What is the worst college football team to win/share a national title?

This is pointless.

 

talent-wise they were a super great team. unfortunately for them they were coached by Les Miles

 

That 1869 Princeton team sucked.

Didn't realize the 2007 LSU squad was the first team with more than one loss to be deemed a consensus national champion.

 

Yes, yes, because OOP and I are the only two who ever got into a pissing match and got a thread locked..... :

 

They flipped after Penn State beat a decent Indiana team (which ended up going 6-5 that year) 35-29 on the road. PSU was up 35-14 late in the fourth and gave up two late TDs -- including a Hail Mary on the last play of the game -- to make the score look artificially close. JoePa essentially got punished for not running up the score.

After that week, they dropped to No. 2 and stayed there. I'm also convinced that was jab by the poll committees to the Big Ten to try to break the B10/Pac-10 Rose Bowl arrangement, and of course, the BCS came not too long thereafter.

My PSU friends still are bitter about that game "costing" them the national title. Indiana, for its part, has apparently vowed to pay them back by playing them everywhere but Bloomington, having moved its home games against PSU to NFL venues not once, but twice in a decade's time.

 

Penn State fan complaining about being dropped after the Indiana game is silly considering that Nebraska earlier in the season dropped from No. 1 to No. 2 - after a 42-16 win at Texas Tech.

Nebraska was ahead of Penn State then fell behind them despite winning in a blow out fashion on the road and then were put back ahead of them a few weeks later. There is a sound argument to be made they should have never fallen behind them in the first place.

And as for the schedules --

Penn State beat a total of four teams with eight or more wins that year - USC (8-3-1), Michigan (8-4), Ohio State (9-4) and Oregon (9-4). They beat two other teams - Indiana (6-5) and Illinois (7-5) with a winning record.

Nebraska beat a total of three teams with eight wins or more -- but two of those three had ten wins or more -- Miami (10-2), Colorado (11-1), Kansas State (9-3) and they beat three other teams - Pacific (6-5), West Virginia (7-6) and Kansas (6-5) with a winning record.

In short - both teams beat six winning teams, Nebraska beat two 10-win teams and Penn State beat none but Penn State beat one more team with eight wins or more.

Nebraska also had a much, much tougher assignment in its bowl game as they had to beat a top five Miami team on its home field in the Orange Bowl while Penn State beat a rather pedestrian Oregon team (the Pac-10 was awful that year, look it up, and the Ducks lost to a 3-8-1 Hawaii team by 20 points and Utah beat them by 18) in the Rose Bowl.

The two schedules are comparable but given the quality teams at the top of the schedule that Nebraska beat as compared to the teams Penn State beat, there is no way anyone, even the most delusional Penn State fan, could make an argument that the Nittany Lions played a measurably "tougher" schedule than Nebraska did and frankly, if you are objective about it you'd have to give the edge to the Cornhuskers on the strength of having to play at Miami because Penn State didn't come close to having a win of that quality.

Oh wait, I forgot, 2-9 Temple was just a little less shitty than 0-10-1 Iowa State and as we learned yesterday it is the degree of shitiness of the bottom teams on your schedule which determine your strength of schedule..... :

 

Again, urban myth.

Nebraska was No. 1 in the AP before that weekend, and remained No. 1.

They flipped in the coach's poll. Were the coaches punishing Paterno, because the media sure wasn't.

 

zag, nice argument. Bur despite all that, I still think Penn State -- had it played Nebraska -- would've had a great chance to win. JoePa's 24-11-1 in bowl games. His teams have always been well-prepared for bowl games.

FWIW, Osborne's bowl record? 12-13, with seven consecutive losses from 1987-1993.

 

I actually think this -- Penn State likely would have beaten Nebraska that year and was likely the better team (though if you remember, Nebraska lost a potential Heisman trophy winning quarterback to a blood clot about four games in and didn't miss a beat and I'm quite sure Penn State minus Kerry Collins doesn't run the table) -- but the Cornhuskers "body of work", which included beating two legitimate top five teams in Colorado and Miami, was just a little bit better and thus if you must choose one over the other in a "beauty contest" it would have to be Nebraska.

The national title, since there is no playoff, is not about who is the best team - it is about who has the best record combined with the best body of work.

That year, it was Nebraska as it was in 1997, but we will not ignite that debate again.

 

I don't disagree with any of that. Nebraska probably was the better team, but JoePa's track record with bowl games -- and Tom Osborne's, too -- makes me wonder how that season could've ended. And that's my frustration with college football, even now.

However, I do think Michigan was the better team in 1997. That illegal kick is something I can't get out of my mind.

 

The problem is that we don't have a system that rewards the best teams. There's too much other stuff involved and I think every other year or so you have at least one team in that championship game that you can make a very strong argument that they don't deserve to be there.

 

Well, once again, the computer strenuously disagrees. Here are the strength of schedule calculations for 1994: http://www.phys.utk.edu/sorensen/cfr/cfr/output/1994/CF_1994_Ranking_Schedule.html

Penn State ranked 14th, Nebraska at 49th. Unlike 97, this time it's Not. Even. Close. Penn State had a MUCH higher ranked schedule than Nebraska.

People forget just how awesome that Penn State team was. Despite having one of the nation's toughest schedules, they only had one really close game all year (at Illinois). They plowed through their schedule just as impressively as Nebraska did through it's far weaker one.

I really don't see any basis for the 94 vote other than the Osborne Lifetime Achievement Award grounds.