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20 Most Influential College Football Games of the 2000s (Andy Staples)
Posted on 8/19/22 at 10:51 am
Posted on 8/19/22 at 10:51 am
20 Most Influential CFB Games of the 2000s (Athletic) ($)
19. 2018 LSU-Texas A&M
14. Alabama-Clemson Title Game after 2018 season
13. Alabama-Clemson Title Game after 2015 Season
12. 2008 Alabama-Clemson
quote:
Then came the hard part. This is a ranking of the most influential games, not necessarily the most exciting games. If this list ranked the latter, we’d just be trying to put the Texas-USC Rose Bowl BCS title game, the Boise State-Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl and the Kick Six in some kind of order. Instead, we opted to factor in how each game affected the sport as a whole. After consulting with our crack team of college football writers and editors here at The Athletic, that aspect of the ranking led to some fascinating places.
19. 2018 LSU-Texas A&M
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LSU coach Ed Orgeron got a Powerade bath with 29 seconds remaining in regulation when the Tigers thought they had intercepted Aggies quarterback Kellen Mond to seal a win.
Unfortunately for LSU, Mond’s knee was ruled down. Texas A&M scored on the final play of regulation to force overtime. And then the game just kept going.
Ninety minutes, seven overtimes and one near-brawl later, the Aggies won 74-72. If it hadn’t been the regular-season finale for the exhausted teams, they each would have been blown out the following week.
This game forced the NCAA to re-examine how college football breaks ties. The results have been underwhelming. Now, teams must attempt two-point conversions after touchdowns in the second overtime. If the game reaches a third overtime, teams run alternating two-point conversion plays instead of offensive possessions. Essentially, this is college football’s version of penalty kicks.
We saw it last year when Illinois beat Penn State in nine overtimes that were at once compelling and wholly unsatisfying.
14. Alabama-Clemson Title Game after 2018 season
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The result was shocking. Thanks to a nasty defensive line and the freshman passing combo of quarterback Trevor Lawrence and receiver Justyn Ross, Clemson crushed Alabama 44-16.
But even though the winner was unexpected, all three games in that season’s CFP had been snoozefests from a competitive standpoint. Alabama had raced to a big lead against Oklahoma and won. Clemson had squeezed the life out of Notre Dame. Then came Clemson’s rout of the Tide in noted college football hotbed Santa Clara, Calif. Meanwhile, the Pac-12 had missed the tournament in three of its five seasons. The Big 12 had missed it twice. So had the Big Ten.
By that point, it had become clear the four-team Playoff was merely a waypoint between the BCS and something bigger. So shortly after that game the leaders of the FBS conferences tasked four men (Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, Mountain West commissioner Craig Thompson, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey) with creating a proposal for a larger CFP. Three years and one pandemic later, they revealed a 12-team plan that could have been put into place as early as the 2024 season.
This might have happened had word not leaked that Oklahoma and Texas were planning to leave the Big 12 for the SEC. Afterward, Sankey’s motives were questioned and the process stalled. Ultimately, the expansion was scuttled by an alliance of the ACC, Big Ten and Pac-12. Earlier this year, when the Big Ten grabbed UCLA and USC from the Pac-12, it became clear the ACC and Pac-12 had been played for fools. They left what might have been the best deal for them on the table, and now they’ll be at the mercy of the Big Ten and SEC as the next version of the CFP is hammered out.
13. Alabama-Clemson Title Game after 2015 Season
quote:
Before Clemson could win a national title by beating Nick Saban’s Alabama, the Tigers had to lose to Alabama in a classic.
Alabama hadn’t reached the final phase of its evolution quite yet, but this game pushed Saban even closer. The Tide defense, dominant all year long, was shredded by a Clemson offense led by sophomore quarterback Deshaun Watson. Knowing he needed to steal a possession, Saban remembered that Clemson’s kickoff return team left one particular spot on the field open. The Tide had practiced a “sky kick” that a Crimson Tide player could theoretically recover, and after an Alabama field goal tied the score at 24 early in the fourth quarter, Saban called for the onside kick.
Tide cornerback Marlon Humphrey grabbed the ball, prompting an all-time you-know-what-eating grin from Saban.
Two plays later, quarterback Jake Coker hit tight end O.J. Howard for a 51-yard touchdown. Alabama held on for a 45-40 win, but Clemson showed on that night in Glendale, Ariz., that the Tigers would be a national power going forward.
The following year in Tampa, Clemson beat Alabama on a last-minute pass from Watson to Hunter Renfrow. The teams would meet in the CFP the following two seasons as well.
