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re: My Top ALL-TIME 5 SEC Teams
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:36 am to bamameister
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:36 am to bamameister
quote:
Put it out there, Cajun. I'm not running from a conversation about all time. If you think your boat will float past Tennessee, make a case.
To me, if you're going to count national titles as a point of comparison, you should only use the major selectors of the eras (AP, UPI, Coaches, BCS, and CFP). These retroactive national title claims that became rampant in the 90s and 00s get really muddy with some teams claiming them and others not claiming them.
LSU, for instance, only claims titles from major selectors. In fact, they have a title the NCAA recognizes that the school doesn't in 1908
For Tennessee, the only national titles they have that are from major selectors are from 1951 (AP, Coaches) and from 1998 (AP, BCS)
Their other claims include:
1938 - Berryman, Billingsley, Boand, Dunkel, College Football Researchers Association, Houlgate, Litkenhous, Poling, Sagarin
1940 - Dunkel
1950 - Billingsley, DeVold, Dunkel, Football Research, National Championship Foundation, Sagarin
1967 - Litkenhous
These are all either retroactive polls that came out years later and/or computer algorithm polls
LSU's national titles they claim are
1958 - AP, Coaches
2003 - BCS
2007 - BCS, AP
2019 - CFP, AP
Their 1908 title predated the major selectors' existence and they were named national champions by the National Championship Foundation after an undefeated season
Other years where they have a claim similar to those above for Tennessee were the following:
1936 - Sagarin
1962 - Berryman
2011 - Anderson & Hester, Congrove Computer Rankings
Here is a link to a wikipedia page that lists all of this for the multitude of different polls that have existed. If you use that, LSU has 8, Georgia 8, and Tennessee 7
LINK
1
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:38 am to WG_Dawg
quote:
Weeks ranked at #1, weeks ranked, etc...those are TEAM accomplishments and very much factor into this. Oh which btw, UGA is better at UT in both of those too.
I don't think so. And ALABAMA has the all-time record for weeks at number one and being AP number one team for 15 years in a row, sometime during the season.
BAMA has had some incredible football runs under Coach Bryant and others during the 60s and 70s, but wouldn't have made a dent in the weeks at number one until Coach Saban. During the BCS, the writers/voters started giving Southern teams their due, unlike anytime in college football history, period.
Suddenly, merit matters every week, cause we have a playoff to take the mythological out of it, and BAMA is constantly getting ranked, and my goodness, could it be, could it really happen, in 2009, ALABAMA has their first Heisman winner, EVER.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:38 am to armtackledawg
quote:
UGA has 15 conference titles, not 13.
You expect a bama grad to be able to count correctly?
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:42 am to bamameister
quote:
All-time stats will do that. Tennessee's history is as legit as Michigan's or Ohio State's. Certainly, Georgia as well. It tells a story of incredible success and fear that ranked supreme in the SEC for decades. From General Neyland back, they were a problem and held up their end of Southern football in a world that traditionally honored the Northern schools. Forever in the South, it was BAMA and Tennessee, and it's not biased to simply state history or tradition as it unfolded for decades.
while all this may be true, I think we're living in the past. It has been almost 30 years since Tennessee's last conference title or national title. In that same timeframe, LSU has added 5 SEC titles and 3 national titles and UGA 5 SEC titles and 2 national titles. 27 years represents approximately 29% of the history of this conference. That's not a small portion, and for those 27 years, Tennessee has won 2 division titles, 10 losing seasons, and have been largely a non-factor almost every year. Any gap they had built over the prior history has been, at minimum, closed and arguably passed by both UGA and LSU
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:45 am to lsufball19
quote:
To me, if you're going to count national titles as a point of comparison, you should only use the major selectors of the eras (AP, UPI, Coaches, BCS, and CFP). These retroactive national title claims that became rampant in the 90s and 00s get really muddy with some teams claiming them and others not claiming them.
