History UsefulNotes / PowerFiveConferences

'''Notable Historic Players:''' Pat Studstill, Wade Phillips, Robert Newhouse, Andre Ware, David and Jimmy Klingler, Case Keenum\\

The '''University of Mississippi''', a.k.a. Ole Miss--''[[InsistentTerminology do not]]'' call them "Mississippi"; doing so immediately outs you as either a Yankee or a {{troll}}[[labelnote:*]]An example of the latter: During the head coaching tenure of Jackie Sherrill (an Oklahoma native who played football at Alabama) at State from 1991–2003, he made it a point to ''always'' call their arch-enemy "Mississippi".[[/labelnote]]--had one of the strongest teams in college football in the '50s and '60s under coach Johnny Vaught, claiming three national championships. The last great QB from this era, Archie Manning, is still treated as a near deity in Mississippi a half-century after his graduation to a fairly unspectacular career in the pros--the on-campus speed limit remains 18 mph in honor of his retired #18. Before and after Vaught's tenure, the school has been occasionally competitive but rarely dominant, with its greatest success being a division title in 2003 with Archie's son Eli under center. The program has run afoul of the NCAA numerous times; it was the last school to receive a TV ban (in 1995) and had many of its 2010s wins stripped due to numerous rule violations, from allowing academically ineligible players to compete to the head coach calling escorts from his university cell phone. The Rebels have persevered, and the program is currently back to competing in the SEC under Lane Kiffin (himself no stranger to NCAA sanctions).[[note]]This rise has been accompanied by the school finally winning its first recognized NCAA team championships in women's golf (2021) and baseball (2022).[[/note]]\\\

The '''University of South Carolina''''s football program has typically been an underachiever. It was a founding member of the ACC but dipped when it felt like North Carolinian schools were being favored, joining the SEC in 1992 after years as an independent and struggling to assert itself in the tough league, bottoming out with a winless 1999 season. The school has had its moments, though: it produced a Heisman winner in RB George Rogers in 1980, had a solid run of success under Steve Spurrier from 2005-14 after his return from coaching in the pros, and has been somewhat competitive under current coach Shane Beamer (son of the Virginia Tech coaching legend).\\\

The school is ''most'' well known for its [[UnfortunateNames easily mockable name]], which is cringeworthy due to referencing the BeastlyBloodsports of cockfighting (oh, and the whole "cock" thing). Carolina is also almost as well-known for its music-related traditions, entering the field to ''StandardSnippet/AlsoSprachZarathustra'' and playing Music/{{Darude}}'s "Sandstorm" just before kickoff and as a crowd-riser at various times. Their audience is known for being particularly energetic, to the point of making their stadium's upper decks sway from their movement (hence the popular saying "If it ain't swayin', we ain't playin'.") Despite no longer being an ACC member, South Carolina has rivalries with schools in that conference, particularly in-state rival Clemson (played almost annually in the "Palmetto Bowl" since 1896) and North Carolina (as the main representatives of their respective states) Within the SEC, South Carolina's main rival is Georgia, a rivalry partially boosted by the Florida-associated Spurrier.

The '''University of Missouri''' (almost always just called "Mizzou") is the first public university west of the Mississippi and is also home to the world's first journalism school (which remains among the country's most prestigious). It's likely best known in the football world for being the (disputed but most recognized) birthplace of the homecoming game, hosted in 1911 to encourage students and alumni to "come home" to view their rivalry game with Kansas; its massive success helped to ensure the tradition being adopted by almost every college and high school. While Mizzou is not an athletic power generally, the Tigers have been generally successful on the football field, peaking with an undefeated 1960 season under coach Dan Devine (1958-70). Soon after over a decade of losing seasons (1984-96), coach Gary Pinkel turned the Tigers back into a power, becoming the winningest coach in school history. Despite spending most of their history in the Big Eight/Big 12, Missouri made the jump to the SEC in 2012 to mixed results, disrupting their historic rivalries with Oklahoma and especially Kansas and becoming the ''third'' "Tigers" program in the conference.[[note]]Incidentally, this is the ''[[HistoryRepeats second time]]'' the SEC has had three sets of "Tigers"; charter member Sewanee, which left in 1940, also uses that nickname.[[/note]] Following Pinkel's retirement, the Tigers have regressed to a mid-tier team that has somewhat struggled to find its place in the conference.\\\

After a brief [[AudienceAlienatingEra slump]] in the late '90s, Bob Stoops revived the school's performance during his HC tenure (1998-2016), including leading them to an undefeated national title season in 2000. Heisman-winning [=QBs=] Jason White and Sam Bradford led the Sooners to three more BCS Championship Game appearances [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut (and losses)]] in 2003–04 and 2008, respectively. Stoops' successor, Lincoln Riley, kept the Sooners the dominant power in the Big 12 and a regular playoff contender. He developed a reputation as a QB whisperer due to producing back-to-back Heisman winners in Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray, both transfers who rose to great success in Norman. However, the school has yet to return to a national championship game since the current CFP system was implemented, and Riley (and future Heisman-winning QB Caleb Williams) left town after 2021 for USC after a down year by OU's high standards.\\\

The "Sooner" nickname refers to the non-native settlers who rushed to grab Oklahoma land in the late 19th century before they were legally allowed to. (The fact that their team is named after land thieves is something rival fans are happy to point out.) The team's mascot is an actual covered wagon, the Sooner Schooner, which is pulled across the field by horses Boomer and Sooner after every home and bowl score (it has only catastrophically wiped out twice). All of OU's Heisman winners are featured in statue form in the school's Heisman Park. Their stadium was renamed after a major donor in 2003, though most fans continue to refer to it as "Oklahoma Stadium" or "Owen Field"; it boasts the same distinctive "Cherokee Gothic" architecture featured in the rest of the campus. Oklahoma has heated rivalries with intrastate rival Oklahoma State and fellow "power school in small market" Nebraska, but it saves its greatest enmity for Texas, a rivalry that will continue in the SEC.

'''Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College''' (''[[InsistentTerminology always]]'' abbreviated to LSU) has a proud football history; though the school does not claim it, their retroactively awarded 1908 national title was the first to be won by a Southern school. LSU was the undisputed crown jewel of Louisiana football for decades before the Saints came to town (and for decades after when they were the basement-dwellers of the NFL), and even today it is extremely popular in the state.[[note]]Though it is not the most decorated sport at LSU; that would be women's track and field, which has won 11 indoor and 14 outdoor national championships as of 2022.[[/note]] The love is returned in kind, with the school embracing the Cajun heritage of the state by officially spelling its chant (and anything else with a long 'o' sound) "[[SpellMyNameWithAnS Geaux]] Tigers!" The school's first ''claimed'' national title came from an undefeated 1958 campaign led by a gritty defense nicknamed [[ValuesDissonance "the Chinese Bandits"]] and star HB Billy Cannon, who won the Heisman the following year after his legendary "Halloween run" punt return TD against Ole Miss.\\\

Following some struggles in the '90s, the "Bayou Bengals" rose to regular national prominence in the 21st century, with each of their last three coaches (Nick Saban, Les Miles, and Ed Orgeron) winning a national title and fostering a reputation for LSU as a factory for both wide receiver and defensive back talent. Their 2007 title, fitting that season's wild reputation, is the only one since the start of the BCS to be awarded to a two-loss team (both losses coming in triple overtime). In contrast, LSU's most recent national championship came in an undefeated 2019 resulting from a a record-breaking passing performance from Heisman winner Joe Burrow; this Tiger squad's complete dominance of a historically difficult schedule (and the sheer number of NFL talent it produced) has made many historians of the game rank the team as the greatest in college football history. However, the program notably slumped following the departure of the QB and his stacked roster of receivers, resulting in the school breaking a two-decade streak of winning seasons. Continued struggles the following year led admin to scrap their championship-winning coach. In a testament to LSU's pedigree, the school was able to lure away Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly and immediately bounced back to contention, winning its division in Kelly's first season and producing its third Heisman winner in QB Jayden Daniels in his second.\\\

LSU "stole" the nickname "Death Valley" from Clemson after beating them in the 1959 Sugar Bowl to claim their first national title, though their stadium is certainly just as intimidating. To differentiate, Tiger Stadium is sometimes called "Deaf Valley" due to being one of the loudest sporting environments in the world. Two of Tiger Stadium's earliest expansions were built using funds allocated for building student dormitories, meaning students literally lived under the stands; however, the dorms were decommissioned as housing in the 1980s and converted to other uses, and were demolished in the late 2010s to add additional concession stands and restrooms. Also, Tiger Stadium has two other unusual features: the goalposts are H-shaped rather than the slingshot style used almost everywhere else[[note]]Florida State and Washington State are the only other FBS schools to use the H-style goalpost. When the Saints had to play 4 "home" games at LSU in 2005 due to Hurricane Katrina, they had to get special permission from the NFL to use LSU's standard.[[/note]], and the field is marked numerically in 5-yard increments rather than the usual 10-yard increments.

'''Mississippi State University'''[[note]]For the ''full'' name, see note regarding date of establishment.[[/note]] (or just "State", as it's known to one and all in Mississippi) is a land-grant school with all the tropes that attach to it. The Bulldogs have long been known for sports teams with a bad case of EveryYearTheyFizzleOut, an incredibly bitter rivalry with Ole Miss whose football version is known as the "Egg Bowl",[[note]]named after its trophy, featuring a gold-plated old-time football that looks to modern eyes like a big egg[[/note]] and "More Cowbell"... literally. State fans have a decades-long tradition of bringing cowbells to games to use as noisemakers; the SEC tried to ban them, but State managed to get its fans to limit their use to specific times when they'd be less likely to interfere with game action. Speaking of that rivalry, it's bitter enough that State fans yell "Go to hell, Ole Miss!" at ''every'' opening kickoff, regardless of the opponent. The sports website SB Nation had [[https://www.sbnation.com/a/ole-miss-leo-lewis-ncaa-enforcement-recruitment-violations this to say]] about the schools' stereotypical fans:
--> If you're an Ole Miss fan, you're probably an asshole lawyer in seersucker. If you're a Mississippi State fan, you're probably an asshole redneck in camouflage. Mississippi is a small place -- the campuses are a two-hour drive apart -- which means a lot of these folks know each other, too.\\\

The '''University of Florida''' enjoys a good claim to being the state's most prestigious institute of higher learning, both in academics and athletics, with one of the largest student populations of any college, but it wasn't always this way. After being the ButtMonkey of the early SEC in the '30s[[labelnote:*]]alongside Sewanee, which left in 1940[[/labelnote]] and '40s, with a winless 1946 season, Florida rose to become a major power starting in the '60s, when it achieved national prominence after producing Heisman-winning QB Steve Spurrier in 1966. The school was also an SEC power in the '80s, but NCAA sanctions prevented them from competing in the postseason for a national title. Spurrier returned to his alma mater as a coach in 1990 and served there until 2001, elevating them to an SEC power and claiming the school's first national championship in 1996 under another Heisman QB in Danny Wuerffel, making them the last program to enter the "blue blood" ranks by claiming their first recognized major college national title. When coach Urban Meyer took the reins from 2005-10, he shaped one of the more memorable teams in college football history. QB Tim Tebow became the school's third Heisman winner and helped lead the team to two national championships, quickly becoming one of the most famous and decorated players in college football history. Meyer's tenure ended amidst rumors of a toxic locker room culture, and the program has fluctuated ever since. Not helping matters is Florida's growing reputation as a party school rather than the academic and athletic powerhouse of the past sixty years, and the growth of second-tier college programs elsewhere in Florida (notably South and Central Florida).\\\

Florida's rivalry with Florida State is far and away the most heated athletic rivalry in their state, collegiate or professional, and games between the two (or less often, the Hurricanes in the event they meet the two northern Florida schools) have set attendance records at both campuses. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium (much better known by its appropriate nickname "The Swamp") is the largest stadium in the state, and Gators home games are infamous for paralyzing traffic throughout their home town -- which the university more or less owns, being an hour's drive from the Jacksonville area. Gainesville was the hometown of the late Music/TomPetty, and the school has firmly adopted the tradition of singing "I Won't Back Down" after the third quarter. For non-football fans, the Florida Gators are probably ''most'' notable for being the namesake of the Gatorade sports drink, which was first developed by university scientists to help their football team stay hydrated in the Florida humidity during their launch to prominence in the 1960s; whether the drink actually had anything to do with their success remains a matter of debate.

