Are college football dynasties dead?
Dynasties were always more fragile than are remembered, but now we're confronted with it.
Here’s a fun football game for a random spring Thursday: Go to College Poll Archive, find the Total Appearances dropdown menu at the top of the page, go to the From box and input your birth year. The list that follows will give you a decent idea of how nationally relevant Nebraska football has been during your lifetime.
If you’re over 30, you won’t have to scroll beyond the top 20 on this list to find Nebraska. If you’re at or approaching 90—meaning you were born in 1936, the same year the Associated Press poll was—the Huskers have appeared in 57.9% of all possible AP polls, eighth-best nationally. The 60-year-old Nebraska fan has had it the best with a 70% poll percentage since 1966, but anyone between the ages of 50 and 80 saw the Huskers appear in about two-thirds of the polls in their life to date.
Me? My number is 65.7%, slightly less than Nebraska fans a decade or two older than me, but the Huskers were ranked in the AP poll from the time I was 2 until I was 23, a 348-poll streak over 22 seasons that is still at least four seasons away from being broken. From birth until I graduated high school, Nebraska was out of the top-25 for two of 310 polls, which is the sort of thing that impacts your perception of the future of a program even if it has nothing to do with the realities of what’s to come.
