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We all have our own opinions regarding the best college football teams of all time. Maybe you're a 2001 Miami person. Maybe you prefer 2005 Texas or 1995 Nebraska, or maybe you'd rather go with another Nebraska vintage, the 1971 version. Maybe you're like Beano Cook, forever spreading the gospel of 1947 Notre Dame. Maybe you were hypnotized by the coolness of Joe Burreaux and 2019 LSU. Maybe you think the best of the Nick Saban Alabama teams -- 2011? 2012? 2020? -- deserves the honors. Maybe you're like me, a 1945 Army hipster. The greatest teams don't always make the greatest impact on the sport, however. For more than a century, college football's evolution has been driven by teams both big and small and by coaches both massively and only moderately successful. This list is an attempt 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 teams in college football history. You can make this list in a lot of different ways. Maybe you spurred major innovation. Maybe your team came to define the peak of a certain era. Maybe you made an impact both through greatness and cultural or social impact. Maybe you were just cool as hell. Regardless, here are 30 teams that made a particularly indelible mark on the sport. Jump to: Top 10  30. 1899 SewaneeHead coach: Billy Suter Record: 12-0  I can't tell you what kind of tactical brilliance Billy Suter unfurled, and I can't tell you what made captain and future College Football Hall of Famer Ditty Seibels so special. But I (and a million other college football fans) can tell you this: Over the course of six days and 2,500 miles of train rides in November, Suter's iron men played Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU and Ole Miss. They won those five games by a combined 91-0. A few days after returning home, they crushed Cumberland 71-0. If we are still talking about your feat 125 years later, you probably did something special.
29. 2010 TCUHead coach: Gary Patterson Record: 13-0 
As you'll see, this list is full of teams with dynamic, innovative and ahead-of-their-time offenses. But TCU made the list with a dynamic, innovative and ahead-of-its-time defense. Gary Patterson brought the Horned Frogs back to prominence in the 2000s thanks primarily to his devastating 4-2-5 D. They led the nation in scoring defense in 2000 with Patterson as defensive coordinator, then he succeeded Alabama-bound head coach Dennis Franchione, and after a run of sustained success, TCU went a combined 23-3 in 2008-09, with back-to-back top-10 finishes. In 2010, the Horned Frogs again led the nation in scoring defense, but they also boasted a top-five offense thanks in part to quarterback Andy Dalton. After beating No. 24 Oregon State in the season opener, the Frogs won their next nine games by an average of 43-8 and crushed No. 6 Utah 47-7. As Mountain West champs, they scored a rare Rose Bowl opportunity and won 21-19 in a thriller over No. 4 Wisconsin. If a four-team College Football Playoff had existed, they damn well might have won it. In the 2000s, both Patterson's 4-2-5 and New Mexico head coach Rocky Long's 3-3-5 were spoken of with reverent tones. They were speedy and modern defenses designed to slow the dominant spread offense of the time. By the 2020s, no matter what formation might be listed on the official depth chart, almost every school defended from either a 4-2-5 or 3-3-5 a majority of the time.
28. 1906 ChicagoHead coach: Amos Alonzo Stagg Record: 4-1  College football was becoming an increasingly popular and increasingly violent sport by the early 1900s, and after a run of fatalities in 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt, who loved the game and whose son was on the Harvard team, called for changes to make the sport a bit safer. Representatives from a number of schools came together to institute vital rule changes to stretch the game out a bit and create fewer 22-body pileups. First downs would require 10 yards instead of 5. The neutral zone was created to separate the offense and defense at the start of a play. The "flying wedge" formation was banned. The forward pass was legalized and the organization that would eventually become the NCAA was created to oversee enforcement of these new rules. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the sport's greatest tinkerers found immediate success. While Walter Camp created a lot of the sport's early rules -- and hated basically any and every change -- Amos Alonzo Stagg was its first real innovator. Along with coaches such as Pop Warner and Saint Louis University's Eddie Cochems, he embraced newfound passing concepts. With the Big Ten dramatically cutting down schedule sizes (and a driving rainstorm turning Chicago's big game with Minnesota into an old-school slopfest that Minnesota won 4-2), Stagg had only so many chances to show off his new ideas in 1906. But in four other games, his Maroons beat Purdue, Indiana, Illinois and Nebraska by a combined 173-13. Poor Illinois was the victim of a 63-0 blowout. Chicago would lose only twice over the next three seasons, too.
