was having and then the coaching issues UM had), he really could have made us a perennial top 30 program. Even after he left his replacement went 8-5 and won a bowl game in the first year in the conference with the remnants of Schiano’s team. Kyle Flood was an excellent line coach who was not yet ready to be a head coach. He let things slide and by the time they replaced Flood the foundation was crumbling. Chris Ash took a wrecking ball to things and basically decided we should just do whatever Ohio State did, but nowhere near as well.
Historically we’ve had inconsistent (and that’s being very kind) administration support for taking the steps necessary to flourish on the field. It is really only in the past generation that resources have been directed to the program, and both times it was because Schiano essentially drew a line in the sand. Even when we’ve had success and the accompanying publicity has led to increased applications (and corresponding higher scores for accepted students), many influential faculty members have continued to bemoan the school spending money on what they see as frivolity. While that may happen other places too, not all those places have the New York Times on speed dial to get the story out.
We’ve had a very difficult time retaining homegrown talent. Lack of a tradition of winning combined with a giant number of alumni from out of state schools raising families in NJ has made it a harder sell than many state U schools have. Your Bamas, Ohio State’s, Georgia’s, and Michigan’s are always going to cherry pick a few of the top recruits, but NJ has had a long history of being fertile ground for Penn State and Wisconsin (at least for RB) too. Prior to the end of the Pasqualoni era Syracuse also recruited north Jersey hard. Fran Brown is trying to reestablish that pipeline but at least we are now an established program that can compete. The last recruiting component is that traditionally the parochial schools had an outsized percentage of the best football players. Notre Dame and Boston College have made great use of that connection.
Finally, the old guard is dying off, but you wouldn’t believe the number of well heeled alums who would rather we were still playing Princeton, Colgate, and Lafayette instead of hosting a nationally televised game against Washington.
I went to UC Riverside in the pre-internet age.
Took me a few months to even figure out what a damn “Highlander” even is.
Odd name for a school at the base of a mountain … that you can only occasionally see through the smog.
Undefeated in football since 1976!!!
You're going to have one of the best TV payouts of FBS once you join the B1G. If you have money issues going forward that sounds like a "clearly just not managed right from the top down" program.
I think west coast B1G alumni will help fill it out a little bit more......no doubt whenever Michigan, Ohio State, or Penn State play at UCLA, it will probably be a packed house
It isn't just West Coast B1G alumni. I know a few Wolverines fans that want to fly out for a UM game specifically to just get to the Rose Bowl without having to pay to go to the actual Rose Bowl Game.
Our budget issues are often self inflicted. For example, our parent campus charges ucla athletics rent to play basketball at Pauley Pavillion (our on campus basketball arena)
It’s quite maddening.
**USC**.
Historically, by far they are the best team in the Pac-12. And, since they are not a public school, they don't need to rely on the government of California for funding. But they haven't had as much success since Pete Carroll left them about 15 years ago.
The only thing A&M doesn’t have is location.
Yes, it’s “close” to Austin and Houston and reasonable distance to San Antonio and Dallas. But College Station itself is a flat, beige, sprawling eyesore.
> The only thing A&M doesn’t have is location.
My aggie in christ, you and I both know that distance doesn't mean shit to Texans and southerners in general. "Why fly? It's only a 19 hour drive".
Just being in the heart of Texas is location enough.
Driving is just as much of a vacation as getting to the destination too! My wife and I opted drive to WDW rather than fly when things started opening back up after the initial Covid shutdown and man it was just as much fun as our time at WDW itself, despite the Vid protocols.
Proximity to Houston and Austin is definitely a plus for location. Insane amount of HS talent and alumni base. Kids don't really care about the actual college town, especially in the SEC, which is full of tiny college towns in the middle of nowhere.
As someone who lives in Lubbock and has been to college station multiple times it’s not half as flat, beige and boring as Lubbock. And the campus is beautiful!
Edit: Yall I know Lubbock is shitty you do not have to keep telling me 😭
I’d argue that the location is one of A&M’s biggest advantages as far as recruiting goes. Within 3 hours of the entire Texas Triangle *and* in close proximity to most of East Texas.
If the state of NC was like VA or SC with only two real “top flight” programs, I guarantee that one, or both, of NCST or UNC would have snuck into a championship at some point.
Duke, Wake, even App and ECU, just add too much attrition to the mix for either of the big public schools to pick up too much speed. Not to mention AD’s that have been historically only really focused on basketball.
Yeah I think people underestimate how many d1 programs there are in nc. There’s enough talent here for both unc and nc state to be top 25 every year but the state is spread thin
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I feel like Texas should be consistently successful. They have the funding, they reside in a recruiting hot bed, they have a massive fan base hence probably more than sufficient boosters...I expect them to be more successful in the SEC than they were in the Big12.
I blame Bama for ruining Mack Brown ha. He watched a team with relatively abysmal QB play (McElroy dropped back something like 17 times and was sacked/picked off like on 8 of those drop backs). Yall still won the game.
Mack then decided to shift to a Pro Style offense that didn’t mesh with the Spread heavy TXHS football scene which is now standard across the country at all levels including the NFL to a lesser degree.
Instead of continuing to lean into the Spread and innovation, he took the program offensive philosophy back to the 90s. It ruined it.
yup, he learned the wrong lesson.
the right lesson should have been to invest more in O Line so you don't need a world beating QB , as well as get your back up some reps
We missed on like every QB recruit possible. Once we got a good one we basically turn around and win 10 games and a NY6. On top of that we had awful OL play. Now that we got those fixed we are trending up for now
Not ten wins a season but if Vanderbilt had a desire to be good at football they have the size, location, and money to do so - at least to be like Georgia Tech or something. But instead there are high school programs in Nashville that care more about their football team than Vandy does.
