Top 25 Eastern Rankings

Out of curiosity I wondered what was Syracuse's place in Eastern football after this horrible decade called the two thousand aughts. I guess people warning of Y2K were right. But now that the decade is over, hopefully we move back to where we should be.

So where is that? I wanted to use just the modern era but when did that start? I decided to use the time period from the D1 split into 1A and 1AA. That is 32 seasons (1978-2009) and seems like a good starting point. The game was played a lot different before that. And teams where fine playing several smalls schools who ended up in 1AA. By the late 80s most teams had removed those teams totally from their schedule.

Ok now which teams are Eastern? I decided to use Big East teams (including former BE member Temple), ACC teams, Army, Navy, and Penn St. Since that was 24 teams I decided to throw ECU in there as well to make a 25 team field. I took into account overall record, number of winning seasons, Bowl games, Bowl records, national titles, conference titles, Top 25 finishes, and Top 10 finishes. Using that I ranked the 25 teams.

So I have SU as the 8th best program over that period. The point fives indicate a shared title or ranking in just one poll. If the is a 0.5x that means the team had more than one shared title or half ranking with the number after point five being the number of times that occurred. For USF and UConn I only included their records since joining 1A.