Clemson a top-20 all-time program

By Chris Preston  |   Thursday, July 24, 2008  |  Comments( 6 )

 Clemson Tigers
Mindlessly scanning through ESPN.com on Tuesday, I stumbled on its rankings of the Top 50 college basketball programs in the NCAA Tournament era. That got me thinking: Where would Clemson fall in an all-time ranking of college football programs? My inclination was to say somewhere in the top 20 or 25, but I wanted to really do some digging to come...
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CommentsComments: 6
 No.1
RazzMaTazz		 07:27 PM
07/24/2008
Chris: Did you use a formula for your rankings?

It's not clear to me how Billingsley does his rankings. He seems to rely on W-L records, without regard for strength-of-schedule, or human-poll rankings. Although his "all time rankings" should include "all time", I'm far more interested in seeing rankings over the last 5, 10, 20, 30, 50 years.

It would be interesting to assign reverse-order points to each team in the AP Top 25 final poll, total the points over the last 5, 10, 20, 30, & 50 years, and rank the teams based on their cumulative points over those time periods.
 No.2
Brent		 12:11 PM
07/25/2008
Match your rankings and even the final polls from the last couple of years with a list of state schools by enrollment. I think you'll find bigger schools with much larger alumni bases are the most successful now and over time. Other than Notre Dame, Clemson is by far the most successful small university in terms of football now and through history. And we know ND has support from much more than just alumni or one region of the country. Also U of W and Auburn both are much larger as are all the schools ranked higher.

To me, that is the overlooked story of Clemson's sports success. The under grad enrollment is half of most state schools and total graduates in the history of the school is only 120k. Some schools produce that in 5 to 6 years.

Some say Clemson is over hyped or has too high expections but the full story is Clemson has always been a football over achiever. It's the small town boy making it in the big city.
 No.3
RazzMaTazz		 02:27 AM
07/26/2008
Brent really changed th subject quite a bit. I'm guessing there are a few more schools, but off the top of my head, I think I'd have to give an edge to Notre Dame and Miami in the adjusted-for-school-size rankings. Both of those schools have enrollment that's about 2/3 of Clemson's. But I don't really care about school size as a handicap. Clemson is one of only two major schools in South Carolina, and the ONLY football school. And there's no professional football team. So Clemson's football fan base and financial support is based on far more than its alumni. Compare that to say, North Carolina, with 4-5 major schools and a pro team. Speaking of which, as of late, you'd have to give Wake some major kudos since their enrollment is about 1/3 of Clemson's.

If you want to handicap football programs, I'd say handicap them by academics. It's so much harder to find athletes who meet the admission criteria (and to keep such students academically elligible) at Duke compared to Clemson, or Stanford compared to USC. That might have something to do with why the Ivy League hasn't been dominant in the last 100 years or so, even though the income levels of Ivy League alumni would easily enable far, far more financial support of their alma mater's football team than at a school like Clemson. Harvard's endowment is $35 billion. Clemson's is $375 million.
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