Located in the college town of Athens just outside of UsefulNotes/{{Atlanta}}, the '''University of Georgia''' has both a strong academic and athletic tradition, with the school claiming over 40 national titles in various sports.[[note]]It's a powerhouse in men's tennis (6) and women's gymnastics (10), swimming (7), and ''equestrian'' (7, though this sport is not overseen by the NCAA).[[/note]] However, its football program outshines all others in popularity, being the second most lucrative in all of college football behind only Texas. Despite its rabid fanbase and many years of consistent success, Georgia football has only claimed four national titles, the first in an undefeated 1942 under Heisman-winning HB Frank Sinkwich and LongRunner HC Wally Butts (1939-60) and the second in an undefeated 1980 under future Heisman-winning HB Herschel Walker and similarly long-termed HC Vince Dooley (1964-88). For decades afterwards, the Bulldogs continued to win plenty of games, with numerous double-digit winning seasons and no consecutive losing campaigns since 1963. However, the Bulldogs made a habit of [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut falling just short]] of claiming another national title multiple times, most notably losing in overtime to Bama in the 2017 National Championship game. They finally got over the hump in 2021, as their historically dominant defense surrendered the conference championship to the Tide but ultimately defeated them for the national title. Said 2021 team had ''15'' players[[note]]8 from the defense, including ''5 first-rounders''; 6 from the offense, and one from special teams[[/note]] drafted into the NFL, a modern-era record. They followed it up with [[EvenBetterSequel an undefeated championship season]] the following year, with their 65-7 victory over TCU in the CFP Championship Game being the biggest CurbStompBattle ever seen in a college football postseason game. They remained undefeated the following regular season but again lost to Bama for the SEC title... only to set an even higher benchmark for a bowl blowout in their consolation match with Florida State.\\\

Georgia's field is one of the most distinctive in college football due to the hedges planted around its perimeter; while they serve mostly as a cosmetic touch, the hedges are also an effective crowd control measure, discouraging fans from rushing the field.[[note]]When Sanford Stadium hosted the soccer competition in the [[UsefulNotes/OlympicGames 1996 Summer Olympics]], the hedges were temporarily removed to accommodate the wider width of the soccer field; the old hedges were also suffering from disease, and the new hedges were grown from healthy clippings from the original for two years prior to the Olympics and were replanted before the Dawgs' football season. Speaking of the hedges, they also hide a chain-link fence that surrounds the field.[[/note]] UGA's mascot is a real English bulldog named... Uga. Uga is owned by the family of Sonny Seiler, a retired attorney from Savannah who passed away in 2023, and has been a fixture at UGA football games since 1956. There have been 11 bulldogs to bear the Uga name; every succeeding Uga is descended from the original, and every deceased Uga is interred in a mausoleum at Sanford Stadium. The symbol on the team's helmets is borrowed (with permission) from the logo of the NFL's Green Bay Packers. While Georgia has pretty harsh rivalries against several of the other major schools of the SEC (particularly Auburn, Florida, and Alabama), their fans save their greatest "Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate" for Georgia Tech.

The '''University of Kentucky''' is the [[MyFriendsAndZoidberg Zoidberg]] of the SEC in that football isn't the sport that moves the needle. Instead, [[FanCommunityNicknames Big Blue Nation]] eats, drinks, breathes, sleeps, and lives basketball. And then some. Not that football is lacking in fans, but when you share a campus with a men's basketball program that has won eight national titles, won more games[[note]]UK had lost this distinction to Kansas, but got the lead back in 2023 after KU was forced to vacate 15 wins due to major NCAA rules violations.[[/note]] and appeared in more NCAA tournaments than any other D-I program, and won more SEC titles than all of the other conference programs ''combined'', it's kind of hard for football to gain a foothold.[[note]]Also not helping matters is that Kentucky's high school sports scene is arguably ''even more'' skewed toward basketball. As late as the 1980s, there were high schools with over 1,000 students (moderately large by Kentucky standards) that ''didn't have football teams''. Even now, Kentucky produces ''far'' less football talent than other states in the SEC footprint.[[/note]] In fact, the great Bear Bryant took Kentucky to its sole (retrospective) championship in 1950 but left three years later when he learned that basketball coach Adolph Rupp would receive a contact extension--''after'' the university president had told Bryant that Rupp would be fired due to NCAA rules violations. In Bryant's view, this confirmed that UK football would [[AlwaysSecondBest always be second]] to basketball. The Cats haven't had a head coach leave Lexington with an overall winning record at UK since Bryant's successor Blanton Collier left for the NFL after 1961, enduring decades of mostly losing seasons at least partially due to numerous NCAA sanctions and penalties; after their sole post-Bryant SEC championship season, the Wildcats posted an even better record the next year but were disqualified from postseason play or a conference title and collapsed afterwards due to sanctions. After those decades of struggles, Kentucky is finally experiencing a modest revival under Mark Stoops, who has turned the program back into consistent contenders after his arrival in 2013 and has since passed The Bear for most career wins at UK.\\\

One notable fact about UK is that it was the first SEC football team to desegregate, recruiting its first Black players in 1966 (probably not coincidentally the season after [[Film/GloryRoad the all-White Wildcat basketball team lost the NCAA championship]] to Texas Western's[[note]]now UTEP[[/note]] all-Black starting five), with defensive end Nat Northington being the first one to suit up the next year (making his overall debut in the season opener against Indiana and his conference debut the next week--ironically against Ole Miss, who would be the ''last'' SEC team to integrate, in 1971).[[note]]Though Northington wasn't the first Black athlete in the SEC... that distinction belongs to Stephen Martin, who walked on to the Tulane baseball team in 1966, right before that school left the SEC. Northington was actually one of two players who were meant to integrate UK football, but the other, Greg Page, was paralyzed in a preseason practice accident and died the day before Northington took the field against Ole Miss. Vanderbilt recruited two Blacks for basketball in 1966, but one was injured as a freshman and transferred out. The other, Perry Wallace, integrated SEC basketball later in 1967.[[/note]]\\\

Outside of men's basketball, UK has enjoyed relatively little national success (at least in the NCAA). Its most successful non-basketball NCAA sport is the niche sport of rifle, with four team titles. The Cats also have single national titles in women's cross-country and women's volleyball. It's an SEC Zoidberg in another respect: it's the only current or future member that's never appeared in the Men's College World Series, the final phase of the D-I baseball championship. However, much like Minnesota, UK's most successful sports team competes outside the NCAA. The ''cheerleading squad'' has won ''24'' national championships,[[note]]College cheerleading has two separate governing bodies; UK has only competed in one of them.[[/note]] has its own page on The Other Wiki (and, unlike Minnesota, its page is ''solely'' dedicated to cheerleading), and has even been the subject of a reality TV series. As with basketball, Kentucky's greatest and most competitive football rivalry is with Louisville, fueled mostly by "big brother/little brother" syndrome. Before the modern football rivalry began in 1994, the two schools hadn't played for ''70 years''.[[note]]As for men's basketball, before the modern rivalry began in 1983, the last regular-season game between the teams was in 1922.[[/note]]

The '''University of Alabama''' (often referred to as just "Bama") is one of the most successful programs in college football history, having played in more bowl games (76), spent more weeks at #1 in the AP Poll (140 at the end of 2022), and claimed more national championships than any school starting in the 20th century.[[note]]Princeton and Yale both claim far more, but almost all of them are from the late 1800s, an era where those schools had little to no competition; it's also been ''so'' long since either of those programs were relevant that touting their accomplishments seems almost pointless.[[/note]] Coaches Wallace Wade (1923-30) and Frank Thomas (1931-46) brought the school five claimed national titles in the early 20th century. Wade's first championship year in 1925 was capped by the Tide being the first Southern team invited to the Rose Bowl in lieu of a Northern or Midwestern team; Alabama's hard-fought victory by a single point is viewed as one of the most important moments in establishing Southern college football as a national power. After suffering through a severe decline in the early 1950s, including a winless '55 season, Bear Bryant returned to his alma mater as HC and made the program the most successful team in the nation through his 25-year tenure (1958-82), claiming six national championships and being named to several more. After his first season, Bryant's team made 25 straight bowl appearances, a record at the time, still fifth all-time, and a staggering accomplishment in a time with far fewer bowl opportunities. Bryant's name was added to the school's stadium in 1975, seven years before he retired.\\\

A "razorback" is a feral pig native to the region; the name was adopted by Bezdek's squads for their physicality, which multiple generations of "Hogs" have attempted to emulate. Fans mimic pig calls of "Woo, pig, sooie!" to cheer on their teams, and they have a live hog mascot named "Tusk". While its football program isn't particularly notable when placed next to its counterparts in the SEC, Arkansas actually boasts more national athletic titles than any other school in its conference thanks to its dominant programs in men's cross country (11) and both indoor ''and'' outdoor track and field (20 and 10); it leads the nation in the first two and sits behind only USC in the third. As part of their effort to represent the entire state of Arkansas, the college didn't played another Arkansas school for several decades and plays some of its "home" games in Little Rock. Historically, its most hated rival is likely Texas (whose defeat of Arkansas in the 1969 "Big Shootout" cost the Razorbacks a second national title).

The very next year, new coach Shug Jordan turned Auburn back into a football power, posting the longest and winningest coaching tenure in the school's history (1951-75) and claiming both the school's first national championship with a perfect 1957 campaign and its first Heisman winner in QB Pat Sullivan (1971). Following a brief regression, coach Pat Dye (1981-92) again revived the program with the help of 1985 Heisman RB and dual-sport superstar Bo Jackson. Dye's tenure ended due to NCAA sanctions; his successor Terry Bowden had an undefeated regular season in his first year but was disqualified from postseason play and the chance at a national title. Coach Tommy Tuberville (1999-2008) again revived the program's prospects after a brief lull, going undefeated in 2004 but finishing ranked #3 behind USC and Oklahoma; Tuberville parlayed his success into a successful campaign for the U.S. Senate despite zero political experience and having not lived in Alabama for a decade, a testament to the program's local influence. Dynamic juco transfer QB Cam Newton claimed the school's third Heisman while leading them to a BCS Championship in 2010, but the school has struggled to regain national prominence in the decade since.\\\

Outside of football, Auburn's strongest sport is swimming, which won 13 national titles (8 men's, 5 women's) in the late '90s and 2000s. Despite having a tiger as a mascot, Auburn fans cheer on their team with a "War Eagle" chant and features a trained eagle that flies over Jordan-Hare Stadium, much to the confusion of pretty much everyone. Auburn's oldest rivalry is with Georgia and they have a pretty intense one with their fellow Tigers at LSU, but there's no question that their most extreme one is with Alabama, with their Iron Bowl matchups considered more important than the Super Bowl in Alabama.

Athletically, '''West Virginia University''' has enjoyed the most success in the niche sport of rifle--it's won 19 NCAA team titles--but its football program is quite strong and has had moments of national prominence. The school was able to attract some decent talent and coaches for decades, with notable runs of regional success in the 1920s (when it was the centerpiece of a regional conference) and '50s (when it joined the [=SoCon=] shortly before all its power schools left to form the ACC). However, the hiring of Michigan assistant Don Nehlen as head coach in 1980 truly kickstarted the program. In his [[LongRunner two decades]] as HC, Nehlen guided the team into joining the Big East and introduced the distinctive "Flying WV" helmet logo. A standout year was 1988, when the Mountaineers finished the regular season undefeated and played #1 Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl with the national championship on the line (Notre Dame won 34-21). This turned out to be a trend for the Nehlen-led program, which lost [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut 9 of 13 bowl appearances]]. WVU partially shed this choking reputation in the 2000s when star QB Pat White took them to four straight bowl wins, which enabled it to be in the right place at the right time as the Big East imploded, finding a place in the Big 12.[[labelnote:*]]WVU's AD at the time, Oliver Luck ([[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeagueQuarterbacks Andrew's]] father), was a graduate of UT's law school, providing him contacts with many of that state's power brokers.[[/labelnote]] However, the Mountaineers failed to make compete for a national title in 2007 thanks to an upset loss to nearby rival Pitt, and the school hasn't come close tothat level of national relevance since.\\\

As the highest-profile representative of a small rural state that lacks any pro teams, West Virginians are pretty diehard for the team in Morgantown (unless they're [[Film/WeAreMarshall Marshall]] fans[[note]]This "rivalry" is not particularly strong, as the schools don't play each other anymore and the Herd never managed to beat the Mountaineers when they did; WVU has much fiercer (and competitive) rivalries with schools right across state lines, most notably Pitt.[[/note]]). When WVU fills its stadium, it becomes the largest "city" in the state by a healthy margin.[[labelnote:*]]As of the 2020 census, the population of the state capital of Charleston was about 49,000; Huntington (home to Marshall) was second at a hair less than 47K. Morgantown itself has around 30K.[[/labelnote]][[note]]WVU has possibly the most fragmented campus in America. Its central campus, like its home city, is shoehorned into an Appalachian river valley. As WVU grew in the 1960s, it was forced to expand into two additional campuses, one on a parcel about two miles down the Monongahela River and the other out of the valley entirely onto the hilltop that now houses its medical school and football stadium. Shuttling students between the campuses created megacity-level gridlock (making matters even worse, the central campus is on the other side of downtown from the other two), so a federally funded experimental light rail system, which still operates, was built in the 1970s to connect the campuses.[[/note]] Home games at the stadium echo with the sound of "Take Me Home, Country Roads"; Music/JohnDenver himself performed the song at the dedication of the school's hilltop stadium in 1980. Reflecting the school's UsefulNotes/{{Appalachia}}n heritage and success in rifle, games open with the Mountaineer mascot firing a rifle into the air.