27. 1998 TulaneHead coach: Tommy Bowden Record: 11-0  In 1993, behind a young head coach named Rich Rodriguez, Glenville State reached the NAIA national title game with a funky and nightmarish offense. The Pioneers operated with extreme tempo because Rodriguez, a former West Virginia defensive back, hated defending the two-minute drill as a player. They operated from the shotgun because, as Rodriguez once put it to me, "We had a shorter quarterback, and I thought I could get five dumpy linemen who could get run over slowly." And they used what became the zone read, one of college football's ubiquitous plays in the 2000s, because one day, after a bobbled exchange with the running back, quarterback Jed Drenning kept the ball and ran for a nice gain after seeing the defensive end squeeze in toward the running back.  It was the ultimate "That's an interesting idea -- let's do that all the time!" offense. It featured a lot of what would become the modern-day spread offense, and it got Rodriguez hired as Tommy Bowden's offensive coordinator at Tulane in 1997. The Green Wave surged from 2-9 to 7-4, and from 85th to eighth in scoring, that fall. And in 1998, they went 11-0, averaging 52.3 points over their final seven games. Quarterback Shaun King both threw for 3,232 yards and 36 touchdowns and rushed for 532 yards and 10 more scores. Three years later, after Bowden had been hired as Clemson's head coach (bringing Rodriguez with him once again), the Tigers' Woody Dantzler became the first QB to both throw for 2,000 yards and rush for 1,000 in a single season. A few years after that, with Rodriguez now head coach at alma mater WVU, the incredible backfield combo of Pat White and Steve Slaton nearly won a national title behind these same concepts, and a huge percentage of elite offenses in the 2000s and early 2010s looked like Tulane's 1998 scheme.
26. 1941 MissouriHead coach: Don Faurot Record: 8-2  The greatest innovations are often born of necessity. Missouri had just lost its greatest player to date, quarterback Pitchin' Paul Christman -- a second-round NFL pick and two time top-five Heisman finisher -- and was getting ready to take on tougher nonconference matchups against teams like Ohio State. While Christman mostly operated out of the single wing, Don Faurot decided to widen the offensive line's splits to create more gaps for a speedy but undersized roster to exploit in what he was calling the "Split-T." And as a former Mizzou basketball player who thrived on two-on-one fast breaks, he decided to give his quarterback options based on the decisions of an unblocked defender. He became potentially the first coach to lean on option football as a result.  With film study still in its nascent stages, these tweaks wreaked sustained havoc. Faurot introduced the new offense in the second half against Ohio State, after the Tigers had fallen behind, and after a promising few series against the Buckeyes, he leaned on it the rest of the year. Mizzou won eight games in a row by a combined 219-25. When World War II took Faurot into the military, he landed a gig as head coach of the Iowa Pre-Flight team in 1943. He nearly led the Seahawks to a national title that year, and more importantly, he taught his exciting offense to Pre-Flight assistants Jim Tatum and Bud Wilkinson. Tatum would go on to lead Maryland to three top-five finishes in a five-year span in the 1950s, and Wilkinson would use the offense to rule college football for most of the 1950s as Oklahoma head coach.
25. 1956 OklahomaHead coach: Bud Wilkinson Record: 10-0  Step 1: A coach at a middleweight (or lower) school crafts a game-changing innovation. Step 2: A few years later, a coach with greater recruiting prowess and a better roster adopts the innovation and destroys the innovator with his own invention. It's a story that has played out many times in college football's history, and this was a pretty clear case of it. Taught all the ins and outs of Faurot's Split-T, Wilkinson used it with increasingly dominant effect. Oklahoma went 31-2 from 1948 to 1950, winning its first national title in 1950. And starting with a 19-14 win over Texas in 1953 -- and perhaps with a bit of help from a player-payment slush fund that would earn NCAA punishment on a couple of occasions -- the Sooners ripped off a record-setting 47-game winning streak. They just kept getting better every year. In 1954, they outscored opponents by 24.2 points per game and beat Faurot's Missouri 34-13. In 1955: plus-29.5 per game with a 20-0 win over Mizzou. The peak came in 1956, when they outscored opponents by 41.5 points per game, beating Kansas State 66-0, Texas 45-0, Notre Dame 40-0, Iowa State 44-0, Nebraska 54-6, Oklahoma State 53-0 and, yes, Missouri 67-14. This was one of the sport's most dominant teams, deployed by both the coach and school that defined the 1950s.
