The Athletic ranks Gators 10th best football program of the 2000s
The Florida Gators, winners of two national titles this century, are the 10th best program in college football since 2000, according to The Athletic. Stewart Mandel compiled a list of the 25 top programs over the past 25 years using the following criteria: Overall winning percentage, BCS or New Year’s Six bowl appearances (including last year’s first-round CFP games), national championships, conference championships*, wins against ranked opponents (via Stathead), percentage of total weeks spent in the AP Top 25 and top 10 (via College Poll Archive) and, as a counterbalance, their number of losing seasons.
Multiple Florida Gators coaches have had 10-win seasons this century
Here is what he said about the Gators: “This one surprised me, given the Gators peaked in 2009 under Urban Meyer. But believe it or not, five coaches — Steve Spurrier (who left in 2001), Meyer, Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen — notched at least one 10-win season. Meyer won two national titles in three years and Mullen went to three consecutive New Year’s Six bowls.”
Who came in at No. 1 on Mandel’s list might surprise many. To him, it’s Ohio State in the top spot over Alabama. The Buckeyes have won three national championships since 2000 while the Crimson Tide have six. Both programs have claimed nine conference crowns during the same stretch. Overall, though, Ohio State (.840 to .781) had the higher winning percentage of the two.
Wrote Mandel: “Only one program has spent nearly the entire century competing at an elite level — and it’s not Alabama, which was mediocre for six of the eight seasons before Nick Saban got rolling. Whereas Ohio State had only five seasons out of 25 in which it won fewer than 10 games (and one of those was an eight-game 2020 season). It’s won three national championships, played for three more, and craziest of all, it has been ranked in the Top 25 in nearly 93 percent of the 411 AP polls since 2000.”
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Other programs of note in Mandel’s rankings: No. 4 Georgia, No. 5 LSU, No. 9 Texas, No. 12 Florida State, No. 14 Miami.
The article did have one glaring mistake. It listed Florida and FSU as having identical resumes since 2000, including only one national title each. The Florida Gators, of course, won championships in 2006 and 2008. However, this misuse appears to be a copy-and-paste mistake, not one that impacted Florida’s ranking on Mandel’s list. We think anyway.