The '''Pac-12 Conference''' (short for "Pacific") consists of Western US schools and is also tied to the Rose Bowl. Its history stretches back to 1915 (when it was known as the Pacific Coast Conference). It dissolved in 1959 but five of its members immediately reorganized as the "Athletic Association of Western Universities", popularly the "Big Five". While officially remaining the AAWU until 1968, it unofficially became the "Big Six" when Washington State returned in 1962, followed by "Pacific Athletic Conference" or "Pac-8" when the Oregon schools returned in 1964. The "Pacific-8" name was officially adopted in 1968, remaining in use until a change to Pac-10 when the Arizona schools joined in 1978 (thus making the name a geographic ArtifactTitle). The current "Pac-12" name was adopted when Utah and Colorado joined in 2011. To devoted college football fans, the Pac-12 is best known as a land of chaos, where anybody can beat anybody at any given time, especially in night games--hence the famous [[HashtagForLaughs #Pac12AfterDark]] meme.\\\

When it expanded to its current membership of 12 in 2011, it split into North and South Divisions, with the Bay Area, Oregon, and Washington schools in the North and the Arizona, Los Angeles, and Rocky Mountain schools in the South. However, the scheduling model assured that all California schools would play one another every season. When the NCAA changed its rules in the 2022 offseason to completely deregulate how conferences choose to select their title game participants, the Pac-12 immediately adopted a single league table for football, with the top two teams in the conference standings advancing to the title game. While the 2022 schedule was still based on the old divisions, the Pac-12 stated that it was reviewing future scheduling models.\\\

Like the Big Ten, the Pac-12 is well-known for being both an athletically competent and academically prestigious conference (with the California schools regularly being ranked in the Top 25 universities in the country). It also refers to itself as the "Conference of Champions", stressing the strengths of its schools' athletics [[JackOfAllTrades well beyond just football]]. Of particular note are UCLA, Stanford, and USC, all of which have ''[[OverNineThousand over 100]]'' national team championships.\\\

However, the Pac's reputation in football has never been ''quite'' as sterling as its sister conferences further east (not helped by most of their aforementioned late games airing in the middle of the night through most of the country), and its programs and fanbases have been far outpaced by the other conferences for several decades. Largely for this reason, USC and UCLA announced in 2022 that they will be ending their century-long membership in the conference in 2024 in order to make the leap to the Big Ten. This move has had massive ramifications for conference alignments--and the long-term structure of college football. More than losing some of its most titled programs, this cost the conference its largest market at a time where it was negotiating a new media deal, and observers were increasingly wary about the Pac's future. This only increased with the announcement that Colorado would return to the Big 12 in 2024, costing the Pac-12 another large media market in Denver. The following week, the Pac-12 ''lost five more members'', with the Big Ten scooping up Oregon and Washington, and the Big 12 taking the other "Four Corners" schools (Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah), all for 2024. The carcass of the Pac-12 was then picked over by the ACC, which took California and Stanford, effectively spelling the end of one of the most storied NCAA conferences. It's possible that the "Pac-12" brand may survive, though not as a power conference; the two remaining schools, Oregon State and Washington State, effectively won a legal battle over the distribution of the conference assets.[[note]]Under Pac-12 bylaws, schools that announce their departure are immediately removed from the conference board and lose voting rights. The settlement between the 12 members acknowledged that the OSU and Wazzu presidents are now the only legitimate members of the Pac-12 board, with those schools having control of most of the Pac-12 assets, including the brand name.[[/note]] The NCAA has confirmed that the "Pac-2" can operate as a two-team conference during a two-year grace period available to any conference that drops below the required number of members (for FBS, 8 teams). For at least 2024, the Pac-2 will be in a football scheduling alliance with the Mountain West Conference, while most of their other sports (apart from baseball) will be housed in the non-football West Coast Conference through 2025–26 (the end of the grace period).

The Beavers of '''Oregon State University''' have a reputation as the ButtMonkey of the Pac-12, but it hasn't always been that way. They had several winning seasons in the first half of century and even were the first West Coast school to produce a Heisman winner, star QB Terry Baker in 1962. However, their reputation as a competitive football school was greatly tarnished when they went nearly three decades without a winning season (1971-98), and they now have the worst overall win-loss record in the conference. This stretch was ended by the arrival of Dennis Erickson in 1999, who took the team on a Cinderella run to a conference championship the following year. That run still stands as the program's peak in many respects; the Beavers sunk back to mediocrity and worse in the 2010s, though the return of their 2000 QB Jonathan Smith as the team's HC has helped revive their prospects. However, the implosion of the Pac-12 has left OSU in a precarious position--especially considering that it spent more than $160 million on a massive stadium renovation that was completed just in time for the conference to implode (though that's dwarfed by Cal's athletic debts). On top of that, Smith would leave after the 2023 season for the Michigan State vacancy. For a short time, OSU and fellow Pac-12 leftover Washington State were being fought over by the American Athletic Conference and Mountain West Conference, but on the same day that Cal and Stanford were announced as new ACC members, The American ruled out any expansion to the Pacific Time Zone, making it more and more likely that the two leftovers will eventually end up in the MW. Further evidence of this was the announcement that the "Pac-2" had entered into a football scheduling alliance with the MW for 2024 and 2025.\\\

One of the more geographically isolated Power Five schools, '''Washington State University''' sits in the agricultural Palouse region well over an hour's drive from the nearest significant airport (Spokane). "Wazzu" is not a sports powerhouse (its sole national title in any sport was in indoor track and field in 1977), and its football program has had a few ups and quite a few more downs through the decades. Like Oregon State, it has traditionally played second-fiddle to its state's "main" school, though the program has had some good runs since the late '90s under coaches Mike Price and Mike Leach, the former taking them to two conference titles and the latter shattering conference passing records with his high-flying Air Raid offense. Today, the program is probably most notable for "Ol' Crimson", a school flag that waves at every broadcast of ESPN's ''College [=GameDay=]'' as part of a decade-plus-long campaign to get the school featured on the show that finally succeeded in 2018.[[note]]Even during COVID-19, when ''[=GameDay=]'' was a studio-only show with no fans, the hosts cut every week to a remote feed of one or more Wazzu fans waving Ol' Crimson to keep the tradition alive.[[/note]] They gained further national attention when head coach Nick Rolovich was fired in 2021 for refusing a COVID-19 vaccine in the face of a mandate for state employees. Wazzu is the other Pac-12 school being left behind in the 2022–23 realignment saga, and when considering geography, athletic success (or lack thereof), and resources, may be in a worse position than OSU, which it is likely to join in a move to the Mountain West.\\\

Besides the other Pacific Northwest schools, Wazzu's biggest rivalry has traditionally been with Idaho, an now-FCS program whose campus is located just seven miles away across the border. The "Battle of the Palouse" was the one rivalry in which the Cougars were typically able to shed their underdog status, and it was once a big deal in the rural region, but the series is no longer held regularly. Before taking the Cougar nickname in the early 20th century, the football team's mascot was one of many named after American "Indians". This had to do with the program hiring much of its staff from the Carlisle Indian School; the program's peak years, including the 1915 season where they went undefeated with a Rose Bowl victory, were coached by William "Lone Star" Dietz, a Carlisle alum who was later the namesake for Washington D.C.'s much-maligned NFL mascot (he turned out to not even be a Native American himself). Nearly a century after that undefeated season, Washington's State Senate passed a resolution to recognize that 1915 team as national champions, though no selector ever named them to that honor and the school itself doesn't recognize it.

The '''Southeastern Conference''' (or just the '''SEC''') is the premier conference of the American DeepSouth and all of college football, enjoying such a degree of popularity and on-field success that truly dwarfs the rest of college football. Fans are only half-joking when they speculate that the SEC could rival the NFL if it absorbed just a few more major programs (something that the SEC likes to do every few years). In the BCS era, SEC schools were 9-2 in the championship game (and one loss was due to a matchup of two SEC members). In the 4-team CFP era, the SEC has always sent at least one rep to the playoff (usually
either Alabama or Georgia), has won more then half of the national titles, and is the only conference to have sent two teams to the playoff in the same season (both times they did so, those teams played each other for the championship). Tradition runs deep in the conference: Alabama-Auburn is considered one of the greatest rivalries in the sport, as is Georgia-Florida, whose Halloween weekend game is nicknamed "The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party". The SEC is also notable for its relatively compact geography. With realignment for 2024, combined with the collapse of the Pac-12, the SEC will be the only power conference whose geographic footprint consists entirely of adjacent states.[[note]]South Carolina is the only SEC state that borders only one other conference state (Georgia). Oklahoma, which becomes part of the footprint in 2024, borders three current SEC states.[[/note]]\\\

The SEC was the ''other'' Power Five conference that was formed by schools that seceded from the Southern Conference. In 1932, the 13 [=SoCon=] members located east and south of the Appalachians left to form a more geographically compact league. Three of its charter members left over time. Sewanee, a small private school in Tennessee, had been a football power around the turn of the 20th century, but by the time the SEC formed, it was in the process of deemphasizing athletics; it left in 1940 and is now in D-III. Georgia Tech, as noted in the ACC folder, left in 1964 and Tulane left two years later.\\\

The SEC was the first D-I conference to split into divisions ("East" and "West" in its case) and hold a conference championship game between the top teams of each division, becoming the TropeCodifier for all subsequent conferences to do so.[[note]]The NCAA rule that allowed said title game had actually been enacted in 1987 for the benefit of two D-II leagues, but neither league actually established a title game until after the SEC did.[[/note]] This was implemented in 1992, after the additions of Arkansas and South Carolina made it impractical for all teams in the conference to play each other every year (doing so would have allowed only one non-conference game per season). Texas A&M and Missouri joined in 2012, bringing the conference to a massive 14 teams, which has the unfortunate side effect that SEC players can go their entire college career without ever facing some cross-division teams. From 2012–2023, each team played all six other teams in its division and one designated cross-division rival every year, plus one other cross-division game per year on a rotating basis. Some fans have speculated that the SEC might expand the conference schedule to 9 games, but nothing has come of this so far... except in 2020, thanks to COVID-19. The 2023 season was the last for the divisional setup; when Oklahoma and Texas join in 2024, the divisions will be ditched. The 8-game schedule will stay in place for the time being (with all schools assured of facing all others home and away in a 4-year cycle), but the SEC left the door open for a move to 9 games sometime after 2024.\\\

As noted above, the SEC will add Oklahoma and Texas; while both publicly said they wouldn't join until the current Big 12 media contract expires in 2025, the general reaction from the college sports universe was "we'll believe it when we see it", with most believing that rich boosters and/or ESPN would [[MoneyDearBoy grease an earlier exit]]. The skeptics proved to be right, as the Big 12 and the two schools agreed on a 2024 departure date. The conference gets a lot of games televised; it has an extremely lucrative contract with ESPN for all of its games that kicks in for 2024 (replacing a less lucrative but still massive deal that was split between CBS and ESPN). The only richer contract is that of the Big Ten, and both are ''miles'' ahead of any other conference in that respect.

Located in the city of Eugene at the southern tip of the Willamette Valley, the '''University of Oregon''''s athletic program is best known historically for its success in track (more on that later). Its football team was fairly successful in the early 20th century but descended into mediocrity for decades starting in the late '30s, save for a brief period of success under Len Casanova in the '50s and early '60s. However, after a ''long'' rebuild process led by Rich Brooks (1977-94), Oregon began playing its best football in the 21st century under Mike Bellotti (1995-2008), staying a Pac-12 power and competing a few times for a national title (though it has [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut yet to seal the deal]]). HC Chip Kelly (2009-12) made the team famous for its ridiculously [[LightningBruiser fast-paced offense]] where they spent the whole game as if they're in a 2-minute drill; this offense earned them a berth in the BCS National Championship Game after an otherwise-undefeated 2010. In 2014, the school's first Heisman winner, QB Marcus Mariota, led the Ducks to an appearance in the first CFP National Championship game, making Oregon the only Pac-12 school to progress that far in the CFP postseason. Oregon followed the Los Angeles schools to the Big Ten effective in 2024.\\\

The '''University of Arizona''' ("Zona" for short) followed its intrastate rival Arizona State to the Pac-12 in 1978. While fairly well renowned as a basketball school, its football team has mostly just ''existed'' in Tucson. Their 1987 season may well have been the most mediocre campaign in college football history: 4 wins, 4 losses, 3 ties.[[note]]Besides the three ties, they had a 1-point loss to Iowa and a 2-point loss to USC, meaning they were 8 points away from a 9-2 record.[[/note]] Their greatest success came in the 1990s; led by the dominating "Desert Swarm" defense of coach Dick Tomey, they won a share of the Pac-10 title in 1993 and earned a higher ranking than conference-winner UCLA in 1997 by winning more games. However, the team cratered after Tomey's departure and have generally underachieved since despite a succession of high-profile coaches and some notable players. The Wildcats' performance truly cratered in 2020, where they went winless in the COVID-shortened season and won just one in the following year.\\\

The team receded from national prominence when [=McCartney=] retired after Salaam's Heisman win to focus on his Christian ministry organization. The Buffaloes ''could'' have become the first FBS team ever to field a woman, but placekicker Katie Hnida[[labelnote:*]](The "H" is silent.)[[/labelnote]], though making the team and suiting up for a bowl game, never saw the field. Hnida would later report after leaving the school that she had been sexually assaulted by a teammate, one of many controversies that forced the school to fire head coach Gary Barnett and incur several sanctions; the Buffaloes subsequently endured a decade of losing seasons and still have yet to return to their former success. In the midst of this decline, when the Pac-10 tried to swipe up half of the Big 12 in 2010, Colorado was the only school to actually follow through and make the leap. The move didn't last long: Colorado will return to the Big 12 in 2024, now coached by Deion Sanders, whose Hall of Fame playing resume and larger-than-life persona immediately elevated the program's profile (if not its performance).\\\

While its football program is AlwaysSecondBest to its dominant intrastate rival, '''Oklahoma State University-Stillwater''' actually claims the most national athletic titles of any school outside the Pac-12 (a distant fourth to Stanford, UCLA, and USC) thanks to its wrestling program, which has won ''34'' championships (the majority of them pre-1970), and golf, which has won 11. On the football field, the Cowboys (known as the "Aggies" or "Tigers" pre-1958, when the school was called Oklahoma A&M, and more colloquially known today as the "Pokes") have fluctuated massively in strength. The program was retroactively awarded a national title for its undefeated 1945 season, but it collapsed to a losing record the following year. In 1951, the Cowboys had a serious "never live it down" episode when one of their players deliberately injured Drake's African-American star Johnny Bright in what most concluded was a racially motivated attack. After going under .500 through the '60s, the team began to recover, culminating in its production of its sole Heisman winner, legendary RB Barry Sanders, in 1988. Unfortunately, Sanders' departure coincided with a host of sanctions that again cratered the program's win record. Thankfully, the hiring of current coach and former star QB Mike Gundy in 2005 set the school on the longest run of sustained success in its history.\\\

OK State's athletic program is also notable for being a pet project of a billionaire alum--in this case, late energy investor and football stadium namesake T. Boone Pickens, who funded the expansion of the stadium and many other OSU projects, both athletic and academic, to the tune of over $1 billion. Other examples of this phenomenon include Big 12 newcomer Houston and incoming Big Ten member Oregon. The prominence of the school's wrestling program is reflected in the position of its arena (also used by the basketball teams), which is located right behind the eastern end zone of the U-shaped Boone. Diehard Poke fans known as "paddle people" sit in the front rows of said stadium and make noise by smacking the sideline wall with giant orange paddles.