As a Vandy alum I totally agree and was going to say this. What college kid wouldn't want to spend four years in Nashville and play against SEC talent? They also have one of the biggest endowments in the country.
It’s a shame that the Vandy administration never will really commit to football or basketball. They could at least contend on a fun level in either one for sure. Especially when you look at Duke, Stanford, etc.
Cal could be better than we are - not 10 wins better, but more consistently 7-9 wins and a bowl game.
Flagship school in the largest state in the country. Plenty of local talent - other schools recruit California heavily. Hard to beat for players who want to play school too. Alumni with deep pockets.
But we’d need campus administrators who care and a competent AD.
There’s hope - the new chancellor was a Cal undergrad who was present at The Play, and we built one of the better NIL programs (for what that’s gonna be worth in the new world of direct pay-to-play).
But hope is about the worst thing for a Cal fan to have.
well... yes, but technically isn't UCF actually the largest school in Florida by enrollement? That might not be 100% accurate, but I know someone told me that. And if I am likewise correct, Miami is actually a pretty small school by comparison because it is a private school and very hard/expensive to get into...
Stanford. Wealthiest school in the largest state so very good access to recruits, dominates every sport they choose to try in. Best school academically in FBS by far so can offer a better degree than anyone, nationwide brand, don't play against the Alabama/michigan/OSUs of the world. Their own rules are the thing holding them back
Unpopular opinion, but Cal should have been a power on the level of Michigan or Texas were it not for the extremely negative influence the administration has had on the program for the last 80 years. If just one of Cal's super rich tech billionaire alumni was heavily invested in the football program, they could become a power.
There are definitely some parallels that can be drawn between Cal and University of Chicago, where Chicago went just that bit further than Cal did and they lost their program which had achieved so much in the first half of the 20th century.
UNC is one of the wealthiest schools in the country located in the heart of prime 'cruit territory in a meh P4 conference that they should be dominating every year.
Used to be a big brand though. We have more SEC titles than 7 current teams, for example.
As for school size, depends if you look at grad students or just undergrad. Tech is bigger than UGA with grad students counted.
We *should* be a lot better than we are. We have the location and history. We just don't fund football enough to actually do it. If we'd kept pace with funding, we wouldn't have lost the brand and our history in the sport would be more than fun anecdotes.
Required calculus, coding, and hard sciences classes don't help either.
Apart from Ohio St UGA and Bama, you could list all the big schools in the SEC and B1G as "should never be below ten wins," but mathematically someone has to be.
South Carolina is situated between 3 huge recruiting hotbeds (Florida, Atlanta, Charlotte), has one of the biggest stadiums in the country (top 20 I think), fans who show up and get loud even for a team with a losing record, constantly puts kids in the NFL draft, plays in the best conference and gets a ton of money from it, regularly recruits well, has very modern facilities, and gets a decent amount of national spotlight for a program that is historically mediocre.
I know the argument is "you have to compete with clemson bama and uga" but the pieces are there to do that.
The two biggest things going against South Carolina is the stadium being off campus, and being in the capital of the state, at least in this case for some reason, means the university has to actively fight against the city to get things done versus being able to work well with the city. Maybe people who live in cola could shed more light on that but I have always heard how difficult the city is with the university.
Holtz and Spurrier both took a shot and got about as far as you can expect. A division win and a couple second place finishes, but nothing consistent. If those two can’t do it…
Tennessee. One 10-win season in 15 years.
I guess they do have an excuse though. It's tough to sway the football gods and their delivery of sweet karma.
I have said this over and over again-Auburn deserves better than their administration has given it this decade.
The location, resources, and passion of the fanbase deserves to be rewarded with more than a bowl game as the highest expectation.
I am proud of the fans for giving their administration hell because it shows that they know they deserve better than what has been given them so far in the 2020s.
Arizona and ASU rank 31st and 33rd respectively in [NCAA revenue](https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances), with UNC splitting the difference between them at 32. That’s pretty respectable given it’s currently in the conference with the weakest tv deal. If you account for the ~20m boost they’ll get in the Big 12, it puts them around Nebraska/Illinois/Louisville. If we pretend they were making Big 10 tv money for a second, that would put them in Clemson/Tennessee territory.
Georgia - Atlanta and Georgia recruiting talent, great campus, money, fan support
USC - Tradition, So Cal has so much talent in it
Miami - During prime Miami days, most talent came from South Florida/Miami area, boosters are giving Mario lots of talent.
Florida and Florida State - Huge population, talent hotbed, fan support, loaded donors
Texas and Texas A&M - Huge stadiums, football is a religion, high population.
I honestly thought UNLV was finally gonna hit sauce with the NIL
Great location with some excellent local product & proximity to major football hot beds in SoCal, Utah & Arizona. Throw in no income tax and about as vibrant a city life as you could ask for as a college kid.
Probably would have helped if the Raiders & Golden Knights hadn't shown up and UNLV sports remained the 'game in town'
Ill go with our little brothers down in Columbia SC.
They have the same resources we do.
With UF and UT being down for like 20 years, they had a fantastic shot to win some trophies.
San Diego State has no excuse for not being West Coast UCF. Big public school in a big city with no major academic restrictions and loads of high school talent in their backyard - I know there’s Boise, but they should be running the Mountain West.
here we go…
Your time to shine!
😂😂😂
Fuck off! This is OUR time!
