I know very little about college football, but certain names keep popping up: Nebraska, Notre Dame, Ohio, and especially around here, Penn State. How is it that these schools grew to become so strong in football as opposed to, say, Hofstra? Apoligies to any alumni of that school, I just chose one that I didn’t seem to hear as much in conversation or in the paper.
The same way that Kentucky, UCLA, Michigan State and Kansas became basketball powers: the program was started early in the history of collegiate sports and had success quickly.
Once a program comes up with a couple of championships and a reputation for being good, they start attracting the best players, which leads to more winning.
Ohio State.
Anyways, a lot of it has to do with winning breeding winning; A lot has to do with having a good coach; and a lot has to do with location. If you are a top college player are you going to go to Hofstra or Notre Dame? Of course not, you are going to go to the better team. Thus teams that are good tend to stay good through their ability to draw top talent.
Coaching is extremely important in college football. Penn State is a powerhouse because Joe Pa is one of the best coaches ever. Same with Flordia State and Bowden, Ohio State and Woody Hayes, Tom Osborne at Nebraska etc. A good coach can turn a program around, and recruit top tier talent. Once established as a powerhouse these programs can stay on top.
Location is important. The best states for breeding football talent are obviously the bigger ones, and where football is important. Florida, Texas, Ohio, California, and Virginia all have better high school football, and simply more people to draw from. Thus you have an advantage of drawing the people that want to stay close to home. In general the top talent in Ohio goes to Ohio State, the top talent in Michigan goes to Michigan, top talent in Nebraska goes to Nebraska, etc.
Of course it will vary from program to program, but it’s a combination of those three things.
The Ivy League used to dominate in college football up until the 1930’s or so.
Having attended Ohio University for a bit, I’m sure you mean the Ohio State University instead. Not the same thing!
Historically, football was a major sport at, strangely to modern perspectives, the elite eastern universities. The Ivy League - not even called the Ivy League yet - had the nation’s powerhouses. The Yale/Harvard and the Army/Navy games were of national interest.
Football was extremely rough and physical and players got hurt in large numbers. And killed in surprising numbers. Theodore Roosevelt called a halt to it.
President Roosevelt saves the game. . .
As football became more interesting and important, more schools picked it up as a major attraction. The big state schools of the midwest, especially, started attracting big beefy farm kids or Pennsylvania steeltown kids to play the game. The sheer size of the schools, with enrollments ten times or more the size of an Ivy League school, helped ensure their dominance. The increase in attendance in state colleges after WWI also helped. Radio broadcasts of games brought them national interest and more kids who wanted to major in football. By the 1930s the champs were almost always from the schools now thought of as the historic football powers.
There were a lot of scandals along the way. The Marx Brothers movie Horsefeathers has a plotline about enrolling older professional ringers as college football players. Apparently this was so widespread that it could be satirized in a mainstream movie and nobody even at the time thought it unusual to do so. And even 75 years ago the image of the big dumb football player not taking courses can be found in a stream of Hollywood movies. Football was big business, and in any big business, bigness becomes its own virtue. That’s why all the football factories were big schools.
For the most part, this is still true. The smaller liberal arts schools are generally in Division III, which doesn’t offer football scholarships. Even the Ivys have gone down to Division I-AA so they don’t have to compete directly against Ohio State, Penn State and Notre Dame.
Of course, the early risers don’t always keep their lead. My alma matter, Duke, was a football powerhouse in the 30’s and 40’s. Today . . . not so much.
Interesting bit of trivia: the only time in history that the Rose Bowl wasn’t played in Pasadena was January 1, 1942 when the game was held in Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium in Durham. Unsurprisingly, the powers that be weren’t wild about having a crowded sports event on the West Coast three weeks after Pearl Harbor.
There have also been a number of colleges that made a deliberate decision to deemphasize or even eliminate football. The University of Chicago, one of the founding members of the Big 10 Conference, dropped football in 1939. St. Louis University, the team generally regarded as having invented the forward pass, ended its football program in the late 1940s and the University of San Francisco ended its program in 1951, despite earning a bowl bid that season.
I once saw an aerial photo of a packed Michigan Stadium on game day in 1929. They were playing…Harvard.
Let’s just let that sink in a minute. MICHIGAN vs. HARVARD.
The past really was a different country…
Just misread that as: “which leads to more whining.” In case there isn’t more winning.
The Miami Hurricanes is an example of a team that came out of nowhere to become a football powerhouse. Although Florida is a big football state, prior to the 80’s, it seemed as if Miami got all the football leftovers and they had no history of excellence. They usually really sucked. All of the sudden, one coach (Shellenberger, I think) totally turned around the program. He recruited well and made the university commit to winning. They have won 5 championships since then. Even though they have changed coaches- the winning breeds more winning thing is working well for them (until this year). However, the Hurricanes have a reputation for being thugish and undisciplined. They are not looked at as a model program.