'''Texas Tech University''' was long considered a junior sibling to Texas and Texas A&M among the state-run Texas schools, both athletically and academically. Efforts to lure Texas to the Big Ten or Pac-10 in 2010 were considered hobbled by the perception that any expansion scenario involving the Longhorns would require them to also admit the much less desirable Tech, which has never finished in the AP Poll's Top 10 and is one of the most geographically isolated Power 5 schools. Even still, the Red Raiders have managed to carve out a solid if not spectacular football legacy. The arrival of HC Mike Leach in 2000 jump-started their greatest period of success, with his pass-heavy Air Raid offense bringing a succession of record-breaking quarterbacks to the team, though some football observers derided them as marginally-talented "system [=QBs=]". One of those [=QBs=], Kliff Kingsbury, later took over as HC in 2013. Kingsbury was cut loose after six unspectacular seasons most notable for producing Patrick Mahomes, whose massive NFL success was sufficient to win Kingsbury a pro coaching role of his own.\\\

While the '''University of Central Florida''' is one of the newer D-I schools by founding date and start of football, and currently the youngest school in the Power 5, it has grown at a tremendous pace and now has the largest undergraduate enrollment of any single university campus in the country (close to 60,000), with only Texas A&M having a larger total enrollment.[[note]]While incoming Big 12 member Arizona State and Conference USA member Liberty have considerably larger total enrollments than either UCF or A&M, it's only because of both schools' online operations (ASU's being large, and LU's being absolutely ''massive''). The distinction of most on-campus students belongs to ASU, but its enrollment is split between ''four'' Phoenix-area campuses; the main campus in Tempe has fewer total students than UCF has undergrads.[[/note]] The Knights football program has likewise had a momentous ascent from their first season in D-III in 1979, becoming the first football program to play at all four current levels of NCAA competition (James Madison became the second in 2022). Three years later, UCF moved to D-II, and later managed to lure former NFL coach Lou Saban, though he enjoyed far less success than in the pros, stepping down in the middle of his second season. The university nearly dropped football, but it became successful in D-II in the last half of the '80s, and took the jump to Division I-AA (now FCS) in 1990. In the then-Golden Knights' first I-AA season, they became the first team ever to qualify for the I-AA/FCS playoffs in their first season of eligibility and enjoyed reasonable success until making the jump to I-A/FBS in 1996. After modest success as an independent and a decline in the early 2000s as a football-only member of the MAC, the program was reinvigorated by the arrival of HC George O'Leary in 2004, who had been forced to leave Notre Dame in disgrace before coaching a game thanks to lying on his resume. While the Knights went winless in their last MAC season, they turned things around upon joining CUSA in 2005, winning two conference titles and playing for two others while making their first bowl appearances (though a win wouldn't come until their fourth try in 2010). O'Leary also oversaw UCF's move to The American in 2013, where it won conference titles in its first two seasons. However, his tenure [[BookEnds ended in 2015 as it began]]--with a winless season.\\\

Scott Frost quickly righted the ship, making a bowl in his first season alongside program-redefining freshman QB [=McKenzie=] Milton. 2017 saw Milton set multiple school records while leading the Knights to an unbeaten season, finishing it off in the Peach Bowl by beating an Auburn team that had laid double-digit defeats on both participants in that year's CFP title game (Alabama and Georgia). The program claimed a national title on the basis of a single computer ranking, with Bama the consensus champion; Floridians were so incensed that the school was not even given the opportunity to fight for the title in the Playoff that the state legislature ''passed a resolution'' recognizing it. The following year, with Frost gone to Nebraska and Josh Heupel replacing him, UCF again went unbeaten until losing to LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, having lost Milton to a catastrophic knee injury in its final regular-season game. This success, along with UCF's explosive growth and location in a major media market, made it a frequent subject of realignment speculation. This finally bore fruit in 2021 with the announcement that the Knights would join the Big 12 in 2023.\\\

UCF was known as the "Golden Knights" before 2007; before that, the team had been known as the "Knights of the Pegasus", and before ''that'' (indeed, before the football program was founded) the mascot was briefly [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d1/Florida_Tech_Citronauts.png/207px-Florida_Tech_Citronauts.png "The Citronaut"]], an anthropomorphic orange that was also an astronaut (basically '60s Central UsefulNotes/{{Florida}} in a nutshell). The football team plays in what had been one of the most uniquely named stadiums in college football, the Bounce House.[[note]]The "Bounce House" nickname was actually gleaned off its original corporate naming rights deal with cable provider Bright House Networks, now part of Spectrum (the brand name of Charter Communications). That deal lapsed after the 2019 season.[[/note]] After playing in the off-campus Citrus Bowl for several decades, the university built a more modern facility on-campus in 2007. Unfortunately, the stadium wasn't exactly up to snuff; in addition to lacking water fountains on opening day (a code violation and a major problem in the Florida heat), the stadium noticeably shook when fans were on their feet, giving it the nickname that briefly became official when naming rights sponsorships dried up in 2020 (though the stadium now shakes much less--and has water--after renovations). Despite its relatively small size, UCF's stadium has arguably one of the best home-field advantages in the sport, with frequent sellout crowds that deafen visiting offenses.

UCF's primary rival is USF (South Florida), down the road in Tampa. "The War on I-4" reached its height in TheNewTens during UCF's ascent, though as of 2022 it's (at least temporarily) on ice since USF was left in The American, and it'll be several years before UCF can pencil them in on their out-of-conference schedule. Of note is that [=UConn=] tried to form a rivalry with UCF called the "Civil [[FunWithAcronyms ConFLiCT]]" when both were in The American; [[UnknownRival UCF disavowed the "rivalry"]], and it essentially died when [=UConn=] left the conference after 2019. Potential future rivalries include with fellow American transplant Cincinnati, with whom the Knights have had many important battles over the years; Baylor, whom they upset in the 2014 Fiesta Bowl; fellow Big 12 eastern outpost West Virginia; and Houston, also a former AAC team with a history associated with the space program.

The '''University of Utah''' is one of two FBS universities founded by early UsefulNotes/{{Mormon|ism}} leader Brigham Young, and the ''other'' school known to its students and fans as "The U", complete with a hand signal very similar to that of Miami. Utah was a regional football power for much of its history, with some dominant years in the 1920s and '30s under the long tenure of Hall of Fame coach Ike Armstrong (1925-49). The Utes were inconsistent after his departure and regressed in the '70s with the rise of BYU hurting them in recruiting. The program turned things around in the '90s and made a national splash in the 2000s, becoming the first "BCS Buster"[[labelnote:*]]a team outside of the Power Five's predecessors, the six "automatic qualifying" conferences of the BCS era, to play in a BCS bowl game[[/labelnote]] in 2004 under HC Urban Meyer and star QB Alex Smith and becoming the first two-time BCS Buster in 2008 under current HC Kyle Whittingham, winning both bowl games on the way to undefeated seasons. Their nine-game bowl win streak from 1999-2009 is tied for the second-longest ever. They parlayed this success into an invitation from the former Pac-10 in 2011, eventually settling in there as a solid competitor. After the loss of two players to gun deaths before and during the 2021 season, the program retired its #22 in their honor and won the conference the next two seasons. The Utes are another program leaving the sinking ship of the Pac-12, moving to the Big 12 alongside their Pac-12 Four Corners compatriots.\\\

The Utes are also known for their spicy rivalry with LDS Church-owned BYU (nicknamed "the Holy War"); they have similar but less extreme rivalries with Utah State and Colorado. After playing most of their history in Ute Stadium (renamed Robert L. Rice Stadium in the '70s after the main benefactor of a facility renovation), their home venue was almost completely demolished and rebuilt in 1998 so it could be used as the main stadium of the 2002 Winter Olympics (with the Eccles family, major benefactors for the university as a whole, getting their name added to the pre-existing "Rice" name). Like Florida State, Utah has explicit permission from a Native American tribe to use a tribal nickname, in its case the various Ute tribes, one of which (the Northern Ute, consisting of three bands) has its reservation in the state. The U (presumably) gained considerable goodwill from the Ute nation when it scrapped its "Redskins" nickname in 1972, well before most other schools with similar nicknames did so, and gained more when it dropped Native mascots. The Ute nation also signed off on the use of two feathers in the school's athletic logo (said logo later having been deemphasized) and the school's current mascot, an anthropomorphic red-tailed hawk. Outside of football, the school is known for its strong programs in men's basketball, women's gymnastics (nine national championships in the '80s and '90s) and co-ed skiing (13 national titles). The university is symbolized by a large concrete block "U" on a nearby hillside (built in 1907, inspired by similar hillside letters at UC Berkeley and BYU), which is visible throughout the Salt Lake Valley and is lit up whenever a Ute team wins a contest.

The '''University of Kansas''' (locally abbreviated "KU") is best known for its historic and prestigious men's basketball program, which was founded by James Naismith himself[[labelnote:*]]the man who ''invented the game''--though ironically, he was the only men's basketball coach to end his KU tenure with a losing record[[/labelnote]], produced UsefulNotes/WiltChamberlain, and holds numerous records and honors (including the second-most wins,[[note]]Before being forced by the NCAA to vacate 15 wins from its 2017–18 season due to fielding an ineligible player, it had the most wins.[[/note]] third-highest lifetime win percentage, four national titles, and the most conference titles of any program). Its football program is ''much'' less esteemed, though it is quite historic; it is the only original member of the MVIAA to still be in the Big 12. The Jayhawks have been pretty bad pretty much since that conference dissolved in the 1920s, including a winless 1954 season. The team had an anomalous breakout year in 2007 under HC Mark Mangino only to fall ''very'' hard back to earth quickly after, reclaiming its ButtMonkey status with a vengeance. Through the 2021 season, the Jayhawks failed to post more than three wins in a season since a 5-7 campaign in 2009[[labelnote:*]]In which they started 5-0 and were ranked in the Top 25 before finishing 0-7, which until 2022 gave them the odd distinction of having been ranked more recently than they were last ''bowl eligible''.[[/labelnote]], going completely winless in 2015 and 2020. Needless to say, they've become regular "Bottom 10" members as the "Kansas Nayhawks". However, the arrival of current coach Lance Leipold after the 2020 disaster immediately turned things around. In 2022, the Jayhawks surpassed their best win count in over a decade ''just to start their season'' and made it to bowl eligibility; they posted their first winning record since 2008 the next year.\\\

The '''University of Colorado Boulder''' (the flagship campus of the state's university system, locally abbreviated as "CU") is unsurprisingly home to a powerhouse skiing program, being located in the hub of the sports' popularity (the school has 19 national titles in men's/co-ed skiing). Its other sports have not been as successful,[[note]]though 1960s DB Hale Irwin won an individual NCAA golf title that proved to be the launching pad for his Hall of Fame career in that sport[[/note]] but football has had some moments of prominence. The Colorado football program was a regional power in the late 19th/early 20th century. The hiring of pro coach Chuck Fairbanks in the early '80s brought unwelcome attention to the school when the team cratered under his tenure. Thankfully, his successor Bill [=McCartney=] elevated the program to its greatest heights, earning a split national title in 1990 and producing a Heisman winner in RB Rashaan Salaam in 1994.\\\

The team receded from national prominence when [=McCartney=] retired after Salaam's Heisman win to focus on his Christian ministry organization. The Buffaloes ''could'' have become the first FBS team ever to field a woman, but placekicker Katie Hnida[[labelnote:*]](The "H" is silent.)[[/labelnote]], though making the team and suiting up for a bowl game, never saw the field. Hnida would later report after leaving the school that she had been sexually assaulted by a teammate. This was one of many controversies to impact the program at this time, forcing the school to fire head coach Gary Barnett and incur several sanctions; the Buffaloes subsequently endured a decade of losing seasons and still have yet to return to their former success. In the midst of this decline, when the Pac-10 tried to swipe up half of the Big 12 in 2010, Colorado was the only school to actually follow through and make the leap. The move didn't last long: Colorado will return to the Big 12 in 2024, now coached by Deion Sanders, whose Hall of Fame playing resume and larger-than-life persona immediately elevated the program's profile.\\\

Colorado's stadium, Folsom Field (named for an early coach who led the team to three straight undefeated seasons in 1909-11), is one of the most picturesque in the nation, located right up against the Rocky Mountains and among the unique "Tuscan Vernacular Revival" architecture of the surrounding campus. Folsom has the highest elevation of any Power Five stadium and the third highest of any in the FBS behind Wyoming and Air Force. The program has a strong in-state rivalries with the latter school and with Colorado State. Since adopting the "Buffalo" name in 1934 (prior teams were the "Silver Helmets" or "Frontiersmen"), the school has run an actual buffalo (i.e., bison) named Ralphie along the sidelines of said field.