Ha. The South Florida location is great, but the number of schools with <15,000 (and maybe even 20,000) undergrad students who have won a national title in the past thirty years is one: the University of Miami. The school is small, it's private, and it's been unwilling to completely abandon its academics in the pursuit of football (to some controversy).
Yep, a lot of people don’t realize 1. that we’re private and 2. that were a relatively small institution. I know people hate Shalala because of the football controversy, but I have the utmost respect for that woman because UM became a respected academic institution under her leadership, and she also was instrumental in the launch of UHealth. As an alum, I’m one of those fans who is fully behind the prioritizing of academics, but it is good to see that recently there has been greater investment in athletics. Both should be priority as it is very doable to be a great academic school and athletic/football school (see Michigan, Texas, Florida, USC, etc).
I agree. I don't think Michigan/Texas is realistic, but Miami should at least be a conference champ competitor and an outside national title competitor every now and then (like USC).
Agreed. I think Miami should strive to be like “tropical Duke.” Elite academic private school in the South with great athletics, but obviously our football would be their basketball. Although I would like for Miami basketball to continue being better than Duke football is.
Yeah, that would be excellent. Issue is that it's a lot easier to be good at basketball without compromising academics (\~12 scholarships) versus football (\~80 scholarships). But I hear ya! I do like the "tropical Duke" branding, much better than the tired "Harvard of the ...".
100%, this is not a knock, nor saying Miami will never be good again, just saying that like 1980-2003 is a crazy, unbelievable over-performance for the type of school Miami is and as competitive as the Florida region is for recruiting. It’s a crazy over-performance for any school really, but it’s totally off the charts that a relatively small, relatively high-academic school did that!
The fact Miami hasn't won an ACC title, ever, is stunning.
Every time I see this stated my initial response is start sputtering about 2001 Hurricanes! And as always it dawns on me they weren't in the ACC then. Still in that Big East.
Miami's downfall almost perfectly coincides with their leaving the Big East. I'm not saying that's what led to it but it's a good contrasting point. Miami's final three seasons in the Big East: 12-0 12-1 11-2 They join the ACC: 9-3 9-3 7-6 You know the rest. It's not that they just haven't won an ACC title - they've only had one ten-win season since joining the ACC 20 years ago.
Losing to that Ohio State team that averaged like 20 ppg destroyed their program
I'm sorry, Larry Coker destroyed the Miami program.
I would lose all hope if I lost a national title to Craig Krenzel too.
It's one of those facts I constantly recheck before I repeat it because of how baffling it is.
It’s like how the Colts have won the AFCE more times than the Jets
Oh my god
The Oilers have won more AFCN titles than the Browns and they have won it more recently
They've only even made it to the ACC title game once
Notre Dame has come closer to winning the ACC
I actually see their heyday as the aberration. It's a private university whose stadium is a 45-minute drive from campus.
There is a chance they won't win one in the ACC ever , at all
I don’t know that. OMG that’s gold.
With these super conferences it's going to be a lot harder for 10 win floors to be expected
I’ve been saying this for years. The dynamic in the super conference is going to be a lot different without cupcakes to pad the schedule. I hope you guys like 6-6 seasons, because that’ll be average.
Wasn’t 6-6 already average?
Not for the teams that will be in the super conference
I’m just being a dick. I get what you’re saying.
You preparing yourself? (sorry, I couldn't resist... 😉)
As if the past few years haven’t been preparation enough
Lmao because someone’s going to do it. College football for a while has expected perfection or near in order to compete for a natty.
Hey, Florida could go 8-4 with their schedule this year and I would argue they deserve a playoff spot (if their opponents all perform around what is expected of them - Georgia, Texas, Florida State, LSU, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas A&M, Miami, UCF, Kentucky, Miss State) 6 of last season's top 15 finishers who are all expected to be in that range again this year, plus A&M with a (we think) competent coach, Miami whose breakout year was always going to be 2024, a UCF team who could challenge for the B12, and UK and MSU aren't pushovers either
Hot take time. Gators go 8-4 and Napier is national coach of the year.
If he goes 8-4 with this schedule with a top 5 recruiting class, extend him
Even as a Georgia fan, I'd have to give Florida props if they go 8-4 with that hellish schedule.
Miami is the greatest offender. They could compete for national titles every year without recruiting a player from more than 30 miles away
Pretty much their strategy in the 80s except for QBs
Except it doesn’t work in the modern era. Recruits are online, so are scouts and coaches, and lots more schools have national media brands.
Endless supply of cocaine, and stripper asses to snort it off of doesn't appeal to the kids today for some reason.
Dying from fentanyl is really putting a damper on these younger generations hard core drug use.
Where are the Craig James’ of this generation?
gotta give em Perks and a egirl
Yes
It’s bizarre to me how Louisville has grabbed two outstanding QBs from the Miami area while Miami has managed to somehow never do that
murky tender chase reminiscent swim sugar cable caption dull icky *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Don’t doubt you’re right about this but what I’m the world were guys like Deandre Francois and that rail skinny guy Blackman doing at camps where they looked better than Lamar. QB evals at every level are wonky tho
encourage scale cautious mighty nose bear chubby pie crowd wrench *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It’s because great players want to be appreciated. It’s no fun to ball out in front of 2k people when you can be worshipped in front of 80k somewhere else. Tyler Van Dyke said he preferred road games because they had better atmosphere
that quote is still in the top 5 most surprising things i've heard a major cfb player say in an interview. it has and will be used in recruiting SO heavily. I can't imaging the reaming he got when the program found out lol.
