College Football Elites, Part 1: What makes a ‘blue blood’?

What makes a college football blue blood? How many blue bloods are there in college football? We will tackle these questions in this series.

One of the unique differences between the NFL and college football is the idea of equity. The NFL is designed for parody. It’s commonplace for a team at or near the bottom to make a run at the top of their division in the matter of one season.

Although there are teams that cannot stop tripping over their own feet — hello Cleveland Browns — most franchises with the right combination of coach, general manager and owner can figure out a path to success. This is because there is a cap in the NFL; a cap to what you can spend and a cap to what you can make — in the sense of profit sharing as it relates to television contracts.

Colleges and universities are non-profit organizations, but they do not have a cap on what they can earn (i.e. alumni donations and endowments). An athletic department’s ledger simply needs to report no profit at the end of a fiscal year. Simply put, in college football, whoever has the most usually wins.

This creates an elitism in college football that does not exist in the pros. Consider a team from Green Bay, Wisc., has the same opportunity and resources to win as a team from New York. This creates what we call “blue bloods” in college football. Certain specific criteria fit this description.

In wealthy circles, blue bloods are known as “one percent-ers” which means the group is small. This group is small. We used the following criteria to define blue blood programs:

• Generational (30+ years) and recent success
• National championships
• Conference championships
• 10-win seasons
• All-Americans
• Players in the NFL
• Heisman Trophy winners

The criteria used was in that order. The teams were divided into two categories in part one of this series: “classic blue bloods” and “new money blue bloods”.

Classic blue bloods are programs that have sustained success for multiple generations and still are nationally relevant. There might have been some down periods, but those periods lasted for 15 years or fewer. New money blue bloods are programs that rose to national prominence in the last 30 years and are still one of the top programs in the country.

Well, let the debate begin. Here are college football’s blue bloods.