Houston's late arrival to the SWC, history with sanctions, and peaks and valleys during its time in the weak C-USA have largely excluded it from consideration as one of Texas' premier programs. However, as an urban school located in one of Texas's biggest metro areas, donors have pushed hard for years to get the program up to the next level. Most notable among these is Houston Rockets owner and UH alum Tilman Fertitta, whose name graces the Cougars' basketball arena and has made UH the most recent example of a program that's the pet project of a billionaire alum, following in the tradition set by charter Big 12 member Oklahoma State and incoming Big Ten member Oregon. It ''just'' missed joining the Big East before that conference collapsed, and Houston had to settle for the American despite the school investing millions into building a new stadium to prep for the leap.[[note]]Despite having a stadium built right on-campus from the school's inception, it was fairly small and not actually owned by the university until 1970; the team shared the venue of hated crosstown rival Rice in the '50s and early '60s and then spent more than 30 years in the famous Astrodome, though it left that venue in the late '90s when the dome became obsolete. They even cohabited with the [[UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueSoccer Houston Dynamo of Major League Soccer]] for a few years. Said on-campus stadium was demolished in 2012 to make way for the current one, which opened in 2014.[[/note]] However, all those years of campaigning finally paid off when the impending departure of Oklahoma and Texas for the SEC enabled UH's promotion to the Big 12 for 2023.

Known affectionately as "The Y", '''Brigham Young University''' is the second FBS member to have been founded by early UsefulNotes/{{Mormon|ism}} leader Brigham Young,[[note]]Read further down for the first.[[/note]] though it wouldn't actually be absorbed by the LDS Church until 1896. BYU had done little in football before [=LaVell=] Edwards, who had arrived at The Y as an assistant in 1962, was elevated to the head coaching position in 1972. A major contribution to this turn in football fortunes was the LDS Church disavowing its former anti-Black doctrines and practices in 1978, aiding the Cougars' recruiting; BYU did not admit Black students at all through the 1960s, far after most universities outside of the South, and its team accepted its first Black players in Edwards' first season, making it among the last programs to integrate. Edwards installed a high-powered passing offense that brought the Cougars quick success, helping them claim a national title in 1984 and produce a Heisman winner in Ty Detmer in 1990; they remain the last non-major school to win that latter award. BYU in this era became known as "Quarterback U"; under Edwards, ''nine'' BYU quarterbacks led the NCAA in either passing yards, touchdowns, or rating, more than any other ''program'' in college football history. Since Edwards' retirement after 2000, BYU has remained a generally winning program, though not quite at its 1980s heights.\\\

BYU is well-known for [[StrawmanU taking its faith very seriously]]. The school has a strict honor code that reflects its church's doctrine, and every so often a player will get suspended or dismissed for a violation. Many of its players are also a bit older than typical college athletes. These older players are returned Mormon missionaries; the LDS Church strongly encourages (but does not require) its young men to spend two years as such, with most doing so immediately after high school graduation.[[labelnote:*]]Before the church lowered the required age for male missionaries from 19 to 18 in the early 2010s, most had to interrupt their college education; the NCAA has long held that missionary service does not count against an athlete's college eligibility. BYU's heavy use of returned missionaries has drawn minor criticism, but because they are not allowed to engage in athletic training during their terms and have minimal time for intense physical activity, it's accepted that BYU gains no significant advantage.[[/labelnote]] BYU also has a firm policy against Sunday play in any sport; while this generally doesn't affect football, it has dramatically affected other sports and caused headaches for scheduling of NCAA championship events. Though it bounced around a number of smaller conferences, BYU felt that it could make far more money as an independent with its built-in LDS following, following the model that Notre Dame established for Catholic fans, and set out on its own in 2011.[[labelnote:*]]The school then placed most of its non-football sports in the West Coast Conference, which doesn't play football and consists entirely of private faith-based schools that don't schedule any in-conference sporting events on Sunday (though, unlike BYU, all of the other members will play non-conference games and participate in NCAA championship events on Sundays).[[/labelnote]] Nonetheless, a Power Five slot remained a goal for BYU, which it finally reached when it joined the Big 12 in 2023. The Big 12 allowed BYU to maintain its no-Sunday policy; perhaps not coincidentally, it has two other faith-based members (Baylor and TCU, though both will play on Sundays).

The '''University of Cincinnati''' is primarily known as a basketball school (with two back-to-back national titles in the early '60s) and has had an up-and-down history in football. Its historic high peak was serving as Sid Gillman's final college coaching stop before the launch of his pro career. After many years of under achieving and bouncing around second-tier conferences (including being a founding member of CUSA), UC joined the Big East in 2005 and soon after surged to national prominence under Brian Kelly in the late 2000s, coming a second away from qualifying for the National Championship game in 2009 [[note]]In the Big 12 championship game between Texas and Nebraska, the officials rewound the game clock in the fourth quarter to 1 second after Texas QB Colt [=McCoy=] threw the ball away on 3rd down and it seemed as though time had run out. This gave the 'Horns enough time to kick the game winning field goal and qualify for the championship game. Had they lost, unbeaten Cincinnati would have leapfrogged them into the title game instead.[[/note]](helping him land his position at Notre Dame). Under coach Luke Fickell, the school became one of the most esteemed non-Power Five programs, seen as fielding a team that could be playoff-worthy if they only played in a more competitive conference... until they actually ''made'' the playoffs in 2021, making them the only Group of Five program to reach those heights in the CFP era (even if they were quickly bested by Alabama). They wouldn't be Group of Five for long, though: earlier that same season, they accepted a spot in the Big 12, joining in 2023.\\\

UC has a fairly close professional relationship with its city's pro team, the Bengals. The Bengals played their first few seasons in the school's historic Nippert Stadium and continue to use UC's indoor practice facilities to this day rather than build their own. They have returned the favor by letting the Bearcats play in their own stadium during renovations or major games. Nippert is one of the oldest venues in college sports. The stands were officially dedicated in 1924, but the field has been in use since at least 1915. It is named after Jimmy Nippert, a UC player who died from blood poisoning in 1923 after a spike wound sustained during a game became infected, most likely from droppings left on the field from a chicken race earlier in the day; his grandfather was a co-founder of Procter & Gamble and paid to have his grandson honored in the name. That said, having a pro-football team co-located in the city has negatively affected game attendance and viewership projections. Power Five conferences passed on this school numerous times because other schools such as Louisville, West Virginia, Rutgers, and Syracuse monopolized their TV markets.

The '''University of Wisconsin–Madison''', the flagship school of the state system, is another early football power that struggled mightily in the mid-20th century after the school pivoted more towards academics, picking up more of a reputation as a left-leaning StrawmanU than a sports school. The Badgers won a lot of games in the early 20th century but mostly faltered in the '30s and '40s outside of a very successful 1942 season where they claimed the school's sole national title in football. Their last era of sustained success for several decades came in the '50s, and they produced Heisman FB Alan Ameche in '54. After ''many'' years of losing, including a completely winless season in '68, the program saw a massive resurgence in the '90s under HC/AD Barry Alvarez. Ron Dayne won the Heisman in 1999 after becoming the FBS's all-time leading rusher, and the school has stayed bowl eligible for the past two decades in large part due to its well-earned reputation of producing record-breaking [=RBs=].\\\

Since that late '90s revival, the team's fanbase has adopted "Jump Around" as a customary celebration, where the fans make Camp Randall Stadium shake by jumping in unison to the Music/HouseOfPain classic between the third and fourth quarters. Said stadium is one of the oldest in college football and takes its name from the field's prior usage as an Army training camp during the American Civil War. The school's marching band is known for performing ''after'' games rather than at halftime, with their "Fifth Quarter" productions changing their orientation and setlist based on the game's outcome. This tradition was a product of the team's futility in the late '60s, as the school sought ways to keep fans in seats through the full game. Wisconsin's rivalry with Minnesota is the longest running series in FBS. Trivia note: the Badgers were the winners of the first college football game ever broadcast live on ESPN, the 1982 Independence Bowl (they beat Kansas State 14–3).[[note]]Under the NCAA's restrictive TV deal at the time, ESPN could show regular season games on same-day tape delay, but not live broadcasts. Since the NCAA doesn't control bowl games, they were able to start showing them live in 1982. The 1984 Supreme Court antitrust ruling against the NCAA enabled ESPN to start showing live regular season games.[[/note]]

Things boiled over in 2011 when Nebraska and Colorado left for the Big Ten and Pac-12, respectively, briefly costing them the right to host a conference championship game and hurting their members' ability to compete for a national title. Missouri and Texas A&M then moved to the SEC the next year, but the conference (barely) survived by replacing them with TCU and (despite the geographical oddity) West Virginia. While they've so far averted the disintegration that once seemed inevitable, mainstays Oklahoma and Texas are currently in the process of moving to the SEC in 2024, forcing another potential realignment. Shortly after OU and UT announced their departure, the Big 12 raided the American Athletic Conference, accepting Cincinnati, Houston, and UCF, along with FBS independent BYU. The current Big 12 commissioner said at his introductory press conference that the Big 12 was "open for business", and his realignment moves bore this out. After kicking the tires on basketball-first schools such as [=UConn=] (a men's and women's basketball power with a mediocre football program) and Gonzaga (a men's basketball power that hasn't had a football team since Pearl Harbor, and would have joined as a non-football member), the Big 12 ended up adding all four Pac-12 "Four Corners" schools (Arizona, Arizona State, [[HesBack Colorado]], and Utah) for 2024.\\\

The Big 12 is also [[InsistentTerminology unusually insistent]] that their conference name not be written "Big Twelve" or "Big XII"... [[EpicFail despite the official logo consisting primarily of a large "XII"]]. Despite having a full round-robin regular season format and no divisions during the 10-team era, and still not having divisions after the 2023 expansion, they still hold a championship game.

'''School Established:''' 1885[[note]]Predating Arizona becoming a state by almost three decades.[[/note]]\\

'''Arizona State University''' was basically the Boise State of TheFifties, TheSixties, and TheSeventies--the Western school that dominated its lower-profile conference on the road to becoming a national power. While a fairly weak football program in the early 20th century, future coaching great Dan Devine led them to an undefeated season in 1957. Frank Kush took over and had even greater success, with two undefeated records in 1970 and 1975, the latter season ending with a #2 final ranking. It was largely this success that led the Pac-8 to come calling for ASU (and their rival Arizona in a package deal), with them joining the conference in 1978. However, Kush, a DrillSergeantNasty who took full advantage of the desert sun as discipline, was fired in the middle of the 1979 season after a scandal emerged over his harsh treatment of his players, including a lawsuit from a former punter who accused Kush of punching him in the mouth during a game.\\\

The '''University of Washington''' (or, more affectionately, U-Dub) is another academically prestigious public university that has had uninterrupted membership in the Pac-12 and its predecessors. It's enjoyed regional and occasional national success in a wide range of sports, but football is the flagship program. In addition to their two claimed and three unclaimed national championships, the Huskies hold the FBS record for the longest unbeaten streak (64 games from 1908-16 under coach Gil Dobie), are second to Oklahoma for the longest winning streak (40 games from 1908-14), and ended Miami's FBS-record home winning streak at 58 games in 1994 (a particularly notable victory, as the two schools split the '91 national title after both went undefeated). After a steep decline in the 2000s, including a winless 2008, the team bounced back as one of the more competitive programs in the West, achieving a berth in the CFP after 2016. On the down side, they're also the most recent [[MedalOfDishonor ranked FBS team to have lost to an FCS team]], falling to Montana in the opener to a 2021 season that ended over a decade of winning records (though they bounced back to their winning ways the following year). The departure of UCLA and USC for the Big Ten, followed by later realignment moves, led U-Dub to move to the Big Ten alongside its historic rival Oregon; it finished its last year in the Pac with an undefeated run to compete in its first national championship game in over three decades, coming up short to Michigan.\\\

U-Dub occupies a scenic campus in northern Seattle, sitting on the shore on the area's two largest lakes, Union and Washington, and featuring views of the Cascade Range and Olympic Mountains. Their home stadium sits on Lake Washington and is the second of the three FBS venues directly accessible by boat, making "sailgating" a popular tradition. On two separate periods, the stadium has hosted the Seahawks of the NFL while their normal home stadiums have been unavailable; in return, Seahawks owner Paul Allen helped fund a renovation to the stadium that greatly amplifies crowd noise. Husky fans also have a credible (though disputed) claim to having originated "The Wave" now currently practiced in most large gatherings back in the '80s. The Huskies' most historic rivalry is their intrastate "Apple Cup" competition with Washington State, though their matchups with Oregon are typically more high-profile and competitive. U-Dub is sometimes referred to as "Quarterback U"; going back to Warren Moon in 1976, the majority of the school's starters have seen playing time in the NFL, though none have matched his Pro Hall of Fame career.