12. 2008 Alabama-Clemson
quote:
The Crimson Tide’s 34-10 beatdown of ACC favorite Clemson in Atlanta on the season’s opening weekend announced to the world that Saban’s reclamation project was ahead of schedule. It introduced Julio Jones and Mark Ingram, and while the Blackout Game win at preseason No. 1 Georgia four weeks later probably told us more about what Saban had in store for the rest of college football, this game is more significant because of how it affected the other program involved.
The beating from Alabama wasn’t the last straw for Tigers coach Tommy Bowden, but it set the wheels in motion. He was fired six games into the season. “Never lose to Wake Forest on a Thursday night,” he’d tell me years later. The next decision athletic director Terry Don Phillips made after firing Bowden was the most important: He named receivers coach Dabo Swinney the interim head coach.
Swinney, a former Alabama walk-on receiver, was named Clemson’s permanent coach following a 31-14 win against rival South Carolina. Effectively, Saban helped create his greatest foil. Swinney has won seven ACC titles and two national titles. Both national title wins came against Saban’s Tide.
This post was edited on 8/19/22 at 10:55 am
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Posted on 8/19/22 at 10:51 am to SummerOfGeorge
10. 2013 Alabama-Auburn
4. Florida-Ohio State BCS title game after the 2006 season
1. Alabama-Ohio State Sugar Bowl after 2014 Season
quote:
The Kick Six, one of the most dramatic final plays in college football history, might have ranked higher on this list had Saban followed through on an impulse he had in the aftermath of the 34-28 Iron Bowl loss to the Tigers.
After Auburn’s Chris Davis returned a missed Alabama field goal 109 yards for the winning score with no time on the clock, Saban briefly considered leaving coaching and joining ESPN’s “College GameDay.” In AL.com editor John Talty’s new book “The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban: How Alabama’s Coach Became the Greatest Ever,” former ESPN executive John Wildhack — now the Syracuse athletic director — confirmed that Saban and the network had conversations following the 2013 season about the coach joining the pregame show.
How different might college football be had Saban left Alabama after 2013? Would Alabama have remained dominant? Would Saban have grown tired of television and landed at another program? Would Malzahn still be coaching at Auburn, and would he have one of the SEC’s powerhouse programs?
We’ll never know the answers to those questions. We know the game sent Auburn to the SEC title game, and the Tigers won the league and fell just short of winning their second national title in four seasons when Florida State scored a late touchdown in the final BCS title game.
We also know the voice of the late Rod Bramblett — who died with his wife, Paula, in a car crash in 2019 — will live on forever in the hearts and ears of Auburn fans. Not a day goes by in the Loveliest Village on the Plains when a cell phone doesn’t alert its owner to a call by screaming “AUBURN’S GONNA WIN THE FOOTBALL GAME.”
4. Florida-Ohio State BCS title game after the 2006 season
quote:
Prior to this game, the SEC didn’t feel all that different from the other BCS AQ conferences. The league had won four national titles in the previous 25 seasons. In the previous 10 seasons, teams from the SEC (Florida, Tennessee, LSU), Big Ten (Michigan, Ohio State), Big 12 (Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas), ACC (Florida State), Big East (Miami) and Pac-10 (USC) had won or shared national titles. There had been robust debate in the final weeks of the season about having Michigan — which had just lost to Ohio State in a classic — play the Buckeyes again in the national title game.
Ohio State had been the presumptive national champ for the entire season. Quarterback Troy Smith won the Heisman Trophy, and prior to the game it didn’t feel as if it mattered who played the Buckeyes. They felt destined to win the title — at least to the untrained eye.
After Florida beat Arkansas for the SEC title and got placed in the BCS title game, a young staffer was tasked with collecting video of the Buckeyes’ games that season. He watched them before the on-field staff gathered to begin game planning. When the young staffer saw some of the older coaches, he couldn’t hide his glee. “Boys,” he said, “we’re winning the national title.”
After reviewing Ohio State’s games, Florida’s coaches agreed. The Gators were much more athletic on both lines of scrimmage. Though they’d struggled with some of their SEC opponents, the Buckeyes didn’t pose the same challenges.
Perhaps a little doubt crept in when Ohio State’s Ted Ginn Jr. returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown. But that quickly dissipated as the Gators scored touchdowns on their first three offensive possessions. Smith wound up running for his life most of the night, and the enduring image of Florida’s 41-14 win was a helmetless Earl Everett hunting down Smith and sacking him.
The modern SEC was born that night in Glendale, Ariz., when Florida defensive end Jarvis Moss summed up the game thusly: “Honestly, we’ve played a lot better teams than them. I could name four or five teams in the SEC that could probably compete with them and play the same type of game we did against them.”
