How far back in the past would you have to go for a current college football ~champions to be better than the NFL champs? Average NFL team? Worst NFL team?
Randomly peppered my dad with questions about this over the holidays. Being from Chicago, the '85 Bears team looms large, but looking at clips, they look awful small. Comparing them to the current Alabama team, Alabama’s O-line is waaay bigger. Eval Neal is 65 lbs heavier than anyone on the Bears O-line, that seems like it would be difficult to overcome. Tactics are more evolved as well.
It’s an interesting question. A modern top-tier college football team would certainly have a size advantage on the lines, compared to an NFL team from a few decades ago, and probably some overall advantage on strength and conditioning (and maybe on speed), due to more advanced training, nutrition, and sports medicine.
On the other hand, some of it may be balanced out by overall athletic ability – even for a top team like Alabama, they likely only have, at most, a dozen players who are of a caliber that they could make an NFL team at that moment. So, even if you are looking at an NFL team from the '80s, which is smaller and maybe not as strong as today’s Alabama, their overall athletic ability is still likely higher.
So, I’m not sure at what point you would have to go to in the past where that bigger size and strength would win the day.