24. 2013 AuburnHead coach: Gus Malzahn Record: 12-2  Gus Malzahn's Tigers are on this list for two reasons: 1. Malzahn was an early adopter of the spread's wide-open potential in the 2000s. He was the offensive coordinator when Auburn won the national title behind Cam Newton's brilliance in 2010, and when he returned to town as head coach in 2013, he led the Tigers to the BCS Championship Game despite a merely decent defense and a converted defensive back, Nick Marshall, at quarterback. Auburn was dynamic and fast and thrilling, and Malzahn had a lot of success in forcing the conservative, defense-first SEC to open itself up to modern offense. 2. This:
23. 1980 Portland StateHead coach: Mouse Davis Record: 8-3  An early devotee of Tiger Ellison's primarily run-oriented run-and-shoot offense, Mouse Davis found loads of success as an Oregon high school coach before landing the Portland State offensive coordinator job in 1974 and the head-coaching job a year later. He turned the run-and-shoot into an almost entirely pass-oriented attack, with new and innovative concepts such as option routes. From play to play, he gave freedom to both his QB and his receivers to find solutions, something nearly unheard of at the time. His first quarterback was June Jones, who would later coach Hawai'i to the Sugar Bowl with his own run-and-shoot. Davis' next QB, Neil Lomax, threw for a combined 11,550 yards and 89 touchdowns over his final three seasons, peaking with 4,094 and 37, respectively, in 1980. He finished his career holding 90 NCAA records. After a 2-2 start in 1980, Lomax and the Vikings found a level of scoring no one had ever seen. They averaged 62 points over their final seven games. Lomax threw seven touchdowns in one quarter of a 105-0 win over Delaware State. The Vikings also scored 93 against Cal Poly Pomona and finished the year with a 75-0 win over Weber State. Davis' offensive ideas led him to offensive coordinator jobs in the CFL, USFL and, with the Detroit Lions from 1988 to 1990, the NFL. It inspired future coaches such as Jones and, perhaps more importantly, a guy in Texas named Hal Mumme. We'll come back to him.
22. 2006 Boise StateHead coach: Chris Petersen Record: 13-0  A quarter century after Portland State made a huge splash on a smaller level, another smaller school from the Pacific Northwest did the same, but on a much, much larger scale. Just a decade after making the jump from FCS, Boise State found itself playing Oklahoma in a major bowl game. The Broncos had gone a combined 36-3 from 2002 to 2004, playing a beautiful brand of innovative and just plain old fun football under Dan Hawkins. In 2006, Hawkins left for Colorado and Chris Petersen took over. With Jared Zabransky throwing for 2,587 yards and Ian Johnson rushing for 1,713, BSU ranked second in the nation in scoring. And it finished the season by winning one of the most incredibly fun games of all time against one of the sport's bluest blue bloods. Boise State taught us that almost any school could build a winner and that you could have a whole hell of a lot of fun winning games. We forget the latter from time to time, and college football has tried its hardest to tamp down the former's potential in the years since.
21. 1958 LSUHead coach: Paul Dietzel Record: 11-0  In 1964, one-platoon football, with its limited substitutions that required players to play offense, defense and special teams, was removed from the college football rulebook. It opened the sport up for specialization in lots of aesthetically appealing ways, and it also allowed some of the sport's most dominant powers to dominate even further with sheer, overwhelming depth. With platoons, depth mattered only so much. Paul Dietzel, however, figured out a way to dominate with depth in the platoon era. Using three full teams of 11 -- the White Team (his starters), the Go Team (primarily offensive specialists) and a set of young, fast and ruthless defenders. He would sub in either the Go Team or the defenders (or both) late in a given quarter depending on the game state. Dietzel mastered the art of the substitution as LSU won 21 of 22 games from 1957 to 1959. The Tigers won the national title in 1958 behind a defense that allowed more than seven points just once all season and shut out Clemson 7-0 in the Sugar Bowl. The next year, they expanded their winning streak to 19 -- including a 7-3 win over the best Ole Miss team of all time thanks to Billy Cannon's brilliance -- before finally falling 14-13 to Tennessee.
20. 1999 Virginia TechHead coach: Frank Beamer Record: 11-1  Sometimes a team reaches cultural transcendence through a particularly transcendent athlete, be it Auburn's Bo Jackson or Oklahoma State's Barry Sanders. Consider 1999 Virginia Tech as this list's representative for that type of team. Blessed with impossible speed and impeccable arm strength, Michael Vick was basically a video game character brought to life. Virginia Tech had already risen to relevance under Frank Beamer, and the Hokies would maintain that after Vick left -- they enjoyed seven top-10 finishes between 1995 and 2009, after all. But their two best finishes came with Vick behind center, and they reached the BCS Championship in 1999. Vick's career was worthy of an oral history. His Hokies had to be on this list. (There's no Florida State team on this list, by the way, which seemed a bit odd. The Seminoles crafted a particularly devastating no-huddle attack for Heisman winner Charlie Ward in the early-1990s, and with stars such as Deion Sanders certainly made a lasting impact on college football culture. Alas, I had only 30 spots to work with, and FSU's role on this list ended up being the team that beats the influential team. The Noles took down both 1999 Virginia Tech and 2013 Auburn to win national titles. They walloped Woody Dantzler, Rich Rodriguez and company a few times, too, for that matter.)