In that moment, the SEC became the ESS EEE SEE. Including that game, SEC teams have won 12 of the past 16 national titles.
1. Alabama-Ohio State Sugar Bowl after 2014 Season
quote:
Fourth-seeded Ohio State’s 42-35 win against top-ranked Alabama was the first upset of the College Football Playoff era. It made Ezekiel Elliott a household name and sent the Buckeyes to a national title game where they would dominate Oregon 42-20.
After more than a month spent arguing about whether one-loss Baylor or one-loss TCU should make the first playoff, the Buckeyes snatched the fourth spot behind the play of third-string quarterback Cradle Jones and then showed in the Playoff that they actually were the nation’s best team.
But Ohio State’s win against Alabama is equally important for what it caused Alabama to do. Crimson Tide coach Saban was two years deep in a schematic renaissance that began when Hugh Freeze and Kevin Sumlin brought high-tempo offenses into the SEC in 2012. Alabama had already begun recruiting smaller defensive players to better run down spread-out receivers. In the offseason between the 2013 and 2014 season, Saban had tasked first-year offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin with studying the various up-tempo schemes, and Kiffin had implemented much of what he learned calling the Blake Sims-led offense in 2014.
After that loss, Saban pushed the metamorphosis harder. Tom Herman, the offensive coordinator from that Buckeyes team that had humbled Alabama’s defense in the second half, had just taken the head-coaching job at Houston. He was summoned to Tuscaloosa, where Saban and his staff picked Herman’s brain to learn how to run the plays that had beaten them.
Forty-two days after the loss, Alabama offered a scholarship to Channelview, Texas, quarterback Jalen Hurts for the class of 2016. The days of Alabama game managers would soon be over — though not quite. Alabama rode tailback Derrick Henry and a dominant (but smaller) defense to a national title in 2015, but soon enough the Crimson Tide would reach Final Boss form. They played for the national title in the 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021 seasons, winning in 2017 and 2020. This season, they return the defending Heisman Trophy winner (quarterback Bryce Young) and the most dominant defensive player college football has seen in a decade (Will Anderson). Naturally, they’re ranked No. 1 in the preseason. Who is ranked No. 2? The Buckeyes, of course.
This post was edited on 8/19/22 at 11:50 am
Posted on 8/19/22 at 10:52 am to SummerOfGeorge
I was confused how 2011 LSU/Alabama wasn't on here as it was the catalyst for the playoffs, but he used Oklahoma State/Iowa State (with the same idea).
6. 2011 Oklahoma State-Iowa State
6. 2011 Oklahoma State-Iowa State
quote:
Did you think that snoozefest of an Alabama-LSU national title game was the final straw that forced a playoff? No. The BCS was toast before that game kicked off. The game that helped create that rematch was the one that truly ushered in the playoff.
It happened on a cold Friday night in Ames, Iowa. Oklahoma State players and staffers took the field with heavy hearts after learning that women’s basketball coach Kurt Budke, assistant coach Miranda Serna and Oklahoma State donors Olin and Paula Branstetter had died in a plane crash the previous day. The Cowboys were 10-0 and had a record-setting offense led by quarterback Brandon Weeden and receiver Justin Blackmon. Iowa State was 5-4 and trying to earn bowl eligibility.
Oklahoma State took a 24-7 lead early in the third quarter, but Iowa State stormed back, tying the score on a Jared Barnett-to-Albert Gary touchdown with 5:30 remaining. Oklahoma State had a chance to win with 1:17 remaining when Quinn Sharp attempted a 37-yard field goal. Officials ruled that Sharp missed wide right. Feel free to watch the video, because that call remains the subject of debate.
The teams traded touchdowns in the first overtime. Iowa State’s Ter’Ran Benton intercepted Weeden on the first play of the second overtime. Three Jeff Woody runs later, the Cyclones were celebrating a 37-31 upset.
Sixteen days later, Big 12 champ Oklahoma State was slated for the Fiesta Bowl while SEC West runner-up Alabama was sent to face SEC champ LSU in the BCS title game. The following night, Big 12 leaders resolved to support an expanded postseason. The ACC and SEC were already on board, and the Big East was about to be torn apart. A playoff was coming.
This post was edited on 8/19/22 at 10:53 am
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:01 am to SummerOfGeorge
how is 2007 Florida @ LSU or 2003 Georgia @ LSU not on this list? List is shite
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:02 am to lowhound
quote:
how is 2007 Florida @ LSU or 2003 Georgia @ LSU not on this list? List is shite
Because it isn't best games it's most influential games for one reason or another. Big SEC games in any given year that just determined who won the league are a dime a dozen.