The main campus of the '''Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey''' system in New Brunswick is the oldest college in FBS football, being founded as Queen's College a decade prior to American independence.[[note]]The eight other colleges with such a distinction are all in FCS, seven of them in the UsefulNotes/IvyLeague; Rutgers is considered a Public Ivy, having been bailed out by the New Jersey government and designated as the state school of New Jersey in the mid-20th century.[[/note]] Its football history is similarly lengthy. At the very dawn of the sport, Rutgers was home to the first intercollegiate football game (which it won) and claimed a share of the first ever national title in 1869 with a 1-1 record (split with Princeton, which it played twice, and obviously awarded years after the fact). The school was also one of the first to have racially integrated teams, with Paul Robeson becoming the first Black All-American in 1917. "The Birthplace of College Football" has had a few moments of glory since, with [[FlawlessVictory undefeated seasons]] in 1961 and 1976,[[note]]They got snubbed by the bowls in 1976 despite going 11-0, which led to the creation of the short-lived Garden State Bowl, played at the Meadowlands from 1978-81, with Rutgers playing Arizona State in the inaugural game.[[/note]] but has otherwise been the very essence of college football mediocrity. Rutgers was involved in the early talks surrounding the formation of both the Ivy League and the original basketball-centered Big East but didn't join either, leaving them as a football independent with no real identity for decades. By TheEighties, they finally decided to take some steps toward legitimacy, upgrading their schedule (they haven't played traditional rival Princeton since 1980) and moving most of their home games from their small on-campus stadium to Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands. This finally bore some fruit when they joined the Big East as a football affiliate in 1991, then moved home games back to campus in 1994, in a new stadium with double the capacity of their old facility, laying the groundwork for their eventual Big Ten invite. However, the program arguably got even worse on the field during this time, bottoming out with a winless 1997 season. They're a frequent member of ESPN's "Bottom 10", an informal weekly ranking of the worst teams in FBS (said column typically calls them "In a Rut-gers"). When coach Greg Schiano had a few years of success and helped get the school to 11 wins in 2006, their first in the double digits since '76, it was considered a miracle of such scale that it landed him an HC gig in the NFL; he came right back a decade later and more or less picked up back where he left off.\\\

Rutgers fans shouldn't feel ''too'' bad about their school's lack of success in football; their sole NCAA national title in ''any'' sport was a shared one in fencing in 1949, six years before their athletics program adopted the "Scarlet Knights" moniker in 1955. Everyone involved has more or less acknowledged that Rutgers is in the Big Ten solely to give the conference a foothold in the New York media market.[[note]]It's not ''just'' a matter of TV sets, but also that a fairly significant number of those sets belong to non-Rutgers Big Ten alumni, helping the conference's other schools to engage with their area alums (and current/future donors).[[/note]] Rutgers' urban campus, located on the fringe of the wider UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity metro area, is broken up into several small sub-campuses scattered across the city. Adding to the confusion, there are also two other Rutgers campuses elsewhere in UsefulNotes/NewJersey (Newark and Camden) that compete in D-III as the "Scarlet Raiders" and "Scarlet Raptors".

The '''University of California, Los Angeles''' is one of the [[BadassBookworm most esteemed public schools in the nation]] and is an overall athletic powerhouse, sitting only behind Stanford in terms of total NCAA championships (120), most famously thanks to John Wooden's dominant basketball program of the '60s and '70s that won 10 national titles (plus another in the '90s).[[note]]The Other Wiki's there for the full LongList, but other historic power programs are men's tennis (16), men's volleyball (19), men's water polo (12), and women's softball (12).[[/note]] The Bruins' sole football national championship, earned after an undefeated 1954 season under coach Red Sanders, does not count among that number due to the NCAA's definitions, but the team is regardless very storied, in part due to playing in perhaps ''the'' most famous stadium in college football, the Rose Bowl (though [[NewerThanTheyThink it only became their home stadium when they moved from the LA Memorial Coliseum in 1982]]). The Bruins' long tenure at the Coliseum gave them and crosstown rival USC the second-longest continuous co-tenancy of college and pro teams, lasting from the Rams' first arrival in LA in 1946 and ending with the Rams' move to Anaheim for the 1980 season.[[note]]The Rams and Trojans shared the Coliseum for four more seasons, starting with the Rams' return to LA in 2016 and ending with the opening of their new Inglewood stadium in 2020. The longest overall co-tenancy is the 50 seasons of the San Diego Chargers and San Diego State Aztecs, starting with the opening of San Diego Stadium in 1967 and ending with the Chargers' move to LA after the 2016 season. If not for Hurricane Katrina, which forced both the New Orleans Saints and Tulane Green Wave to play elsewhere in 2005, those two teams would have the second-longest such co-tenancy, starting with the opening of the Superdome in 1975 and ending with Tulane moving into its own on-campus stadium in 2014.[[/note]] The stadium is located a bit over 25 miles from campus in the neighboring city of Pasadena, an hour's drive in LA traffic from the school's quiet Westwood neighborhood (which has stood in for so many fictional universities that it [[TropeNamer inspired]] the CaliforniaUniversity trope).\\\

UCLA's first great football player was arguably UsefulNotes/JackieRobinson, who played baseball, football, and basketball ''and'' ran track for the Bruins; he was part of UCLA's 6-0-4 1939 team before WWII started, which eventually led him to baseball and the [[UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueBaseball Brooklyn Dodgers]]. In that same 1939 season, he set the still-standing FBS single-season record for yards per carry. Following the Hall of Fame tenures of Sanders and Tommy Prothro (the latter of which saw the school's sole Heisman winner in QB Gary Beban), former player Terry Donahue coached the team for two decades (1976-95), leading the team to eight straight bowl wins in the '80s. The program became much less consistent soon after his departure, sometimes producing competitive seasons but largely posting middling records. In large part because of its connection to the Rose Bowl (and, perhaps just as importantly, their strong rivalry with USC), the Bruins announced a move to the more prestigious and profitable Big Ten in 2024 along with the Trojans. The Big Ten invite came at the perfect time for UCLA, providing a lifeline to an athletic department staring into a financial abyss, although though the move comes with conditions that UCLA has to pay for for academic and nutritional support as well as mental health services as well as a subsidy to Cal-Berkeley to enhance the student-athlete support on that campus.

The '''University of Southern California''' is a private school known as an athletic powerhouse; while it ranks behind Stanford and UCLA in terms of official national titles for team sports (111 as of 2022), it has more official ''men's'' titles than any other school, with 85, not counting its numerous football championships.[[note]]Dominant programs with double-digit titles include the men's programs for outdoor track and field (26, the most of any school), tennis (21, also most), baseball (12, more than twice the number of any other school), and water polo (10).[[/note]] The Trojans have long been ''the'' college football program of the Western United States, with more Heisman winners (8) and Pro Hall of Famers (14) than any other school (and trails only Notre Dame in total NFL draft picks and Ohio State in first rounders). It thus hold many rivalries with the other titans in the east that they have to overcome in order to win national respect; the "Trojan" nickname was selected to emphasize their status as constant underdogs compared to eastern elites. For decades, the school has been known as "Tailback U", producing ''five'' Heisman-winning tailbacks--Mike Garrett (1965), OJ Simpson (1968), Charles White (1979), Marcus Allen (1981), and Reggie Bush (2005)--and numerous others that were arguably as worthy of the award. Despite the star power of its players, it is ironically the only college program that has never permitted them to wear their names on their jerseys.[[note]]Notre Dame also uses this practice, but it has made occasional exceptions. Penn State has historically done this, but during Bill O'Brien's tenure following the Jerry Sandusky scandal, he had the players' names on the jerseys as a deliberate break from the Joe Paterno era.[[/note]]\\\

The program first rose to national prominence under coach Howard Jones, who led them to four national title claims during his tenure (1925-40). Said tenure fell in the middle of a streak of nine straight bowl wins over the span of two decades back when the only such "bowl" was the Rose Bowl (and a one-off "Christmas Festival" in '24); this stood as the longest bowl win streak for decades and is still tied for the second longest. The school became more of a regional power after Jones' tenure was cut short by his sudden death from a heart attack, but they entered a golden age in the '60s and '70s under coaches John [=McKay=] and John Robinson. USC claimed five national titles in this era, with their success being partially attributed to their embrace of African-American talent that helped them to steamroll segregated teams in the South. They regressed to regional status the '80s and '90s only to go on ''another'' run of national title wins in the 2000s under Pete Carroll, helping to fill the football void formed in Los Angeles after the departure of both of its NFL teams. In addition to the aforementioned Reggie Bush, the program also saw two of its [=QBs=], Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, claim the Heisman. However, the school landed in hot water for allegedly paying players like Bush and faced numerous sanctions, including forcing Bush to return his Heisman and dissociate completely from his school.[[note]]Without this disqualification, USC would be tied with Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Oklahoma for most Heisman winners.[[/note]] The program has regressed back to being more of a local power since then, though their name still holds a great deal of clout, enough to poach HC Lincoln Riley and the school's future eighth Heisman winner, QB Caleb Williams, from Oklahoma in 2022. Their history and name recognition led the program to also announce that it and crosstown rival UCLA will be leaving the Pac-12 in 2024 to join the more prestigious (and profitable) Big Ten.\\\

USC is an urban campus located close to Los Angeles' downtown (also a frequent filming location for CaliforniaUniversity, helped by the presence of one of the world's most esteemed and prolific film schools). The Trojans play in the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in neighboring Exposition Park, a National Historic Landmark run by the state, county, and local government since its opening in 1923. The neoclassical structure is one of most storied stadiums in the U.S., having hosted two (and soon to be three) UsefulNotes/OlympicGames and multiple professional teams from various sports. Due to sharing the same metro area with UCLA (and, for many decades, the same stadium) plus having [[RedIndexBlueIndex perfectly contrasting uniform colors]]), USC's rivalry with its public school neighbor has a uniquely intense legacy, with a history of pranks between the schools that verges on criminal. While many of said pranks have targeted the USC's statue of "Tommy Trojan", and the drum major of the marching band wears an elaborate Trojan costume, their actual mascot is a white horse named Traveler (though a contingent of fans still prefer the early 20th century mascot, a lovable mutt named George Tirebiter).

The [[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers]] have major power in Eastern and Western UsefulNotes/{{Pennsylvania}} respectively, but the Nittany Lions of '''Pennsylvania State University''' reign supreme in the state's center. The school has a fairly well-rounded athletics offering, with esteemed programs in men's gymnastics (12 national titles) and wrestling (12, eleven of them since 2011), women's volleyball (7), and the most-titled ''fencing'' program in the NCAA (13).[[note]]Plus 11 men's soccer titles from the pre-NCAA era in the early 20th century and 12 in women's rugby, not regulated by the NCAA but now recognized as one of its "Emerging Sports for Women".[[/note]] These all give the program the most national titles in the conference and fifth most in the nation, but all these other sports' popularities pale in comparison to the Nittany Lions' football team. "White Outs" of Penn State fans packing out the 100,000+ capacity Beaver Stadium dressed in all white comprise one of the most iconic (and intimidating) sights in all of sports.\\\

After its single season in the PIFA, Penn State sports returned to independent status for nearly a century before joining the Big Ten in 1990, with most sports starting conference play in 1991 but the football team not doing so until 1993. Both before and after joining the Big Ten, it was an absolute football power, being named the "Best Team in the East" 21 times through the back half of the 20th century and claiming two national championships in the '80s. Though the school boasted three Hall of Fame coaches with lengthy tenures in the early 20th century,[[note]]Hugo Bezdek, 1918-29; Bob Higgins, 1930-48; Rip Engle, 1950-65[[/note]] their successes were dwarfed by the career of Penn State's most famous figure, Joe Paterno, the longest-serving (1966-2011, over fifty years) and most-winning head coach in NCAA D-I history. Paterno was revered as a near-deity through most of central PA. While the school produced several excellent individual players, particularly 1973 Heisman RB John Cappelletti and a host of solid linebackers, his teams were generally best known for their cohesion, famously eschewing names on their jerseys. Paterno's legacy changed forever when he was fired during the 2011 season over failing to communicate with police during a university child-rape scandal that involved former assistant Jerry Sandusky; he passed away just two months later, leaving a dark cloud over the program's reputation. The NCAA later ordered Penn State's wins from 1998 through Paterno's firing stricken from the record books, costing [=JoePa=] over 100 wins, but the NCAA was forced by court order to restore them in 2015. Since then, the football program has been competitive but far less consistent.\\\