19. 1984 BYUHead coach: LaVell Edwards Record: 13-0  Author S.C. Gwynne put it this way in "The Perfect Pass," a book on the development and rise of Hal Mumme's Air Raid offense: "BYU was the very definition of an odd duck, a Mormon school in the Utah desert with a team populated by ultra-clean 24-year-olds who had done two-year mission trips abroad. They were coached by a man seemingly just this side of crazy named LaVell Edwards, whose quarterbacks threw the football more than anyone else in major college football and routinely gained vast yardage through the air. [...] The football establishment persisted in viewing BYU the way Yale and Army had looked at the Carlisle ... 70 years earlier: as purveyors of cheapjack novelty items that nobody else was interested in and that would soon disappear. It didn't help that BYU played in the Podunk-friendly WAC, with such middle-of-nowhere football schools as Hawai'i, Utah, and Wyoming, that seemed to score a lot of points on one another but did less well against national opponents. It was another reason to ignore the Mormons and keep them off the airwaves. That didn't alter the fact that BYU scared the hell out of everybody." That team won a national title in 1984. The Cougars benefited from a particularly chaotic national landscape, with every top team losing at the worst possible time. But they still did it. It might forever be the most establishment-unfriendly result that this establishment-dominated sport will produce. That gets you on this list.
18. 1973 Tennessee StateHead coach: John Merritt Record: 10-0  Ed "Too Tall" Jones was selected first in the 1974 draft. Linebacker Waymond Bryant went fourth. Receiver John Holland, linebacker Greg Kindle and defensive tackle Carl Wafer went in the second. Big John Merritt might have been the single greatest recruiter in the HBCU universe, and even as SEC schools were finally integrating -- something that would eventually drain the HBCU talent pool significantly -- Merritt painted his masterpiece in the early 1970s, overwhelming opponents and going a combined 40-2 from 1970 to 1973.  With Jones, Bryant & Co. absolutely wrecking shop, the TSU defense hit its stride after surviving tight early tests against Texas Southern and Grambling. In their last six games, the Tigers outscored opponents by an average of 36-6 and finished with their second perfect season in four years. Merritt would continue to win big even in a changing landscape. The Tigers joined Division I in 1977, went a combined 33-8-1 in their first four years and then made the FCS (then 1-AA) playoffs in both 1981 and 1982 before Merritt died from heart disease at age 57 in late 1983.
17. 1971 AlabamaHead coach: Bear Bryant Record: 11-1  Five picks after TSU's Waymond Bryant went fourth to Chicago in 1974, the San Francisco 49ers selected Alabama running back Wilbur Jackson. He would start for five years in the NFL, but his legacy was already set before he turned pro: In 1970, he became the first Black athlete to accept a scholarship from Bear Bryant and Alabama, and in 1971 he first saw the field. Granted, Jackson played only a minor role for the Crimson Tide in 1971, rushing for 211 yards and one touchdown. But he was a symbol of much-needed reinvention in Tuscaloosa. In 1970, Bryant's Tide had gotten blown out by John McKay's integrated USC team, losing 42-21 in Birmingham, to start a second straight six-win season. After nine straight AP top-10 finishes and three national titles from 1959 to 1967, Bryant's program had gone a bit stale. But in 1971, with his roster overhaul taking root, Bryant also adopted Texas' newfangled Wishbone formation. It was the start of a total rebirth. Bama finished 11th or better in the AP poll for each of the next 11 seasons, peaking with back-to-back national titles in 1978 and 1979.
16. 1940 StanfordHead coach: Clark Shaughnessy Record: 10-0  A year before Faurot's Missouri Tigers split the T, Clark Shaugnessy brought the T back. The single wing was the dominant formation of the day, but Shaugnessy found immediate success out west by crafting his own version of the T with motion and eye candy and deception. Pop Warner himself heard about Shaughnessy's plans and said, "If Stanford wins a single game with that crazy formation, you can throw all the football I ever knew into the Pacific Ocean." Stanford didn't just win a single game, it won all their games, scoring 20 or more points -- the equivalent of about 40-plus today -- seven times. And before the team went out to Pasadena to play Nebraska in the Rose Bowl, Shaughnessy paused to help an old friend, Chicago Bears head coach George Halas, tweak his NFL championship game game plan to include a few extra wrinkles. Stanford beat Nebraska 21-13, and Chicago utterly humiliated Washington 73-0. That will cause a ripple in a hurry.
15. 2007 OregonHead coach: Mike Bellotti Record: 9-4  After going 21-3 in the 2000-01 seasons, Mike Bellotti's Ducks had averaged just 7.4 wins per season over the five years that followed. They needed a jolt of energy. An FCS product himself, Bellotti dipped into the FCS ranks to find it, bringing New Hampshire offensive coordinator Chip Kelly and his revolutionary spread offense across the country. Kelly gave not only Oregon, but the entire country, a jolt of energy. Oregon operated with extreme tempo and a playbook that had read options that went far behind "read the unblocked defensive end." The Ducks began the wacky 2007 season 8-1 and reached second in the AP poll, and Kelly's system turned quarterback Dennis Dixon into a Heisman favorite. There might not have been a more symbolic moment for the spread offense revolution than watching Oregon gain 624 yards and score 39 points -- including a Dixon touchdown on a fake Statue of Liberty play -- on Michigan and its old-school defense early that season.  Dixon tore his ACL against Arizona in mid-November, and Oregon collapsed from there. But the impact was clear, and with Kelly first as offensive coordinator, then head coach, the Ducks would enjoy six top-10 finishes between 2008 and 2014, reaching two national title games.
