Private Schools in the two-platoon era

[SWC75]

They were just talking about Syracuse's problems on Bud and the Manchild. Bud pointed out it's hard to be really good for a private school these days. A caller countered that Northwestern is also a private schools and so is Stanford and "Syracuse has a better history than they do". I agreed on northwestern but wasn't so sure about Stanford. I think the relevant thing to look at it is the two-platoon, (unlimited substitution), era, which began in 1964. That's what stretched the recruiting requirements beyond the means of most private schools. You need separate offensive and defensive teams. the "starters" are really the two-deep. You have specialists- not only in the kicking game but in certain down and distance situations. Ben Schwartzwalder's teams used to have traveling squads of less than 40 players and he never had to recruit a key player from outside of New York and it's adjacent states. Now you have to be a national recruiter with spanking new, fancy facilities to attract the players. Private schools aren't going to have the quality or quantity of walk-ons state schools get because academic standards and tuition are higher.

Given all these problems, who have been the most successful private schools since 1964? They can be culled from this list of overall winning percentages in major college football since then:
http://football.stassen.com/cgi-bin...=1964&end=2012&rpct=30&min=5&se=on&by=Win+Pct

The only private school in the top ten is Southern California, (.714), which has the advantage of warm weather, being in the middle of a great recruiting area and having a strong football tradition. Notre Dame , (.700), leads the second ten. It's not warm there but they have the strongest football tradition of all: just ask them. There's also Miami (.664), which has the same advantages as USC. They are all "special" cases.

The next most successful school was Boston College at .559. I had thought Georgia Tech was a private school but it's not. We're next at .536. Then comes Stanford at .536. Pittsburgh is a "state-related" school, (they get about 9% of their budget from the state) and has won at a .520 clip. Tulsa has won 51.7% of their games while not performing at the highest level. Purdue is another schools that sounds like it might be private but isn't. The rest have losing records, with the Wildcats way down the list at #106, (.342)

They are just below Tulane (.361), just above Rice (.337) and also above Vanderbilt (.321). Wake Forest (.391) has done better, thanks to Jim Grobe.

But hey, the alst place team is a state school: UTEP (.317)

 

[WoadBlue]

I have been talking for years about the sea change that came over college football beginning in the late 1950s and set rather firmly by the mid-60s, and the 2-platoon system is the only connecting rod. Before that, all kinds of private schools that afterwards began to struggle were at least regional powers: Dook, Rice, Tulane, SMU, TCU were some of the schools that fell off the map and settled far down the totem pole. I think Pitt was still a fully private school when the 2-platoon fall was completed. Pitt was bad until Johnny Majors revived the program.

Some state schools that also found it very difficult to recruit for 2 platoon football also declined precipitously. Minnesota might be the best example.

I think that some basic sense of what has happened to private schools underlies the widespread Big Ten fan assumption that ACC football is doomed to utter failure at some point.