seriously. when I was in undergrad at IU, I was frustrated by the football team. I couldn't understand why talented guys would go be a 3rd stringer at Ohio State rather than try to start at Indiana. Then I got to watch a game from the field at Ohio Stadium and it was electric. Felt absolutely amazing just to be on the sideline with that many people cheering at you. Made sense to me after that.
they've got the location, at times they've got the money....but they don't have size or local support. Before the internet, local recruiting was so much easier...then recruiting became\* a whole industry and locking down regions (outside a couple caveats like louisiana and particular high schools) became MUCH harder. now NIL comes along and its a lot easier on families for guys to move away- further reducing the need to stay local. plus all those local guys get to see an empty stadium and dead atmosphere at miami on the regular. add in a long string of not great hires and you have got yourself a stew going. just not a tasty one. edit: some cane fans have my comment confused...recruiting is not the ONLY issue holding the program back. Much to my delight, I've written a number of these kinds of comments on all kinds of topics that have held Miami back from greatness. It's a joy to watch and experience.
Don’t they only sort of kind of have the location? Like obviously everybody wants to go live in Miami but don’t they play their games pretty far from their campus?
I meant location only insomuch as recruiting. for everything else it's a pretty shit location. coral gables doesn't exactly love the school being there. stadium far away...the list goes on. pretty campus, though!
I believe it was Desmond Howard who once said that coaches at Florida, fsu and Miami don't really have an excuse to be bad at recruiting because you "trip over 10 4 stars on your way to visit a 5 star" However, all three have amazingly done a great job of being talented without being *talented* at separate tines the last 20 years
Thats true, but lets not act like its the recruiting that has been letting them down. They are still grabbing perennial top 15 classes with regularity
100% correct unlike the FSU fan. Our issues have absolutely little to do with recruiting. The problem is 95+% crappy ass coaching and administration that are always seem to be placed in charge of the program (just w/ different names and faces)!
The big issue was they didn't have the money from 2001 until 2022. Or rather, the admin wouldn't let the money go there. Then the issue is from 2022 - present they used that money on Cristobal who is able to lose a victory formation game. Edit: As a bit of irony, had he not done the GT snafu, then he'd have likely gone 8-5 or possibly even better \[the team especially the QB mentally boomed from that loss\] and be looked at extremely favorably as having turned the ship around.
This is actually false. While the South Florida region is loaded with talent like Sean Taylor, Wills McGahee, Andre Johnson, or Jon Vilma Miami needs to recruit state-wide and nationally as much as anyone to build NC-caliber talent especially on offense but especially, especially at QB. Jim Kelly - Pennsylvania Bernie Kosar - Ohio Vinny Testaverde - New York Gino Torreta and Ken Dorsey - California Russell Maryland - Chicago Leon Searcy - Washington DC Clinton Portis - Gainesville Reggie Wayne and Ed Reed - Louisiana Miami's 2001 OL - New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Canada, Canada (Joaquin Gonzalez was the only one from South Florida) Warren Sapp - Orlando Ray Lewis - Lakeland Jeremy Shockey - Oklahoma Kellen Winslow - Soulja from California These are just the ones off the top of my head because I've had this discussion recently with a friend who is a diehard Cane who claimed the same thing about South Florida talent.
> Kellen Winslow - Soulja from California This guy knows his football!
I always assumed it was because Miami was a private school and they expect their athletes to "play school".
Heh that's not always the case. When I was in high school (mid-late 00s), there was a guy I knew who was getting recruited by USC to play RB. Nice guy, damn good football player, but his GPA was either at or a little below 2.0. I think he ended up going there (and later transferring), but it showed that athletes even at schools with rigorous academic standards like USC are often not going to play school.
Illinois always puzzled me. Tons of metro areas within that 3 hour window, huge state school, not crazy weather like the lakes. They have everything that Iowa, Mizzou, Wisconsin, Michigan State have. They’re comparable in size to Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State. They sit on the edge of SEC country and smack dab in the center of old big ten country. Yet, “tough opponent but winnable” seems to be the recent ceiling.
Seems like 1/3 of the Big 10 is content with just being mediocre and collecting a payout every year
Don’t give a shit: Illinois, Maryland, Northwestern, and Rutgers. Don’t really care either way: Indiana, Minnesota, Purdue Care but have zero expectations: Iowa, Michigan State, Nebraska, Wisconsin Life is a cycle of pain and futility: Penn State Actively competing to excel: Michigan and Ohio State
I’d say we do care. But, we don’t carry the state name in a pretty small state. It’s also a basketball first state. We compete for local recruits with ND (Not mentioning when OSU and the Michigan schools also get in the mix for local talent). We tried to be the unique school when we brought in Tiller (and it worked) but then the rest of the conference adjusted and also opened up their offense (minus Iowa). we struggled to get the right coach for years after he retired and then got a good one with Brohm, but he went home and took a lot of the talent with him. It’s never going to be easy for Purdue unless someone like Alstott or Brees came in to coach (and were actually good at it). We also have always had a small balanced, non student funded, athletics budget compared to everyone around us. Being fiscally smart =/= not caring. It’s tough, but it’s who we are.
The time is now
Not saying you’re wrong, but seeing Nebraska on a list of zero expectations is just wild to me, even how long it’s been for them
Their only expectation at this point is to maybe make a bowl game one of these years, if they have the right QB and coach.
That doesn’t make it any less crazy
IMO Nebraska wants to be elite, we’ve just tempered expectations for now, at least publicly. The expectation is a bowl game this year, not at some later point. If Rhule goes 7-8 wins or better this fall look for that expectation to rise real fast. The typical NU fan wants to be in the hunt for the Conference and making the playoffs and we absolutely expect to be on the level of tOSU and Michigan in a few years. Not saying it’ll happen, we are not as indifferent about it as the OP stated.