14. 1935 TCUHead coach: Dutch Meyer Record: 12-1 In 1958, Iowa's Randy Duncan led the nation with 1,347 passing yards. (An Iowa quarterback leading the nation in passing! It happened!) TCU's Davey O'Brien had thrown for 1,509 yards in a season 20 years earlier than that, and O'Brien's predecessor Sammy Baugh had topped 1,200 even earlier. That's basically like throwing for 7,000 yards in 2024! The secret to success for both quarterbacking greats? Dutch Meyer and his spread offense. I don't know if we can really call it "influential," per say, because everyone kept running the football nonstop for the next 30-40 years, but search for "Dutch Meyer spread" on YouTube and you'll be shocked at how modern some of the passing concepts look. (He even wrote a book called "Spread Formation Football." You can get a nice, used copy for a mere $1,200 on Amazon!) Meyer's Horned Frogs could do it all in 1935. Slingin' Sammy and company scored at least 27 points six times, and they allowed seven or fewer 10 times. After thumping Texas 28-0 in Austin and clinching the SWC title, they went out west to play Santa Clara, a California powerhouse at the time, and won 10-6. Then they went to New Orleans and outlasted LSU 3-2 in the Sugar Bowl. They played a totally different type of football but still won at an elite level.
13. 1974 OklahomaHead coach: Barry Switzer Record: 11-0 A few years before 1974, with Oklahoma having won just 20 games in three seasons, embattled head coach Chuck Fairbanks sent his bright, young offensive coordinator Barry Switzer to Austin to learn the Wishbone from its inventor, Texas coordinator Emory Bellard. (That Texas head coach Darrell Royal allowed this speaks to an almost foolish level of generosity on his part.) With both the secrets of this revolutionary offense and Oklahoma's limitless speed in tow, OU proceeded to destroy Texas with its own invention. From 1971 to 1975, with Fairbanks passing the head-coaching baton to Switzer, the Sooners went a combined 54-3-1 ... and 5-0 against the Longhorns with three wins by at least 21 points.  OU missed the postseason in 1973 and 1974 because of NCAA sanctions, but the Sooners were so absurdly dominant in 1974 that they won the national title anyway. Joe Washington rushed for 1,321 yards and 13 touchdowns, while five other Sooners each rushed for at least 425 yards. OU ranked first in scoring offense (43.0 points per game), and with Lee Roy and Dewey Selmon and linebacker Rod Shoate wreaking havoc on defense, they ranked sixth in scoring D, too (8.4 PPG). They scored at least 37 points seven times and allowed three or fewer four times. They won one game by fewer than 14 points. This was what Wishbone perfection looked like.
12. 2011 AlabamaHead coach: Nick Saban Record: 12-1 While the spread offense revolution was unfolding, Nick Saban was proving its limits. Other teams could have fun with tempo and sparkle and whatnot; he, meanwhile, was going to vacuum up a record number of national titles by simply recruiting better than anyone on the planet, running his team like a professional organization (with a support staff far larger than everyone else's), dominating physically and keeping up with the trends of the day just enough to never grow stale. He built the warship model that has basically won eight of the past 14 national titles (six for Bama, two for former protege Kirby Smart's Georgia). My SP+ ratings suggest that Saban's best team was the 2020 squad that ran roughshod in the awkward COVID season. But when I think "Nick Saban's Alabama," it's the 2011 team that comes to mind. That Tide team allowed just 8.2 points per game in an exploding offensive environment, giving up more than 14 points just once all year (and that was to Georgia Southern and its nasty option attack). It beat Bobby Petrino's best Arkansas team by 24 and crushed Florida and Tennessee by a combined 75-16. It twice played LSU, with its own generationally brilliant defense, and outscored the Tigers by a combined 27-9. LSU's epic 9-6 in Tuscaloosa nearly derailed Bama's title hopes, but they sneaked into the BCS Championship and blew out the Tigers in the rematch. They also get bonus points for winning a title game that few wanted to watch, therefore hastening the arrival of the College Football Playoff. Again: There are lots of ways to be influential.