2018 LSU/A&M wasn't anywhere near the magnitude of the 2 you mentioned, but it's result created a new Overtime structure for all of CFB.
This post was edited on 8/19/22 at 11:03 am
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:19 am to SummerOfGeorge
we were talking about the new overtime and how the NCAA didn't want a repeat of LSU/A&M..
the new overtime SUCKS. But, to be fair, I would feel very comfortable saying that had both teams had an SEC the week following 7 OTs they each would have spit the bit.
There has to be a middle gorund vs. where the NCAA landed. I would be okay if they allowed 4 OTs and then truncate.
the new overtime SUCKS. But, to be fair, I would feel very comfortable saying that had both teams had an SEC the week following 7 OTs they each would have spit the bit.
There has to be a middle gorund vs. where the NCAA landed. I would be okay if they allowed 4 OTs and then truncate.
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:24 am to SummerOfGeorge
quote:
Alabama-Ohio State Sugar Bowl after 2014 Season
I don't really agree with their writeup at all. I DO wholeheartedly agree that saban changing from old scholol early 2000s-era ball to what we see now was one of the biggest landscape shifters in CFB. But it wasn't from that OSu game. As the writeup says, it started long before after losses to malzahn, ATM, anbd seeing freeze have success. And they'd already hired kiffin which was the big turning point. They then point to offering hurts a scholarship as some big to-do when they'd clearly offered (and signed..) dual threat QBs alreayd in saban's tenure. THEN, they go on to say "oh yeah, despite everything we just wrote, none of that actually mattered the entire season following the game in question"
This post was edited on 8/19/22 at 11:26 am
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:25 am to SummerOfGeorge
It amazes me that this board has people on it that you would have to explain this to
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:26 am to Tigerpride18
quote:
It amazes me that this board has people on it that you would have to explain this to
you must not be around much then
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:26 am to lowhound
quote:
how is 2007 Florida @ LSU or 2003 Georgia @ LSU not on this list? List is shite
can you explain how either of those games influenced the CFB landscape nationally?
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:29 am to lowhound
quote:
how is 2007 Florida @ LSU
Was that ... noteworthy?
This post was edited on 8/19/22 at 11:30 am
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:42 am to lowhound
quote:
how is 2007 Florida @ LSU or 2003 Georgia @ LSU not on this list? List is shite
Outside of those programs, not many could tell you who won those games.
Posted on 8/19/22 at 11:45 am to SummerOfGeorge
Was surprised at first thinking ‘06 UF-Ohio State title game didn’t make the list, but saw it was #4.
Posted on 8/19/22 at 12:11 pm to SummerOfGeorge
What about 2011 Bama vs LSU (championship game). Was it not the catalyst to move to the playoff?
Posted on 8/19/22 at 12:12 pm to Jebadeb
quote:
What about 2011 Bama vs LSU (championship game). Was it not the catalyst to move to the playoff?
He basically used Okie St/Iowa St as the "game" for that situation
Posted on 8/19/22 at 12:19 pm to SummerOfGeorge
quote:
The days of Alabama game managers would soon be over — though not quite. Alabama rode tailback Derrick Henry and a dominant (but smaller) defense to a national title in 2015, but soon enough the Crimson Tide would reach Final Boss form.
Posted on 8/19/22 at 12:30 pm to viceman
Posted on 8/19/22 at 12:55 pm to SummerOfGeorge
The 2009 SEC Championship game basically changed the trajectory of the Florida program and kickstarted the Bama dominance.
If Florida had won that game, Saban would have gone his first four years without so much as an SEC title. And would Bama have gotten the same benefit of the doubt rematch in 2011 if that were the case?
If Florida had won that game, Saban would have gone his first four years without so much as an SEC title. And would Bama have gotten the same benefit of the doubt rematch in 2011 if that were the case?
Posted on 8/19/22 at 1:00 pm to SummerOfGeorge
Shouldn't #1 be 2011 Pokes @ Iowa St? The rest of the country got so butthurt that we now have the clown committee.
Posted on 8/19/22 at 1:12 pm to SummerOfGeorge
Surprised there isn't something on that list from the 2004 season. Having 3 undefeated teams, #1 and #2 never changing throughout the season, resulted in them adding the Harris Poll to the BCS matrix and removing the AP.
Same could be said about 2003. After 2003, they changed the calculation after the controversy with LSU/OU/USC
Same could be said about 2003. After 2003, they changed the calculation after the controversy with LSU/OU/USC
This post was edited on 8/19/22 at 1:13 pm
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