Located in the city of Eugene at the southern tip of the Willamette Valley, the '''University of Oregon''''s athletic program is best known historically for its success in track (more on that later). Its football team was fairly successful in the early 20th century but descended into mediocrity for decades in the late '30s, save for a brief period of success under Len Casanova in the '50s and early '60s. However, after a ''long'' rebuild process led by Rich Brooks (1977-94), Oregon began playing the best football in school history in the 21st century under Mike Bellotti (1995-2008), staying a Pac-12 power and competing a few times for a national title (though it has [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut yet to seal the deal]]). HC Chip Kelly (2009-12) made the team famous for its ridiculously [[LightningBruiser fast-paced offense]] under where they spent the whole game as if they're in a 2-minute drill; this offense earned them a berth in the BCS National Championship Game after an otherwise-undefeated 2010. In 2014, the school's first Heisman winner, QB Marcus Mariota, led the Ducks to an appearance in the first CFP National Championship game, making Oregon the only Pac-12 school to progress that far in the CFP postseason. After the Pac-12 lost its two biggest brands in UCLA and USC, and was apparently unable to reach a media deal that offered anything in the same ballpark as the Big Ten and SEC, Oregon followed the Los Angeles schools to the Big Ten effective in 2024.\\\

The Ducks are perhaps even more famous for their flashy uniforms that ''[[UnlimitedWardrobe are different for each game]].'' Like Big 12 members Houston and Oklahoma State, Oregon and its athletic program are pet projects of a billionaire alum, in this case Phil Knight, co-founder of famed shoe company & sports outfitter Nike (and also a former member of the Ducks track team). While the university has an apparel contract with Nike, it's dwarfed by Knight's personal financial contributions to the Ducks' athletic facilities, having pumped ''over one billion'' of his own money into sports facilities and even more into academic programs and buildings. His investments into Autzen Stadium, whose field is built sunken into an artificial landfill, contributed to making the Ducks' house one of the loudest stadiums on Earth, punching well above its capacity weight class. The Ducks are also known for their affiliation with ''another'' MegaCorp: Creator/{{Disney}}. Ol' Creator/{{Walt|Disney}} himself permitted Oregon (whose teams originally held the much more original name of "Webfoots") to use WesternAnimation/DonaldDuck as the inspiration for their mascot all the way back in the '40s, and the school and company have stuck to that agreement ever since.

'''Northwestern University''' is essentially the Stanford of the Big Ten in terms of its academic prestige and private status, but with ''far'' less football success. Unlike Stanford, which for now has a Pac-12 private-school partner in USC, Northwestern has been the Big Ten's only private school since fellow founding member Chicago left the conference in 1946, and will remain so until USC joins the Big Ten in 2024.[[labelnote:*]]Lake Forest College sent a representative to the conference's original organizational meeting but never joined. Two other private schools are members for specific sports--Johns Hopkins in men's and women's lacrosse, and Notre Dame in men's ice hockey.[[/labelnote]] It is also the smallest school by enrollment in the Big Ten. While the Wildcats had enjoyed success in the early 20th century, by the early 1980s they became arguably ''the'' ButtMonkey of not only the Big Ten but also major-college football. Their sole bowl appearance for decades was a Rose Bowl win after 1948, and following the departure of coach Ara Parseghian to Notre Dame in '64, the program spiraled into many years of losing, capped off by a D-I [[MedalOfDishonor record]] 34-game losing streak from 1979-82.[[note]]They snapped it with a 31-6 win over Northern Illinois. Their starting QB in that game was Sandy Schwab, son of investment guru Charles Schwab. They also went completely winless in '57 and '89.[[/note]] The Wildcats turned things around with a stunning Big Ten title season in 1995, which finally broke their bowl-less streak, followed by two shared conference titles. They've since settled in as a mid-pack team with frequent bowl appearances. However, echoing their past futility, they had a [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut record-tying nine straight bowl game losses from 1995-2011]] before finally breaking their six-decade losing streak in 2012. That victory came under Pat Fitzgerald, a star LB on the 1995 and 1996 Big Ten title teams whose coaching tenure had been the longest and most successful in school history until his firing in 2023 over allegations of program hazing.\\\

The Wildcats' most successful sport by far has been women's lacrosse, with eight national titles (2005-12, 2023).[[note]]The school's only other national team titles are one in fencing, a sport it no longer sponsors, and one in field hockey.[[/note]] This stretch marked the only time a school outside the Eastern time zone has won a D-I title in women's lacrosse, but the school's not ''that'' far off from lacrosse's base: "Northwestern" is a NonIndicativeName / ArtifactTitle, as the picturesque main campus is located in a Chicago suburb on the shores of Lake Michigan (i.e. the "Northwest" of the 19th century United States). Ryan Field (known as Dyche Stadium for most of its history), the Wildcats' home from 1926–2023, was notable as the only FBS stadium of the modern era that never installed permanent lighting. However, demolition began in late January 2024, with construction on a completely new (and fully lighted) 35,000-seat Ryan Field to start on the site at midyear. The new stadium is penciled in for a 2026 opening.

Ohio is the cradle of pro football, being the literal birthplace of the NFL and home to two pro teams and the Hall of Fame. Despite all that, the Ohio State Buckeyes are indisputably the state's favorite team. '''''[[InsistentTerminology The]]''''' '''Ohio State University''' is one of the nation's largest schools in terms of student enrollment and is located in the heart of the state's capital. It has a lot of athletic success all around: its [[HeAlsoDid swim program]] is its most decorated with 11 national titles[[note]]Their women's ''synchronized'' swimming team, while not an NCAA recognized sport, is even ''more'' dominant, having won '''34''' such titles.[[/note]] and their men's track and golf programs respectively produced [[Film/{{Race}} Jesse Owens]] and Jack Nicklaus. However, their popularity pales in comparison to Buckeye football, which has been a major power for over a century. Winning is the standard at Ohio State; the school has the best win percentage of any FBS program,[[note]]though when only games played at the FBS level are counted, Boise State beats them[[/note]] hasn't had back-to-back losing seasons since 1924, has only lost more than six games in a year once since ''1897''[[note]]That being 2011, when the team finished 6-7 following the abrupt resignation of Jim Tressel amongst an NCAA investigation.[[/note]], and has spent more weeks in the AP Poll rankings than any other school by a sizable margin.[[note]]981 as of the end of the 2023 season; the nearest runner-up (of course, Michigan) is more than five full seasons behind them.[[/note]] This prestige makes the school a prime recruiter of talent; its players have won 7 Heisman Trophies and earned more first-round draft picks (90 as of 2023) than any other program.\\\

The football program started as a regional power in the early 20th century and experienced several moments of national prominence, with HB Chic Harley becoming one of the sport's first major stars in the 1910s, coach Paul Brown claiming a national title in 1942 (a few years before he would create the two aforementioned NFL teams), and [=HBs=] Les Horvath and Vic Janowicz winning the school's first Heismans in 1944 and 1950. However, it was coach Woody Hayes who transformed the school into a true football heavyweight during his long tenure (1951-78), winning five national championships before getting fired for an on-field outburst. His tenure also saw the production of two more Heisman [=RBs=], Howard Cassady ('55) and the award's sole two-time winner Archie Griffin ('74-'75). The school remained powerful after Hayes' firing; coach John Cooper's tenure in the '90s produced another Heisman rusher in Eddie George ('95), and successor Jim Tressel claimed another national title ('02) and elevated Heisman QB Troy Smith ('06) before being driven out due to NCAA violations. In the 21st century, Ohio State has been the most nationally competitive Big Ten program, with HC Urban Meyer's squad winning the inaugural CFP Championship after upsetting #1 ranked Alabama in the preceding semi-final, a victory that immediately validated the expansion of the playoff. The Buckeyes have since appeared in four more [=CFPs=] and were handed a defeat by Bama in 2020's Championship game.\\\

Ohio Stadium is commonly nicknamed "The Shoe", an ArtifactTitle from before seating was added to the massive horseshoe-shaped stadium in 2014. Stadium size is one of the few areas (along with total wins) where Ohio State still lags behind its biggest nemesis, Michigan. Said stadium hosts "The Best Damn Band in the Land", one of the largest and most acclaimed brass/percussion marching bands in the world; their elaborately themed programs regularly go viral, and their tradition of "dotting the i" (featuring either a senior sousaphone player or a special guest in the dot above the "i" of "Ohio") is one of the greatest honors in college sports. The football program has a tradition of having players add a number of buckeye stickers to their helmets after each win, with each signifying a specific accomplishment; since the team tends to do a lot of winning, players tend to have every inch of their helmets covered by buckeye leaves by December. Oh, and what ''is'' a buckeye, you ask? It's a type of nut native to the Ohio area. Yes, one of the most dominant sports teams in the world has an anthropomorphic nut (named Brutus) as a mascot; such is football.

The United States' first land-grant (and agricultural) college, '''Michigan State University''' is known for its sprawling campus near the Michigan state capital and its sporting tradition, though its reputation was damaged in the 2010s due to the school's former affiliation with infamous convicted child predator Larry Nassar. While not its most decorated program,[[note]]That would be cross country, which won eight national titles from 1939-59, giving it the most of any school save Arkansas.[[/note]] football is the school's most popular and celebrated sport. In the mid-20th century, coaches Biggie Munn (1947-53) and Duffy Daugherty (1954-72) shaped the program into a powerhouse, claiming six national titles through the '50s and '60s thanks in no small part to running one of the first fully racially integrated football teams in the country and attracting top tier talent from throughout the country. This era fostered fierce rivalries with Michigan and ''especially'' Notre Dame; their 1966 tie with the latter remains a common candidate for the "Game of the Century". The Spartans became much less consistent after this era and have never truly returned to that era of strength, though HC Mark Dantonio (2007-19) made them a strong regional power and even earned a CFP berth in 2015.\\\

When the Big Ten expanded to 12 teams in 2011, it implemented divisional play and a conference championship game for the first time. Unlike most conferences with 12 or more teams, which go with geographical division names, the Big Ten opted to name their divisions "Legends" and "Leaders"... a choice which (unsurprisingly) was almost universally ridiculed. In 2014, the conference scrapped "Legends and Leaders" in favor of "East and West", with an almost perfect geographic split on the basis of time zones, with teams on Central Time in the West and teams on Eastern in the East.[[note]]The exception being the universities in Indiana, both of which are on Eastern; Purdue was sent to the West and Indiana to the East, in part because of rivalries but mostly because Purdue has a bigger fanbase in the Chicago area.[[/note]] This geographic adherence has resulted in a laughably one-sided arrangement: since the rename, the East has won the conference title ''every single year''. In all but two of those seasons, the East's winner was either Michigan or Ohio State, meaning the conference champ is ''still'' usually decided by the rivalry game. The divisional format was scrapped after the 2023 season, with the four West Coast schools joining in 2024. The conference schedule remains 9 games. At least for the first five seasons of the new media contract, each team will play all of the others at least once at home and once away. No team will play any other team more than three times in that period except for the parties in 12 "protected" matchups, mostly between historic rivals, which will continue to be played annually. (Among these are Michigan–Ohio State, Oregon–Washington, and UCLA–USC.) Some media members criticized the model because of differences among the membership in the number of protected matchups--for example, Iowa has three (Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin) while Penn State is the only Big Ten member with none. The championship game will feature the top two teams in the conference standings.\\\

The Big Ten is also known for having very strong academic prowess across the board. They're not UsefulNotes/IvyLeague by definition, but all its current and future members except Nebraska are members of the Association of American Universities (and Nebraska does have that academic caliber -- it used to be an AAU member before the organization de-emphasized agriculture and didn't count its off-campus medical center), and its public members (i.e. all of them except Northwestern and future member USC) are usually considered "Public Ivy" or very close to it (Michigan in particular is considered to be on a par with the actual Ivies in everything but social prestige and "old boy net" connections). Additionally, they are all members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance[[note]](known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation until 2016)[[/note]], designed to facilitate sharing of academic resources among members. Until mid-2016, these 14 schools were joined in this by the University of Chicago. This was a holdover from when [=UChicago=] was a full member of the conference; it withdrew from the sports element in 1946, having de-emphasized athletics in the previous couple of decades (the school now competes at the D-III level), and were replaced in the lineup by Michigan State in 1950. (Perhaps not coincidentally a ''lot'' of Michigan State professors are [=UChicago=] grads and Michigan State sends a lot of its graduates to [=UChicago=] for postgraduate education. This was even truer in the 1940s-60s than it is today.) Despite no longer being a BTAA member, Chicago still heavily collaborates academically with the Big Ten and ''technically'' has an open invite to return whenever it wishes (though whether the 70-plus-year-old agreement would be honored today is highly questionable).