11. 1947 Notre DameHead coach: Frank Leahy Record: 9-0  Frank Leahy had his own warship model. His 1947 Fighting Irish roster was overflowing with future pro talent at a level that would even make Saban jealous. The 1946 and 1947 Notre Dame rosters featured 43 players who would go on to play professional football -- and at a time when there weren't nearly as many professional slots available. Defensive tackle Vince Scott would go on to become a Hall of Famer in the Canadian Football League after barely even seeing the field in South Bend. Leahy took advantage of wartime transfer and eligibility rules -- which is to say he had a lot of men who were more experienced than the typical college football player, many of which had already been stars at other schools -- and with the platoon rules of the time, he basically played a different lineup in each quarter to satisfy everyone's desire for playing time. Despite their starters typically playing two quarters at most, the Irish ranked third in scoring offense (32.3 PPG) and fifth in scoring defense (5.8); only one opponent (Northwestern) stayed within 21 points, and in the two biggest games of the year, against top-10 Army and USC teams, Notre Dame won by a combined 65-14. This team was too good for college football and established a model for talent accumulation that no one could hope to imitate.
10. 1912 CarlisleHead coach: Pop Warner Record: 12-1-1 Coach: Pop Warner. Captain: Jim Thorpe. Left tackle: future college and pro football Hall of Famer Joe Guyon. All-time greats. At Sports Illustrated, Sally Jenkins called Carlisle "the team that invented football." It was at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School where Warner, the great football inventor, created the three-point stance, the single wing and, in 1912, the double wing. With Thorpe and a roster of limitless talent at his disposal, Warner let his imagination run wild.  Carlisle began the year by beating four local opponents by a combined 192-7 before hitting the road for 10 straight away games in two months (!!). The team beat Syracuse 33-0 then walloped Pitt 45-8 at Forbes Field. It outlasted Georgetown by 14 points in Washington D.C., and for some reason it then hopped up to Toronto to beat up on a local all-star team 49-7 two days later. An Army team featuring a halfback (and future war hero and president) named Dwight Eisenhower fell 27-6. Only Penn got the best of a Carlisle team that played a brand of football nobody had seen and took on all comers.
9. 1993 FloridaHead coach: Steve Spurrier Record: 11-2  Alabama ruled the SEC for most of the 1970s with otherworldly defense and a dynamic run game. Georgia ruled from 1980 to 1982 with defense and Herschel Walker. Auburn won four of seven conference titles from 1983 to 1989 with defense and runners like Bo Jackson. Johnny Majors' Tennessee won it in 1990 with a 1,200-yard rusher, a top-15 defense and, just for grins, two ties. Alabama won both the SEC and national titles in 1992 by allowing 8.2 points per game and doing only what it had to on offense. Florida won the SEC in 1991 with Shane Matthews throwing for 3,130 yards. The Gators won again in 1993 with Danny Wuerffel and Terry Dean throwing for a combined 3,881 yards. One of the SEC's best ever QBs, Steve Spurrier, had Florida playing the way he wanted to play, not the way the SEC was accustomed to playing. He did it with more than a little sass, too. His 1993 Gators beat No. 5 Tennessee 41-34 thumped Alabama in the SEC championship game, then blew out unbeaten West Virginia in the Sugar Bowl to finish in the AP top five for the first of six times under the ol' ball coach. There was a whole different way of winning in the SEC.
8. 1967 GramblingHead coach: Eddie Robinson Record: 9-1  Eddie Robinson didn't really do sass. He built his Grambling winning machine around toughness, discipline and a playbook that featured only the most tried-and-true methods for asserting toughness and discipline. It worked to the tune of 408 career wins, nine Black college national championships and 17 SWAC titles. He has coach of the year awards named after him in both FBS and FCS. His 1967 Tigers might have been his best and most important team. As Samuel Freedman wrote in "Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights,": "The modern NFL did not draft a black player until 1949, have a black assistant coach until 1957, appoint a black head coach until 1989. Blacks who played quarterback in college, if they were selected at all by pro teams, were routinely switched to other positions. A white quarterback who could run with force or evasiveness, like Bobby Layne or Fran Tarkenton, was valued for such skills; with a black quarterback, those same talents became the rationale for being involuntarily moved to wide receiver or defensive back. Sometimes those reassignments came suspiciously soon after that black quarterback had shown promise at his original position." Robinson was obsessed with getting a quarterback established in the NFL as an actual quarterback. In James "Shack" Harris, he found his man. Harris was offered by Michigan State, one of the great integrated teams of the time, but he felt he was being scouted for a move to split end. So he went to Grambling, threw for 4,705 career yards in college, won or shared four SWAC titles and eventually threw for 8,136 career yards while starting for three different NFL teams. Adding prodigious quarterback talent to a roster that was already gaining notoriety in the NFL -- Grambling would have eight players selected in the top 50 of the draft between 1965 and 1971, peaking with two in the top 10 in 1971 -- was a bit unfair, and the G-Men rolled through most of 1967. They won classics against both Merritt's Tennessee State (26-24) and Jake Gaither's Florida A&M (28-25) in the Orange Blossom Classic, won seven other games by an average of 25 points and slipped up only at Jackson State.