LSU, for instance, only claims titles from major selectors. In fact, they have a title that the NCAA recognizes that the school doesn't in 1908
This is where you and my list respectfully disagree. Football was played on a field, and the games won or lost matter forever. Teams earned their stripes in their day, and they have the hardware to prove it. It was 100 years of the beauty pagent era, but it was what we used to settle our differences.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:45 am to bamameister
quote:
And contrary to popular opinion around these parts, Millennials didn't invent college football. So the way back machine is very much a part of SEC tradition with this BAMA fan's all-time SEC list.
Yet you picked Ole Miss over Auburn.
Auburn has 35 wins to Ole Miss's 12 in the series. That's historical domination.
Auburn dominates most of the stats worthy of tracking on winsipedia except for National Championships. Ole Miss getting speculative championships in 1959,1960, and 1962 doesnt move the needle for anyone.
If you want to paint a historical picture then do it.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:47 am to bamameister
quote:
This is where you and my list respectfully disagree. Football was played on a field, and the games won or lost matter forever. Teams earned their stripes in their day, and they have the hardware to prove it. It was 100 years of the beauty pagent era, but it was what we used to settle our differences.
Voters determined what games "mattered" moreso than the team's in the field. Your position is illogical and needs to be cast away.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:48 am to bamameister
quote:
Teams earned their stripes in their day, and they have the hardware to prove it.
Therein lies the problem with your perspective. Those teams didn't win hardware on the field. They were retroactively awarded hardware decades later through some random publishers putting out computer polls that named champions in past seasons.
But even if you do want to view those as championships, by using your methodology, LSU and UGA both have more national titles than Tennessee. If you want to do an apples to apples comparison, you have to use the same criteria for everyone. I've laid out all the data for you. It's up to you to ignore what's staring at you or just die on a hill of willful ignorance
Tennessee, fwiw, didn't even start claiming anything but 1951 and 1998 until the early 00s
This post was edited on 5/27/25 at 11:54 am
Posted on 5/27/25 at 11:57 am to jangalang
quote:
Yet you picked Ole Miss over Auburn.
It was close, believe me. But Ole Miss had a period of Southern SEC dominance that I don't think the barners can duplicate. You've had success on the national stage here and there to your credit, but Ole Miss was all that for a period of SEC history that feels more significant to me. And history is going to matter all the way back.
Putting the barners at number 6 wouldn't have kept me up at night, but again, Ole Miss was also a shout out to what Coach Bryant felt about the Rebels and Johnny Vaught.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:06 pm to bamameister
quote:
I don't think so. And ALABAMA has the all-time record for weeks at number one and being AP number one team for 15 years in a row, sometime during the season.
and gee, it's almost like they are the #1 program in history too. Crazy how those things may be connected eh?
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:08 pm to bamameister
I think UGA has unfortunately passed Tennessee on the all-time list. Tennessee was in the wilderness pretty much from 2002 to 2021, so I think Mark Richt closed the gap, and Kirby brought the UGA program past Tennessee. However, Tennessee is still slightly ahead of LSU. While LSU has been undeniably the better program from 2000 till now, the 70 years before 2000, Tennessee was better than the Tigers, and it wasn't really even close (90s LSU was worse than anything Tennessee has done). If LSU can win another national title then I think they will have passed Tennessee too. Overall, I think in the history of SEC football the blue bloods are Bama, UGA, Tennessee, and LSU because they have been competitive since 1932. I don't really think anything can happen to move these four out of this "blue blood category." These are the foundational teams with, in my opinion, Auburn rounding out the top 5.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:13 pm to bamameister
quote:
Teams earned their stripes in their day, and they have the hardware to prove it. It was 100 years of the beauty pagent era, but it was what we used to settle our differences.
This falls apart if some schools are more conservative in how many championships they claim compared to others.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:17 pm to WG_Dawg
quote:
and gee, it's almost like they are the #1 program in history too. Crazy how those things may be connected eh?