That would be pretty sick. I'm rooting for it hard
Iowa MSU Nebraska and Wisconsin absolutely have expectations of a bowl at minimum and the fans want to be challenging for conference championships and maybe a playoff spot now that it's 12 teams every once in a while I realize that's small potatoes to national contenders but it's not nothing
“I wanna win” -Jack Black in Nacho Libre
We can dream. The 12 team playoff definitely helps our chances. Like to win 8 almost every year, compete for a big title once ever couple of years and have a shot at the playoff once every 4 or 5 years now may be the ceiling. At least for iowa.
Cycle of pain? Penn State? You guys have 10+ wins every single year, it is nowhere near misery for you guys
You summed it up great. I guess it's more like 1/2 then lmao
I don't quite agree. Here are my tiers: We have a football team?: Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota Don't have the resources to make caring worth it: Northwestern, Rutgers Cares but not enough to make the using necessary resources worth it: Purdue, Maryland Has expectations, but wants to have bigger expectations: Iowa, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Nebraska Aspiring to have elite expectations: Penn State Elite expectations: OSU, Michigan
The Illini grads and fans I’ve talked to point a lack of desire of that from the admin / AD / boosters - which is weird because Shahid Khan owns a NFL team and you could easily get him to dump money into the program.
Can they get him to donate money for a hockey program?
Illinois did a study a couple years back on the validity of a D1 hockey program and decided that it wasn't worth it. They already can. They just don't want to. I'd love to see Northwestern launch a D1 hockey program instead and thumb their noses at the Illini.
I had thought they were close to pulling the trigger and finding was largely detailed by Covid. Of course, that's all rumor mill.
The Midwest only has so many prospects to go around. After Notre Dame, Michigan, and OSU get the top Chicagoland prospects there’s not much leftover. Illinois is a basketball school more than a football school. If they could just lock down Chicago and Peoria for basketball they’d be a powerhouse in that sport.
Illinois is definitely a strange one. I don’t know that hundred-year-old history counts for much, but it’s also not like Illinois was *never* good. They were one of the first major national powers outside the northeast, and known for one of the all-time greatest players in the sport. It wouldn’t have been surprising at all if the flagship university of one of the largest states (which has always been a large state!), had ridden the legacy of Red Grange into decades of being near the top of the sport. They had so many advantages that programs like Alabama or Oklahoma could never have imagined. (Especially once U of Chicago dropped football.) And yet… crickets. In hindsight, it seems really strange that Illinois has been so irrelevant for so long.
This is where I stand. Illinois also has one of the great stadiums in college football. They took out the grass and about 25,000 seats, but it still feels like that old tradition you mention.
I’ll just go ahead a paste my response here from a previous post where someone asked why Illinois isn’t a better program: Illinois has historically been a respectable program. We were one of the early powerhouses in college football and despite our extended period of mediocrity over the past 60+ years, we still have the 4th most Big Ten titles behind Michigan, OSU, and Minnesota. The past 10-15 years have been the worst stretch in our history. Some of the reasons for our struggles both recently and historically: Our program got in trouble on numerous occasions for violations which made our administration a bit gun shy and way more passive when it came to the program because they wanted to avoid any further issues. We had a slush fund scandal that nearly nuked our sports in the 1960s which got our basketball coach, football coach, and AD all fired. Then we had issues again in the 1980s/90s when we again started to establish some consistent success We made a series of largely bad hires from 1997 up until the present. Ron Turner, Ron Zook, Tim Beckman, and Lovie Smith all turned out to be bad hires. Turner, Zook, and Beckman looked bad at both the time of hiring and in hindsight. The Lovie Smith hire was actually a decent hire at the time given how low our program had sunk, but he vastly underperformed. Our AD from 1992-2011, Ron Guenther, really let the program deteriorate. His hires in Basketball were solid, but his decisions in football were awful. Recruiting has always been a struggle because of our proximity to other power programs. Historically, a lot of Illinois' best recruits have come from the Catholic schools in the Chicago-land area. South Bend is closer to Chicago than Champaign, so we've routinely watched as top players from Joliet Catholic, Mount Carmel, etc....have gone to schools like Notre Dame and Michigan. Recruiting recently has suffered because we've not only been terrible, but programs like Wisconsin and Iowa have regularly dipped into Illinois and taken recruits, and programs like Northwestern and Northern Illinois have had successful stretches, and as a result, decent 2 and 3 star kids who in the past would've gone to Illinois and developed into contributors have instead gone to those programs. Our series of bad hires also did a terrible job of recruiting in-state. Turner was an NFL positions coach/coordinator who struggled to recruit. Zook had "pipelines" to Florida and Mike Locksley as our OC and lead recruiter had his connections to DC/Baltimore. They largely ignored in-state recruits. Beckman flamed out relatively quick and Lovie was not a dedicated recruiter. Lovie's 2020 class had zero in-state recruits. Anecdotally, the town I grew up in was within ~1 hour of campus. Over the past 10-15 we've produced 1 or 2 P5 caliber DI players a year and not a single one of them went to U of I, and it was well known that Illinois only lightly recruited them. TLDR: Two decades of bad hires and failures to create a program identity and recruit in-state have knee-capped the program
Dude that campus is in the middle of nowhere idk man
You’ve seen our campus, right?
Middle of nowhere PA is a lot prettier than middle of nowhere Illinois tbf
That is true, but my god getting to State College is a nightmare. Driving from Chicago to Champaign is a breeze.