7. 2019 LSUHead coach: Ed Orgeron Record: 15-0 There was the actual innovation factor: With a wide variety of RPO and pass concepts derived both from passing game coordinator Joe Brady's brain and the absurd array of receiving options available -- Ja'Marr Chase, Justin Jefferson, Terrace Marshall Jr., tight end Thaddeus Moss, running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire out of the backfield -- LSU was able to both create and exploit matchup advantages instantly. And while RPOs are designed mostly to exploit zone defenses, LSU could beat man and zone equally well. There was the "finally, someone different!" factor: Clemson and Alabama had split the past four national titles and played each other in the College Football Playoff all four years. There was a hunger for something new, and LSU provided it. Most importantly, there was just the plain old coolness factor: Chase and Jefferson did effortlessly cool things. Edwards-Helaire was an old-school hard worker in a new-school offense. Orgeron and his gravelly voice and redemption arc were incredible. The secondary, with ruthlessly physical stars like safety JaCoby Stevens and breakout freshman corner Derek Stingley Jr., brought the offense's swagger to the defense. And Joe Burrow, with his "Burreaux" jersey on Senior Night and his post-title locker room cigar, exuded a captivating coolness and poise. This team captured imaginations in a way that few recent teams could.
6. 1991 Iowa WesleyanHead coach: Hal Mumme Record: 10-2  After a couple of years of slowly integrating his wild, pass-heavy vision for Air Raid football at Iowa Wesleyan with solid success, it was time for Hal Mumme to unfurl the entire thing in 1991. Full-time shotgun formations. Enormous line splits that had never been seen outside of trick plays. A mach-speed, "two-minute drill all the time" tempo that produced more than 80 plays per game. No playbook. A QB often calling his own plays at the line and a receiving corps reading the defense and running routes accordingly. It was devastating. Quarterback Dustin Dewald produced numbers -- 400 completions, 4,102 yards, 45 touchdowns -- that put even BYU's Ty Detmer and Houston's David Klingler to shame. IWC went 10-1 in the regular season before falling in snow and a nasty wind chill to Minnesota State-Moorhead in the playoffs. This was the first of many breakthroughs for Mumme and his offensive coordinator, a young lawyer named Mike Leach, and their ambitions would quickly take them beyond IWC (which closed in 2023) to Division II power Valdosta State in 1992 and eventually Kentucky in 1997. Leach would find loads of success as a head coach in his own right, as would an IWC receiver by the name of Dana Holgorsen. Mumme would only enjoy so much success as a head coach, but it was his vision that began one of college football's most noticeable transformations.
5. 2008 Texas TechHead coach: Mike Leach Record: 11-2  Mumme indeed carried his Air Raid vision from the Texas high school ranks to Iowa Wesleyan and everywhere else in his career. And his right-hand man for a lot of that journey brought it to fruition in a single play. When Leach arrived in Lubbock in 2000, Texas Tech was in a bit of a rut: The Red Raiders had won between five and seven games in eight of the nine previous years. His gunslinging offense fit West Texas like a glove, and after a pair of seven-win seasons, he would win at least eight in each of his final eight years on the job. (Tech has won eight games only four times in the 14 years since he left.) The peak came in 2008. With a four-star quarterback (Graham Harrell) throwing to the best receiver in the country (Michael Crabtree), Tech began the season 10-0 and moved to No. 2 in the AP poll after a classic upset of top-ranked Texas. The Red Raiders lost two of their final three to slip to 12th, but this season provided a new level of proof of concept for the Air Raid offense. So many of its concepts have become part of the generic college football offense in the years that have followed, and that's an incredible thing to say considering its counter-culture thinking and small-town start.
4. 1986 MiamiHead coach: Jimmy Johnson Record: 11-1  Few teams get to be schematic and cultural influencers. More than any single coach, Jimmy Johnson -- who happened to be Oklahoma's defensive line coach when Switzer was installing the Wishbone offense in Norman in the early 1970s -- seemed responsible for the demise of the Sooners' relationship with the Wishbone. Oklahoma went 33-3 from 1985 to 1987, beating everyone not named Miami but losing to the Hurricanes three times, scoring just 14, 16 and 14 points in the process. Miami contained this explosive offense with absurd team speed and pursuit (plus some ridiculously disruptive defensive linemen), and granted, that's a recipe that almost no one else could execute. But even Switzer has said he would have probably had to move to the I-formation or something else had he remained at Oklahoma after the 1980s. There's another angle here, though. Miami both became and embraced the role of college football's villain in the mid-1980s. This was a brash and confident team led by a brash and confident coach, and they came about just in time for the explosion in college football coverage that came with the emergence of cable television (and, yes, ESPN). From 1986 to 1992, Miami lost just six games in seven seasons, and while the Canes won three national titles in that span, it was this team, which stumbled at the final hurdle, that might have made the biggest cultural impact. They moved to No. 1 following their second of the three straight wins over OU, they rolled past Florida State and others in the home stretch, they wore fatigues, and they were the favorites in one of the most hyped games of all-time, the 1987 Fiesta Bowl against Penn State. That they lost that game might have helped them long term, adding to the collective drive that reaped three titles in the next five years. But between the swagger, the talent and the temporary downfall, this was one of the most indelible teams the sport has produced.
