Ranking college football’s most influential groups

Costs Connelly, ESPN Personnel WriterJun 12, 2024, 08:00 AM ET Close Bill Connelly is a staff writer for ESPN.com.We all have our own viewpoints regarding the best college football teams of perpetuity. Perhaps you’re a 2001 Miami individual. Maybe you prefer 2005 Texas or 1995 Nebraska, or perhaps you ‘d rather opt for another Nebraska vintage, the 1971 version. Perhaps you’re like Beano Cook, forever spreading the gospel of 1947 Notre Dame. Possibly you were hypnotized by the coolness of Joe Burreaux and 2019 LSU. Possibly you think the very best of the Nick Saban Alabama teams– 2011? 2012? 2020?– deserves the honors. Possibly you’re like me, a 1945 Army hipster.The biggest groups do not constantly make the greatest effect on the sport, however.

For more than a century, college football’s development has been driven by teams both huge and little and by coaches both massively and just moderately successful.This list is an effort to celebrate the influencers– both the Nick Sabans and the Mouse Davises, both the LSUs and

the Gramblings. It is a list of the 30 most influential groups in college football history.(We’ll speak about the first 15 today and the next 15 tomorrow.)You can make this list in a great deal of various methods. Perhaps you stimulated major development. Maybe your group concerned specify the peak of a specific period. Possibly you made an effect both through achievement and cultural or social effect. Maybe you were simply cool as hell. Regardless, here are 30 groups that made an especially enduring mark on the sport. Head coach: Billy Suter Record: 12-0

I can’t inform you what kind of tactical radiance Billy Suter unfurled, and I can’t tell you what made captain and future College Football Hall of Famer Ditty Seibels so unique. But I (and a million other college football fans) can tell you this: Throughout 6 days and 2,500 miles of train rides in November, Suter’s iron guys played Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU and Ole Miss. They won those 5 games by a combined 91-0. A couple of days after returning home, they squashed Cumberland 71-0.

If we are still speaking about your accomplishment 125 years later on, you probably did something special.29.

2010 TCU

Head coach: Gary Patterson

Record: 13-0