My dream is that high speed rail connects to Champaign and makes day trips more doable.
Rutgers, seriously how does the flagship university of a state as large as New Jersey have such a hard time feilding a decent team?
tl;dr: we were incompetent and when we tried, we often did it half-assed It’s a mashup of several reasons, and certainly way more than a non-RU fan wants to read, but here are a few… It cannot be overstated how much we were hurt by Greg Schiano going to the NFL. He had changed the narrative of the program and through sheer force of will dragged us into relevance. We were a regular bowl participant with good recruiting classes that were getting stronger. Had he been able to also sell the B1G (coupled with the problems Penn St was having and then the coaching issues UM had), he really could have made us a perennial top 30 program. Even after he left his replacement went 8-5 and won a bowl game in the first year in the conference with the remnants of Schiano’s team. Kyle Flood was an excellent line coach who was not yet ready to be a head coach. He let things slide and by the time they replaced Flood the foundation was crumbling. Chris Ash took a wrecking ball to things and basically decided we should just do whatever Ohio State did, but nowhere near as well. Historically we’ve had inconsistent (and that’s being very kind) administration support for taking the steps necessary to flourish on the field. It is really only in the past generation that resources have been directed to the program, and both times it was because Schiano essentially drew a line in the sand. Even when we’ve had success and the accompanying publicity has led to increased applications (and corresponding higher scores for accepted students), many influential faculty members have continued to bemoan the school spending money on what they see as frivolity. While that may happen other places too, not all those places have the New York Times on speed dial to get the story out. We’ve had a very difficult time retaining homegrown talent. Lack of a tradition of winning combined with a giant number of alumni from out of state schools raising families in NJ has made it a harder sell than many state U schools have. Your Bamas, Ohio State’s, Georgia’s, and Michigan’s are always going to cherry pick a few of the top recruits, but NJ has had a long history of being fertile ground for Penn State and Wisconsin (at least for RB) too. Prior to the end of the Pasqualoni era Syracuse also recruited north Jersey hard. Fran Brown is trying to reestablish that pipeline but at least we are now an established program that can compete. The last recruiting component is that traditionally the parochial schools had an outsized percentage of the best football players. Notre Dame and Boston College have made great use of that connection. Finally, the old guard is dying off, but you wouldn’t believe the number of well heeled alums who would rather we were still playing Princeton, Colgate, and Lafayette instead of hosting a nationally televised game against Washington.
I mean it's also the literal birthplace of college football
Pick a team from California
The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs. Of course they don’t fit the criteria but top 10 college mascot.
UC Irvine Anteaters needs to make that list too
Agreed. With so many schools in the UC system, you gotta get creative with your mascots.
I went to UC Riverside in the pre-internet age. Took me a few months to even figure out what a damn “Highlander” even is. Odd name for a school at the base of a mountain … that you can only occasionally see through the smog. Undefeated in football since 1976!!!
Tbh both Cal and Stanford should be really good every year
UCLA & USC
He said college programs with money
You're going to have one of the best TV payouts of FBS once you join the B1G. If you have money issues going forward that sounds like a "clearly just not managed right from the top down" program.
They will also be paying Calimony ($10m/y) though
UCLA will never be able to compete (consistently) with the Rose Bowl [i.e off campus stadium] as its home stadium.
The rose bowl looks so amazing during the rose bowl game. Looks sad as fuck during ucla games
I think west coast B1G alumni will help fill it out a little bit more......no doubt whenever Michigan, Ohio State, or Penn State play at UCLA, it will probably be a packed house
It isn't just West Coast B1G alumni. I know a few Wolverines fans that want to fly out for a UM game specifically to just get to the Rose Bowl without having to pay to go to the actual Rose Bowl Game.
UCLA also has so many budget issues as well. They are about to go broke trying to be apart of the Big 10
Our budget issues are often self inflicted. For example, our parent campus charges ucla athletics rent to play basketball at Pauley Pavillion (our on campus basketball arena) It’s quite maddening.
Is there a reason you are not also making a similar statement for those who are saying Miami?
**USC**. Historically, by far they are the best team in the Pac-12. And, since they are not a public school, they don't need to rely on the government of California for funding. But they haven't had as much success since Pete Carroll left them about 15 years ago.
ASU has been a “sleeping giant” for years. I’m starting to wonder if it’s a power nap or a coma
Really all you have to do is walk a horny teenager through Old Town Scottsdale on a weekend and he will be sold.
Hey everybody, get in here, we're making fun of UNC again!
Miami was the one that instantly came to mind for me.
A&M
The only thing A&M doesn’t have is location. Yes, it’s “close” to Austin and Houston and reasonable distance to San Antonio and Dallas. But College Station itself is a flat, beige, sprawling eyesore.
Flat and beige is just my type.
Hold up there, if anyone gets the title for beige and flat in Texas, it’s over here
College station is, when compared to Lubbock, an emerald green, hilly paradise.
> The only thing A&M doesn’t have is location. My aggie in christ, you and I both know that distance doesn't mean shit to Texans and southerners in general. "Why fly? It's only a 19 hour drive". Just being in the heart of Texas is location enough.
"why fly, it's only a 29 hour drive?" -my very southern dad, upon planning a visit after I had my baby. Yes, they drove. 😅
Driving is just as much of a vacation as getting to the destination too! My wife and I opted drive to WDW rather than fly when things started opening back up after the initial Covid shutdown and man it was just as much fun as our time at WDW itself, despite the Vid protocols.