3. 1925 AlabamaHead coach: Wallace Wade Record: 10-0 It is our natural impulse to witness a huge result in a huge game and immediately think, "This changes everything!" That's almost never actually true -- this sport and its balance of power tend to revert to stasis pretty quickly. Alabama's 1925 football team, however? It changed everything. Led by a number of future college football Hall of Famers, from head coach Wallace Wade (after whom Duke's stadium is named) to players like Johnny Mack Brown and Pooley Hubert, the Crimson Tide rolled to an unbeaten record, walloping nine regular-season opponents by a combined 277-7. For any number of reasons both cultural and football-related, the Rose Bowl usually looked past Southern schools when inviting a team to play against the west's best. But there were no obvious northeastern or midwestern candidates in 1925, so it begrudgingly invited Bama. And the Tide beat Washington 20-19 in a game that has since been titled "the game that changed the South." On the train ride back, they were greeted by cheering Tulane students in New Orleans and local bands at other stops. Thirteen Southern teams would get invited to the big stage in Pasadena over the next 20 years. There were plenty of Southern programs that had already fallen in love with college football, but after the 1926 Rose Bowl the sport took on a religious fervor at a number of huge Southern schools, from LSU and Tennessee to Alabama and Georgia and to plenty of places in between. The more football-obsessed members of the Southern Conference split to form the SEC in the early 1930s. It has become the biggest on-field power in the sport, and it all started in Pasadena about 98.5 years ago.
2. 1924 Notre DameHead coach: Knute Rockne Record: 10-0 The year before Alabama's big breakthrough, a team from a Catholic school in northern Indiana enjoyed something similar. Notre Dame had already been good at football before Knute Rockne arrived, but the former Amos Alonzo Stagg protege had taken the Fighting Irish to a different level. Against admittedly weak schedules, Notre Dame went a combined 45-3-1 from 1919 to 1923. But Rockne's promotional abilities, combined with Grantland Rice's typewriter, made everything take off in 1924. "Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again," Rice wrote following an Irish win over Army in 1924. "In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are [Harry] Stuhldreher, [Don] Miller, [Jim] Crowley and [Elmer] Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below." Rice's dramatic panache certainly helped make a mere 13-7 win sound like an epic blowout, but the narrative machine was off and running. Notre Dame was America's team -- especially the team of America's Catholics -- and thanks to Layden in particular, they took down Pop Warner's Stanford 27-10 in the Rose Bowl. The Fighting Irish wouldn't accept another bowl invitation for 45 years, but they didn't have to. They were Notre Dame now.
1. 1968 TexasHead coach: Darrell Royal Record: 9-1-1  So many college football innovations have started far outside the mainstream, in places like Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or Mount Pleasant, Iowa. But one of the single most influential innovations of all time took place at one of college football's power schools. In essence, it doesn't sound like much of a tweak. Tasked with modernizing a stale offense, new coordinator Emory Bellard -- who, strangely enough, had been hired as the linebackers coach a year earlier -- basically went back in time to install the Split-T option offense as a way of getting more from a loaded backfield. Only, he had the fullback line up closer to the quarterback as a faster way of either hitting the hole on the dive portion of the option or fulfilling his blocking assignments. But somehow that little tweak, which made the formation look like a wishbone (or, as writer Mickey Herskowitz called it at the time, "a pulley-bone on a chicken"), led to a revolution.  Having won just 20 games in the three previous seasons, Texas began 1968 with a tie against Houston and a loss to Texas Tech. But backup quarterback James Street looked good in a comeback attempt against Tech; he was named the starter the next week, and Texas wouldn't lose again until 1971. They rolled through the rest of their 1968 slate, then went a perfect 11-0 in 1969, winning an all-time classic against Arkansas, then confirming a national title with a Cotton Bowl win over Notre Dame. Because of Texas' blueblood profile, the Wishbone didn't have to work its way up from the lower levels of the sport. The other powers immediately understood that it could work for them. Alabama's Bear Bryant quickly adopted it following the Longhorns' 1969 success. So, too, did rival Oklahoma. And while the Horns would certainly reap the benefits of this offensive explosion -- they enjoyed four top-five finishes from 1968 to 1972, then another top-10 finish before Royal's retirement in 1976 -- Bama and OU would dominate the decade, with five national titles and 16 combined top-five finishes from 1971 to 1980. Never has an innovation caught on so quickly, and for the success it brought both Texas and others, the team that perfected the 'Bone should be considered the most influential team the sport has seen.
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