We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. If you want good college football content, you can do a lot worse than bookmarking the Collegefootballnews.com website. There’s great content there year round and it’s on the national scale.
That being said, Pete Fiutak does a piece on the best all-time college football programs based on historical Associated Press Poll rankings. His formula is a simple one according to following from the website.
Here’s the drill. Taking all the AP final rankings, CFN devised a scoring system giving every AP national champion 25 points, the No. 2 team 24, No. 3 23, and so on down to the bottom – currently No. 25, but the rankings were only a top ten for a bit, and was later a top 20.
And, based on all of that, your Ohio State Buckeyes are the third best program of all-time behind Oklahoma (No. 1) and Alabama (No.2). The margin is thin with ‘Bama narrowly taking the second spot by just ten points.
You can get a look at all the rankings and the article that even breaks out the program of each decade. For now though, here’s how it all looks going into this year.
| 1 | Oklahoma | 1182 | 1 |
| 2 | Alabama | 1062 | 2 |
| 3 | Ohio State | 1052 | 3 |
| 4 | Michigan | 985 | 4 |
| 5 | Notre Dame | 975 | 5 |
| 6 | USC | 832 | 6 |
| 7 | Texas | 789 | 8 |
| 8 | Nebraska | 783 | 7 |
| 9 | Penn State | 694 | 10 |
| 10 | Tennessee | 686 | 9 |
| 11 | LSU | 653 | 11 |
| 12 | Georgia | 591 | 14 |
| 13 | Auburn | 572 | 13 |
| 14 | Florida State | 563 | 12 |
| 15 | Miami | 530 | 15 |
| 16 | Florida | 518 | 17 |
| 17 | UCLA | 503 | 16 |
| 18 | Michigan State | 454 | 18 |
| 19 | Arkansas | 439 | 19 |
| 20 | Clemson | 424 | 20 |
| 21 | Washington | 376 | 22 |
| 22 | Texas A&M | 375 | 21 |
| 23 | Wisconsin | 363 | 22 |
| 24 | Ole Miss | 347 | 24 |
| 25 | Georgia Tech | 343 | 25 |
Now it’s time to start working on closing the gap on Alabama and Oklahoma.
