Connelly ranks the very best college football groups of every decade

Bill Connelly, ESPN Personnel WriterJun 15, 2023, 08:00 AM ET

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Bill Connelly is a personnel writer for ESPN.com.The style of the 2010s and 2020s in college football has actually been power concentration. Things have actually grown pretty predictable, with Alabama winning 6 nationwide titles in 12 years under Nick Saban; Ohio State, Clemson and Oklahoma duping long terms of conference supremacy; and now Georgia winning back-to-back national titles.It’s early in the College Football Playoff’s life expectancy, but it’s possible that we’re seeing a concentration of power at or near the top of the sport, something that growth to a 12-team CFP may or may not attend to. Or it’s possible we’re simply seeing another, comparable act in college football’s history– it is, after all, a sport that has forever been lorded over by a ruling class of dominant schools.Is the ruling class more dominant than typical? What shifts have we seen with time

? For concerns like these, SP+can can be found in handy.Editor’s Picks 2 Associated While the version of SP+provided weekly throughout a given season is based upon a large number of predictive elements,

I have actually come up with a variation based solely on points scored and permitted that, at the lower levels of the sport, can serve to make strong projections. I applied those same methods to the games returning to 1883, when football’s scoring rules ended up being mainly what they are now. (You can find all ratings here. )Starting with the 1920s, I took a look at which groups most completely controlled the sport from decade to years, using SP+percentile averages for each team and each decade. How much do these lists alter over the years? What can these averages tell us about how things have evolved over the past 100 years and how much things are progressing now?Let’s dive in.