Doesn't have to be. We could be sitting on 12 NCs (before Nick Saban) and hardly spent anytime at number 1, which is my only point. Northern/Eastern voters need to be eliminated from as much of the all time equation as possible without ignoring what made teams dominate in each era of college football. Heismans and weekly rankings just don't do it for me. End of year ranking tell a much better story. It's really all we have.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:21 pm to bamameister
Tennessee does not have 6 National Championships…can we please stop with that…they have 2 legit titles and the rest are bogus.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:21 pm to vidtiger23
Counting NCs is actually pretty simple. The only ones that really "count" after 1936 are the AP/UPI titles leading up to the BCS/playoff era.
Pre '36 it can be subjective...but not after. It's been said a million times, but I wish Bama wouldn't claim '41...that single year let's people play the "if we counted" card. The rest of Bama's NCs are rock solid...including the pre-'36 ones.
Pre '36 it can be subjective...but not after. It's been said a million times, but I wish Bama wouldn't claim '41...that single year let's people play the "if we counted" card. The rest of Bama's NCs are rock solid...including the pre-'36 ones.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:23 pm to bamameister
For forever, the northern voters kept SEC teams from being successful nationally. It's part of the reason why Hank Lauricella and Johnny Majors didn't win Heisman's back in the day, instead losing to players from Princeton and Paul Hornung, who quarterbacked a team to 2-9 lol. Tennessee went undefeated in 1938, but the AP voters felt Notre Dame and TCU were better, even though Tennessee had higher-ranked wins than those schools. It wasn't really till Bear Bryant that the nation started giving southern football its flowers.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:25 pm to VFL67
quote:
(90s LSU was worse than anything Tennessee has done)
From 2008 through 2017 (a ten year period), Tennessee went 67-63 (.515)
and 26-54 (.325) in league play.
From 1990-1999, LSU went 54-58-1 (.482) overall and 31-46-1 (.403) in league play.
LSU had a better SEC winning %. The big difference in overall winning % is due to there being more games per season than there were in the 90s. From 1990-1999 teams played 3 OOC games and 8 SEC games as opposed to the 4 OOC games Tennessee played from 2008-2017. You throw in 10 more games against direction state university, LSU has a winning overall record in the 90s too
And, to boot, Tennessee can add three more seasons to their WOAT period of suck because the above starts with Fulmer's last season and ends with Butch Jones' last season. Pruitt's three years of awful aren't even included.
This post was edited on 5/27/25 at 12:29 pm
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:28 pm to GumpHater24
quote:
Tennessee does not have 6 National Championships…can we please stop with that…they have 2 legit titles and the rest are bogus.
Bogus is as subjective as a mythological championship. Tennessee's claims are no more bogus than some of those Notre Dame teams, which had extreme voter bias every week and for every award. No one is going back to correct that nonsense either.
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:30 pm to bamameister
quote:
Bogus is as subjective as a mythological championship. Tennessee's claims are no more bogus than some of those Notre Dame teams, which had extreme voter bias every week and for every award. No one is going back to correct that nonsense either.
But we're all just talking on a message board. We are able to talk through what is and isn't bogus. And if we want to include all those claims, for the purposes of the discussion we are having on a message board, LSU and UGA should be able to count claims from those same "bogus" polls. Just because there schools choose not to doesn't mean we can't for the purposes of comparing the three. So, by doing that, UGA and LSU sit at 8 national titles and Tennessee at 7
This post was edited on 5/27/25 at 12:32 pm
Posted on 5/27/25 at 12:32 pm to lsufball19
Yeah Tennessee was terrible in that 10 year stretch and LSU was terrible in there's. I mean from 1989 to 1999 LSU had three different coaches and 8 losing seasons so that's pretty terrible too. The difference is Tennessee from that timeline you chose was playing much higher competition SEC programs in Bama, UGA, and Florida than the years LSU was bad lol
The only championship the Vols claim that could be iffy is 1967 but we still finished the year ranked number 2. The rest are all very valid claims. Tennessee could also claim titles that were given like 1956 and 1985 but we claim ones that had NCAA recognized titles.
The only championship the Vols claim that could be iffy is 1967 but we still finished the year ranked number 2. The rest are all very valid claims. Tennessee could also claim titles that were given like 1956 and 1985 but we claim ones that had NCAA recognized titles.
This post was edited on 5/27/25 at 12:35 pm
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