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[QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1854776, member: 289"]
I have a means I use to evaluate teams from different years and eras. I call it "point differential rankings". You look at the scores of each opponent and see who did better than the team you are studying in terms of point differential. If no team beat that team by more than you did or lost to it by less than you did or tied a team you lost to, you get a '1'. If one team did better, you get a '2'. If two teams did better, you get a '3'. For example, we beat Boston College 20-17 in our last game last year. Florida State beat them by 14, Clemson by 17 and Virginia Tech and North Carolina State by 16, Three other teams also beat them by a field goal but they didn't top our performance so we get a '5' for that game. You do that for each opponent and you average the ranking.  I carry it out to two places beyond the decimal. Our point differential ranking last year was 7.09, meaning we averaged being the 7th best team our opponent played that year. That number can now be used to compare that team to other teams. It's a measure of both strength and consistency and it's not dependent on how high scoring the era was.

Here are our numbers for each year of the Carrier Dome Era:

1980  5.73
1981  5.64
1982  7.90
1983  6.82
1984  5.18
1985  4.25
1986  7.18
1987  2.64
1988  3.42
1989  5.00

1990  4.54
1991  4.00
1992  3.66
1993  6.36
1994  6.36
1995  4.00
1996  3.00
1997  3.69
1998  3.67
1999  5.42

2000  4.55
2001  4.38
2002  8.00
2003  7.00
2004  6.42
2005  8.09
2006  7.08
2007  9.50
2008  9.36
2009  8.18

2010  7.18
2011  7.55
2012  5.42 
2013  6.67
2014  8.18
2015  7.08

It's just one way of looking at it, but by this method, the 1987 team was our best team of the era. 1996 was second best. 1992 is in a group with 1988, 1997 and 1998.  1991 was similar to 1995. 1985, 1990 and 2000-01 are in the next group. The rest of the teams were mediocre or worse. For reference, the average national champion is about 2.50 and our 1959 team was 1.18.
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