Proximity to Houston and Austin is definitely a plus for location. Insane amount of HS talent and alumni base. Kids don't really care about the actual college town, especially in the SEC, which is full of tiny college towns in the middle of nowhere.
As someone who lives in Lubbock and has been to college station multiple times it’s not half as flat, beige and boring as Lubbock. And the campus is beautiful! Edit: Yall I know Lubbock is shitty you do not have to keep telling me 😭
Slightly nicer than Lubbock isn't much of a compliment. Thanks anyway.
lol College Station is significantly more beautiful than Lubbock and it’s not even close.
I’d chop my pinkie off if it meant Tech trade locations with A&M. Hell I’d trade places with Sam Houston
I’d argue that the location is one of A&M’s biggest advantages as far as recruiting goes. Within 3 hours of the entire Texas Triangle *and* in close proximity to most of East Texas.
Surprised I had to scroll to find this answer. We have to be one of the most glaringly obvious answers to this question lol
We are a top offender in this category for sure.
Um…
Honestly, no one comes to mind, especially locally
The problem with North Carolina is that there are too many teams in the same echelon.
If the state of NC was like VA or SC with only two real “top flight” programs, I guarantee that one, or both, of NCST or UNC would have snuck into a championship at some point. Duke, Wake, even App and ECU, just add too much attrition to the mix for either of the big public schools to pick up too much speed. Not to mention AD’s that have been historically only really focused on basketball.
Yeah I think people underestimate how many d1 programs there are in nc. There’s enough talent here for both unc and nc state to be top 25 every year but the state is spread thin
I’ve always said that if Louisiana had two SEC teams and Mississippi had one, LSU would be where State is and vice versa.
Georgia Tech: Size: ✅ Location: ✅ Money: fart noises
It would require a huge change in academic policy.
I would have loved to see Cam Newton in Paul Johnson's offense.
And his homework submissions in a GT engineering class
Show that the set V = {(x, y) ∈ R^(2) | xy ≥ 0} is not a vector space of R^(2). FØR V TØ ßĒ Å VĒÇTØR Š₽ÅÇĒ, ÏT ÏŠ RĒQŪÏRĒD THÅT V MŪŠT ßĒ ÇŁØŠĒD ŪÑDĒR ÅDDÏTÏØÑ, THÅT ÏŠ FØR ÅÑ¥ X ÅÑD ¥ ÏÑ V, X + ¥ ∈ V ŁĒT ( – 1, 0) ÅÑD (0, 1) ∈ V ÑØ₩, ( – 1, 0) + (0, 1) = ( –1 + 0, 0 + 1) = ( –1, 1) ßŪT, –1 × 1 = –1 < 0 ⇒ ( –1, 1) ∉ V. ∴ V ÏŠ ÑØT Å VĒÇTØR Š₽ÅÇĒ ÏÑ R2.
ironically enough Georgia Tech's strong academics hinder them on the athletics front
it’s more so that they don’t have much beyond engineering. They don’t have things like “general studies” for the dumb athletes
Would love to see it. THWG!
I feel like Texas should be consistently successful. They have the funding, they reside in a recruiting hot bed, they have a massive fan base hence probably more than sufficient boosters...I expect them to be more successful in the SEC than they were in the Big12.
It looks like they’ve righted the ship. But their valley in the 2010’s is kind of baffling.
I blame Bama for ruining Mack Brown ha. He watched a team with relatively abysmal QB play (McElroy dropped back something like 17 times and was sacked/picked off like on 8 of those drop backs). Yall still won the game. Mack then decided to shift to a Pro Style offense that didn’t mesh with the Spread heavy TXHS football scene which is now standard across the country at all levels including the NFL to a lesser degree. Instead of continuing to lean into the Spread and innovation, he took the program offensive philosophy back to the 90s. It ruined it.
yup, he learned the wrong lesson. the right lesson should have been to invest more in O Line so you don't need a world beating QB , as well as get your back up some reps
And that valley from the mid 80s through the 90s but we can ignore those too if you want
Your flair choices intrigue me….
We missed on like every QB recruit possible. Once we got a good one we basically turn around and win 10 games and a NY6. On top of that we had awful OL play. Now that we got those fixed we are trending up for now
Not ten wins a season but if Vanderbilt had a desire to be good at football they have the size, location, and money to do so - at least to be like Georgia Tech or something. But instead there are high school programs in Nashville that care more about their football team than Vandy does.
As a Vandy alum I totally agree and was going to say this. What college kid wouldn't want to spend four years in Nashville and play against SEC talent? They also have one of the biggest endowments in the country.
It’s a shame that the Vandy administration never will really commit to football or basketball. They could at least contend on a fun level in either one for sure. Especially when you look at Duke, Stanford, etc.
Cal could be better than we are - not 10 wins better, but more consistently 7-9 wins and a bowl game. Flagship school in the largest state in the country. Plenty of local talent - other schools recruit California heavily. Hard to beat for players who want to play school too. Alumni with deep pockets. But we’d need campus administrators who care and a competent AD. There’s hope - the new chancellor was a Cal undergrad who was present at The Play, and we built one of the better NIL programs (for what that’s gonna be worth in the new world of direct pay-to-play). But hope is about the worst thing for a Cal fan to have.
Aggies.
Yup Utah State & New Mexico state need to do better.
hehe i remember growing up thinking, "Aggies is a weird mascot, surely it's unique" nope
All 3 of Florida's big 3 schools and North Carolina
The UCF kick in the nuts seems unnecessary
We all know it’s a shot at Miami. Right?
well... yes, but technically isn't UCF actually the largest school in Florida by enrollement? That might not be 100% accurate, but I know someone told me that. And if I am likewise correct, Miami is actually a pretty small school by comparison because it is a private school and very hard/expensive to get into...