Not to discount the winning breeds winning thing, because it’s very real, but look at Minnesota which has won numerous national championships yet can’t recruit for shit these days.
In order to recruit, you have to have won recently. The meat-heads (a.k.a excellent students who are a credit to the schools they choose to attend) the schools fawn over are only interested in who has won recently.
One of the schools mentioned in the OP, namely Nebraska, is in some danger of falling out of the elite. They are better this year but still not in the top 20. But that school spends SERIOUS money on it’s football program (ever seen their locker room?). Their unbridled commitment to being known as a football school first, last and always is legendary. It may be enough to save them. May. But top recruits have to be looking more at, say, Texas now.
Also let’s not overlook academic fraud, lowering of Universities’ academic standards, recruitment of academically dubious players, strip club visits, prostitutes, overzealous boosters, fake jobs and under the table payments to players as tools used by universities to attract top talent.
Another thing is that many universities believe that having a strong football team adds to their reputation in all areas and will allocate significant resources to football almost as a marketing effort (see, for example, Rutgers repeated efforts to build a strong national football team, which have met with mixed success at best).
Also, the Ivy League (and many other schools) have a policy prohbiting athletic scholarships. The powerhouse schools can offer to pay their football players’ academic expenses, but the non-scholarship schools can only do so if the players demonstrate financial need.
Further, Division I college football is divided up into two sub-divisions, Division I-A and Division I-AA. Those schools that are nationally competitive (i.e. the ones you see on TV, ususally) are all Division I-A. Other schools elect to be in the less competitive Division I-AA. (In contrast, in basketball, there is no split and virtually all Division I schools are eligible for the the national championships, and most league champions – whether nationally competitive or not – get a guaranteed spot in the NCAA Championships, which is why you often hear long-shot schools making a run to the basketball Final Four.)
Yep. Harvard is a hockey school now.
Until 2006 anyway 
All three schools resumed their football programs in the 1960s. Saint Louis and San Francisco dropped them again before the end of the decade, but Chicago has continued to play to this day.
I’m posting from the UK where we only get some American Football. Hopefully you won’t mind answering these questions:
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is there a Heismann trophy for the best college player?
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if so, does the winner usually get selected in the first round of professional draft picks?
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what proportion of professional players come through the college system?
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can a highly promising player be kicked out of college for other misbehaviour?
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is there a ranking list of colleges?
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presumably there isn’t a National College League, but is there a National College KO event?
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the ‘West Wing’ mentions Notre Dame football team several times. Is this because Notre Dame is excellent both academically and football-wise?
The Heisman trophy is the award for the best college player.
I’d say it’s probably 60% that do. NFL players are bigger and faster, so what works on the college level might not work on the pro level. The best example is someone like Eric Crouch. He was a running quarterback in college that didn’t have the arm strength or accuracy to be a NFL quarterback. He was drafted in the third round of the draft, but as a safety, not a quarterback.
I would say 100%
Yes. The most recent notable one is Maurice Clarett. He was a key component on the Ohio State national championship team, but was booted off the team next year for taking money. Since college players are (supposed to be) amatures they are prohibited from taking money for their play.
There are three lists put out. One is the AP sports writers poll, the other is the USA Today Coach’s poll, and the last is the BCS (Bowl Championship Series). The BCS is a computer ranking based on strength of schedule, and many other factors. You can see the rankings here:
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/rankingsindex
The top two ranked teams in the BCS play each other. I am not sure, but I believe the USA Today is required to crown the winner of the BCS championship game champion, but the AP poll is not. If those two pick different teams, there is a split national championship. This happened in 2003 where Louisana State Universty (LSU) won the BCS, and the University of Southern California (USC) won the AP championship.
Before the BCS teams played other conferences in bowl games at the end of the year. For example, the winner of the Big 10 (midwestern school) would play the winner of the Pac-10 (pacific coast schools). This often meant that the two best teams never played each other, would end up with the same record, and there would be a split national championship. This happened in 1997, 1991, and 1990.
Yes, and there is also a sort of mythology and lore associated with Notre Dame.
Chicago came back as a Division III team – certainly a de-emphasis. I don’t know about USF, but St. Louis U. came back as a club team, not an official varsity sport.
In all the po$t$ o far, no one ha mentioned the actual rea$on that $ome chool dominate the $port year after year, and $ome chool never how up on anyone be$t in collegiate port.
Funny how that tiny detail kipped everyone' thought.
Tri$
Why no mention, even tangentially, of the great University of Alabama when discussing football “powerhouses?”
Suck it Notre Dame / Penn State