What is everyone complaining about?

[mack]

I hated it when Brainless said we were a seven and five sc;hool much of the time and we would at times win eight etc and when we did well first two years I was sure he was wrong .........now I am not so sure....we need to get it in gear.

 

[floridajacket]

This thread got me thinking. I downloaded a dataset of all historical results for the top two divisions ever and set up the ranking as simple Elo Chess, which is far from ideal since every team starts with the same score and at first all wins or losses generally help out the same amount. But they still tracked the rankings in general.

Here's a graph of the complete history of GT's ranking. Red line is the five-year average.

Even with the 1990 championship (which the damned thing ranked at #2, though Colorado would have definitely not been #1 without the fifth down and "clipping" against ND) and success in the mid-80's, basically GT has been more successful in general since 1997 than at any point since Dodd left, except for maybe a couple of years in the 70's. The average since then has been in the 30-50 range, but that's much better than many years in the 70's and 80's. And that's with three different coaches.

The rankings in the pre-war era are interesting too. The rankings then are skewed because many "teams" would play a couple of games a year, at least against NCAA competition. One of GT's games back in the day was against Fort McPherson, for example. But Alexander, other than 1927-28, was sort of a crappy coach.

 

[coit]

basically GT has been more successful in general since 1997 than at any point since Dodd left

Now where have I heard that before?

You can flip the Y axis of your chart and it will read better. Pretty good look otherwise.