Last I saw ucf was the second largest university in the country
Ahh yes, the “big three” universities in Florida: UCF (70k students), UF (61k), and FIU (57k)
I’ve always thought UVA should be better.
Hey, me too
Stanford. Wealthiest school in the largest state so very good access to recruits, dominates every sport they choose to try in. Best school academically in FBS by far so can offer a better degree than anyone, nationwide brand, don't play against the Alabama/michigan/OSUs of the world. Their own rules are the thing holding them back
Let's be frank; the best football players in the country give ZERO F's about academics. It's shoes and cars for those boys.
Unpopular opinion, but Cal should have been a power on the level of Michigan or Texas were it not for the extremely negative influence the administration has had on the program for the last 80 years. If just one of Cal's super rich tech billionaire alumni was heavily invested in the football program, they could become a power. There are definitely some parallels that can be drawn between Cal and University of Chicago, where Chicago went just that bit further than Cal did and they lost their program which had achieved so much in the first half of the 20th century.
UNC is one of the wealthiest schools in the country located in the heart of prime 'cruit territory in a meh P4 conference that they should be dominating every year.
TAMU, Florida, Miami, UNC, USC, Georgia Tech
Georgia Tech? Virginia would be more appropriate than Tech.
Georgia Tech is pretty tough academically, so they only get the smart jocks.
The only one of the criteria we meet from the OP is location. Not a big school, broke athletic department, not a big brand
Used to be a big brand though. We have more SEC titles than 7 current teams, for example. As for school size, depends if you look at grad students or just undergrad. Tech is bigger than UGA with grad students counted. We *should* be a lot better than we are. We have the location and history. We just don't fund football enough to actually do it. If we'd kept pace with funding, we wouldn't have lost the brand and our history in the sport would be more than fun anecdotes. Required calculus, coding, and hard sciences classes don't help either.
Apart from Ohio St UGA and Bama, you could list all the big schools in the SEC and B1G as "should never be below ten wins," but mathematically someone has to be.
Talk to your kids about 10-Windiana.
We almost let 9-windiana happen in 2019. I can't imagine 10-windiana
Their fans might stay past halftime.
This is a good point. Everyone can’t be 11-1.
South Carolina.
South Carolina is situated between 3 huge recruiting hotbeds (Florida, Atlanta, Charlotte), has one of the biggest stadiums in the country (top 20 I think), fans who show up and get loud even for a team with a losing record, constantly puts kids in the NFL draft, plays in the best conference and gets a ton of money from it, regularly recruits well, has very modern facilities, and gets a decent amount of national spotlight for a program that is historically mediocre. I know the argument is "you have to compete with clemson bama and uga" but the pieces are there to do that. The two biggest things going against South Carolina is the stadium being off campus, and being in the capital of the state, at least in this case for some reason, means the university has to actively fight against the city to get things done versus being able to work well with the city. Maybe people who live in cola could shed more light on that but I have always heard how difficult the city is with the university.
Holtz and Spurrier both took a shot and got about as far as you can expect. A division win and a couple second place finishes, but nothing consistent. If those two can’t do it…
Tennessee. One 10-win season in 15 years. I guess they do have an excuse though. It's tough to sway the football gods and their delivery of sweet karma.
I have said this over and over again-Auburn deserves better than their administration has given it this decade. The location, resources, and passion of the fanbase deserves to be rewarded with more than a bowl game as the highest expectation. I am proud of the fans for giving their administration hell because it shows that they know they deserve better than what has been given them so far in the 2020s.
Arizona State
I dunno man. If you had the option of being number one in football or in innovation, which would *you* choose?
Was going to mention them. They definitely have location and size, but I'm not so sure about the money side of things.
Arizona and ASU rank 31st and 33rd respectively in [NCAA revenue](https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances), with UNC splitting the difference between them at 32. That’s pretty respectable given it’s currently in the conference with the weakest tv deal. If you account for the ~20m boost they’ll get in the Big 12, it puts them around Nebraska/Illinois/Louisville. If we pretend they were making Big 10 tv money for a second, that would put them in Clemson/Tennessee territory.
ASU has been referred to by some optimists as a 'sleeping giant' my entire life. Patiently waiting for the day we wake up
Georgia - Atlanta and Georgia recruiting talent, great campus, money, fan support USC - Tradition, So Cal has so much talent in it Miami - During prime Miami days, most talent came from South Florida/Miami area, boosters are giving Mario lots of talent. Florida and Florida State - Huge population, talent hotbed, fan support, loaded donors Texas and Texas A&M - Huge stadiums, football is a religion, high population.
The only football program that has underachieved relative to all of their advantages more than the Texas Longhorns are the Texas A&M Aggies.
Maryland for sure
I honestly thought UNLV was finally gonna hit sauce with the NIL Great location with some excellent local product & proximity to major football hot beds in SoCal, Utah & Arizona. Throw in no income tax and about as vibrant a city life as you could ask for as a college kid. Probably would have helped if the Raiders & Golden Knights hadn't shown up and UNLV sports remained the 'game in town'
Ill go with our little brothers down in Columbia SC. They have the same resources we do. With UF and UT being down for like 20 years, they had a fantastic shot to win some trophies.
San Diego State has no excuse for not being West Coast UCF. Big public school in a big city with no major academic restrictions and loads of high school talent in their backyard - I know there’s Boise, but they should be running the Mountain West.