'''Indiana University Bloomington''' has a generally stellar athletic reputation, being most famous for its men's basketball team, which has won five national titles and famously was the last D-I men's program to post an [[FlawlessVictory undefeated season]] in 1976.[[note]]Less famously, their men's teams have also won six straight national swimming titles in the late '60s/early '70s (helped by the Olympic legend Mark Spitz) and eight total soccer national titles.[[/note]] However, in football, the school has been a total ButtMonkey, with the most losses of any FBS program and the worst win percentage in the Power Five. The program's undisputed peak came in their unbeaten 1945 season, led by coach Bo [=McMillan=] and George Taliaferro, a do-it-all player who became the first African American to be drafted into the NFL. Ever since their departure for the pros, however, the school has wallowed in sub-mediocrity outside of a few scattered decent seasons; every single coach since then has left the school with a losing record, and only HC Bill Mallory has managed to put up more than two winning seasons during his run in the late '80s/early '90s (and that was after the team went completely winless in his first season).\\\

The '''University of Iowa''' is distinct for a number of reasons (including being the first coed public university in the U.S.), but it is perhaps most unique among American universities in that it's historically most known for its wrestling program: Iowa wrestling has been ''dominant'' since the 1970s, winning ''24'' national titles as of 2023. In the early 2020s, it was probably even ''more'' known for women's basketball in general and UsefulNotes/CaitlinClark in particular, the leading career scorer in D-I basketball history. Iowa's football program has been much less consistent, going through dramatic peaks and valleys in its storied history. Howard Jones (1916-23) coached the team to two undefeated championship seasons before making the leap to his legendary run at USC. RB Nile Kinnick won the Heisman in 1939 while leading his "Ironmen" team; following his death a few years later while serving in WWII, the school renamed their stadium after him, making it the only college football stadium named after a Heisman winner. The program reached its peak in the late '50s under Forest Evashevski, claiming three national titles before his early retirement to become AD. He was much less suited for this job, and Iowa football cratered for the next two decades (including going winless in '73). The team's prospects were revived during the lengthy tenure of Hayden Fry (1979-98). His successor, current HC Kirk Ferentz, is the longest-tenured HC in FBS football, having held the position since 1999. Ferentz's tenure has established the Hawkeyes as the StoneWall of college football, almost always sporting excellent defenses that would be competing for national titles were they not consistently hindered by terrible offenses.\\\

One of the most historic and esteemed public universities in the U.S., the '''University of Michigan''' [[BadassBookworm is also quite an athletic power]]. While it has success in many sports (with a swim program that's won 12 national titles and a men's hockey program that's tied with non-football Denver for the most national titles at 9), the school is most proud of its football program, which has posted more wins than any in the FBS and was the source of numerous football firsts. After being among the first "Western" (i.e. not Northeastern) schools to form a competitive football program, HC Fielding H. Yost (1901-23, 1925-26) started off the program's reputation of success and, in doing so, changed the game of football, as his development of concepts like the linebacker position and the hurry-up offense made him among the first to carve out coaching as a profession. Yost also led the Wolverines to victory in the first ever bowl game, a CurbStompBattle 47-0 trouncing of Stanford in the 1902 Rose Bowl, claiming the first of his six national titles. Yost's tenure ended with the "Benny-to-Bennie" years of the mid-'20s, when QB Benny Friedman and end Bennie Oosterbaan helped to revolutionize and popularize the passing game as a viable offensive weapon.\\\

The Wolverines' success on the gridiron persisted through the first half of the 20th century. Yost was the first of a string of Hall of Fame head coaches to lead Michigan, most prominently former star player Harry Kipke, Fritz Crisler, and Oosterbaan himself. These coaches collected four more national titles between them. Crisler's tenure is particularly notable for introducing Michigan's iconic maize and blue uniforms and winged helmets, producing Heisman-winning HB Tom Harmon ([[Creator/MarkHarmon Mark's]] dad) in 1940, and winning the 1947 national title in his final season as a coach with his "Mad Magician" two-platoon system of dedicated offensive and defensive players that again changed the sport forever. Michigan remained a very winning program through the rest of the century, particularly under HC Bo Schembechler (1969-89), produced two more Heisman winners in dynamic receiver/returner Desmond Howard and sole defensive winner Charles Woodson, and finally won another national title in 1997 under Woodson and HC Lloyd Carr. The Wolverines receded from the peak of college football in the 2000s between struggles to beat their rivals, a few losing seasons, and an infamous loss to FCS Appalachian State. Former QB Jim Harbaugh, fresh off a successful coaching stint in the NFL, eventually helped them reclaim their former glory. In 2021, the Wolverines reached the CFP after starting the season unranked in the major polls (a first for any program) and returned the following season with an undefeated record before being knocked off by TCU. In the midst of another undefeated run in 2023, the Wolverines became embroiled in a sign-stealing controversy that left them at odds with their own conference; that couldn't stop them from finally reclaiming a national title, but Harbaugh immediately returned to the NFL afterwards.\\\

The conference's age and decades of stability before the 2010s scramble for expansion gives it a deep-rooted history and culture. Because of how long they've been together as a conference, the old Midwest rivalries have a very traditional feel to them and a disproportionately high number of them have some sort of traveling trophy awarded to the winner. (This even extends to relative newcomer Nebraska, though having joined during the age of social media, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota%E2%80%93Nebraska_football_rivalry#%245_Bits_of_Broken_Chair_Trophy some of them seem a tad out of place.]]) The Michigan-Ohio State rivalry is in the running for the biggest in the country for ''any'' sport and is usually the most viewed college football game of the year, in part because it often determined the conference champion. When both teams made the CFP in 2022, the Big Ten became the only conference besides the SEC to send two teams to the playoffs in the 4-team era (they both lost, disappointing TV execs who hoped to see them compete for the natty). When the Big Ten expanded to 12 teams in 2011, it implemented divisional play and a conference championship game for the first time. Unlike most conferences with 12 or more teams, which go with geographical division names, the Big Ten opted to name their divisions "Legends" and "Leaders"... a choice which (unsurprisingly) was almost universally ridiculed. In 2014, the conference scrapped "Legends and Leaders" in favor of "East and West", with an almost perfect geographic split on the basis of time zones, with teams on Central Time in the West and teams on Eastern in the East.[[note]]The exception being the universities in Indiana, both of which are on Eastern; Purdue was sent to the West and Indiana to the East, in part because of rivalries but mostly because Purdue has a bigger fanbase in the Chicago area.[[/note]] This geographic adherence has resulted in a laughably one-sided arrangement: since the rename, the East has won the conference title ''every single year''. In all but two of those seasons, the East's winner was either Michigan or Ohio State, meaning the conference champ is ''still'' usually decided by the rivalry game.\\\

The divisional format was scrapped after the 2023 season, with the four West Coast schools joining in 2024. The conference schedule remains 9 games. At least for the first five seasons of the new media contract, each team will play all of the others at least once at home and once away. No team will play any other team more than three times in that period except for the parties in 12 "protected" matchups, mostly between historic rivals, which will continue to be played annually. (Among these are Michigan–Ohio State, Oregon–Washington, and UCLA–USC.) Some media members criticized the model because of differences among the membership in the number of protected matchups--for example, Iowa has three (Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin) while Penn State is the only Big Ten member with none. The championship game will feature the top two teams in the conference standings.\\\

The '''Big Ten Conference''' (sometimes stylized '''[=B1G=]''') is the oldest conference in Division I[[note]]It is not ''the'' oldest in college sports--that would be the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a D-III league founded in 1888. Incidentally, current Big Ten member Michigan State was a founding MIAA member.[[/note]] and the second most popular and successful college football conference behind the SEC, with plenty of historical powerhouse programs. Michigan, Ohio State, Nebraska, Penn State, and future member USC all have incredibly storied histories and have produced multiple national championships and tons of NFL greats.\\\

Traditionally ''the'' football conference of the Midwest, the Big Ten was founded as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives (formal name) or Western Conference (informal) in 1896 with charter members Chicago, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin. It changed its name to the Big Nine three years later with the addition of Indiana and Iowa and has used the "Big Ten" name almost continuously from the time of Michigan's return in 1917, though they didn't ''legally'' adopt "Big Ten" until ''[[NewerThanTheyThink 1987]]''[[note]]They briefly reverted to the Big Nine name between the departure of Chicago and the addition of Michigan State.[[/note]], and it is an ArtifactTitle - there have been at least 11 schools in the conference since Penn State joined in 1993, and it expanded to 12 in 2011 with the addition of Nebraska. Though these schools fell outside the Midwestern region, their blue blood reputations and cultural similarities meant that few really cared. Purists ''did'' protest when the underperforming East Coast schools Rutgers and Maryland joined in 2014. This didn't stop the conference from expanding to the ''West'' Coast as well while attempting to compete with the SEC for brand recognition, with four schools from that region set to join in 2024. Los Angeles-based UCLA and USC announced their moves in 2022, with Oregon and Washington following suit a year later. The Big Ten announced shortly after the UCLA/USC announcement that it had agreed on a seven-year, ''$7 billion'' media rights deal, dwarfing the SEC's upcoming deal with ESPN, that runs from 2023–30. While it won't fully kick in until 2024 (when the West Coast schools join), it will eventually give each member school up to $100 million a year and reportedly has an escalator clause if the conference adds more members. Notably, this new deal completely locks ESPN out of Big Ten sports, with Fox, CBS, and NBC all getting pieces of it.\\\

The conference's age and decades of stability before the 2010s scramble for expansion gives it a deep-rooted history and culture. Because of how long they've been together as a conference, their rivalries have a very traditional feel to them and a disproportionately high number of them have some sort of traveling trophy awarded to the winner. (This even extends to relative newcomer Nebraska, though having joined during the age of social media, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota%E2%80%93Nebraska_football_rivalry#%245_Bits_of_Broken_Chair_Trophy some of them seem a tad out of place.]]) The Michigan-Ohio State rivalry is in the running for the biggest in the country for ''any'' sport and is usually the most viewed college football game of the year, in part because it often determined the conference champion. When both teams made the CFP in 2022, the Big Ten became the only conference besides the SEC to send two teams to the playoffs in the 4-team era (they both lost, disappointing TV execs who hoped to see them compete for the natty). When the Big Ten expanded to 12 teams in 2011, it implemented divisional play and a conference championship game for the first time. Unlike most conferences with 12 or more teams, which go with geographical division names, the Big Ten opted to name their divisions "Legends" and "Leaders"... a choice which (unsurprisingly) was almost universally ridiculed. In 2014, the conference scrapped "Legends and Leaders" in favor of "East and West", with an almost perfect geographic split on the basis of time zones, with teams on Central Time in the West and teams on Eastern in the East.[[note]]The exception being the universities in Indiana, both of which are on Eastern; Purdue was sent to the West and Indiana to the East, in part because of rivalries but mostly because Purdue has a bigger fanbase in the Chicago area.[[/note]] This geographic adherence has resulted in a laughably one-sided arrangement: since the rename, the East has won the conference title ''every single year''. In all but two of those seasons, the East's winner was either Michigan or Ohio State, meaning the conference champ is ''still'' usually decided by the rivalry game.\\\

The private '''Syracuse University''' (affectionately "Cuse") in upstate New York is better known in athletics for its prestigious basketball program (with three national championships and an active streak of 51 straight winning seasons), dominant men's lacrosse program (with ''11'' NCAA championships[[note]]Technically "only" 10 since one was vacated due to player payment infractions... but that's still the record (plus they won five before the NCAA era; the Orange ''love'' their lacrosse).[[/note]]), and the most prolific school of sports journalism in the nation. Its football team has been something of an afterthought in recent years, but it wasn't always that way. In the early 20th century, their team was quite strong, helped by the progressive college being one of the first schools to racially integrate its athletic program. SU truly ascended under Ben Schwartzwalder, who coached the team for over two decades (1949-1973), won a national title in 1959, and made Syracuse into an absolute factory for legendary running backs. Several of these players, most notably the legendary trio of Jim Brown, Ernie Davis, and Floyd Little, wore #44. The number's legend only grew when Davis became the first African-American player (and only Orangeman) to win the Heisman, only to tragically die of cancer shortly after being drafted #1 overall. The program faded in the '70s, but Dick [=MacPherson=] coached them back to bowl contention in the '80s (including going undefeated in '87). After decades as an independent, they joined the Big East in 1991 and performed well there, winning three straight conference titles with Donovan [=McNabb=] under center. Unfortunately, the team regressed in the mid-2000s and has never fully recovered, with NCAA sanctions from a pay-to-play scandal only adding to the team's troubles.\\\

About that name: for most of the school's history, their team name was the "Orangemen" (and their women's teams were the "Orangewomen"). Depending on who you ask, the school adopted the color-themed name either because of the Dutch heritage of upstate New York or because it was just a unique color at the time. For decades, the school had a Native American mascot called Big Chief Bill Orange, aka the "Saltine Warrior" (Syracuse, situated on briny Onondaga Lake with several other nearby salt deposits, is called the Salt City). They dropped him in the late '70s as one of the first schools to cave to indigenous criticism of Native mascots. They experimented with a few different mascots before settling with a literal anthropomorphic orange named Otto in the early '80s. The program maintains strong rivalries with Boston College, Pittsburgh, and West Virginia; they ''used'' to have intense rivalries with Penn State and neighboring Colgate, but they now rarely play each other.

The '''University of Virginia''', or simply UVA, is one of the most historic and esteemed institutions of learning in the United States, having been founded by UsefulNotes/ThomasJefferson himself as the first secular university in North America. The school also does well in many sports, most notably men's soccer and lacrosse (seven national titles apiece). Their football history has been much spottier. Virginia had a very solid early start as one of the South's first football powerhouses, helping found the SIAA, [=SoCon=], and the ACC and serving as regional power when the sport was first introduced to the region. However, the Cavaliers (or the "Wahoos", as they are more widely known by fans) have been a fairly poor team since 1950, when the school chose to deemphasize football; they posted a then-record-tying 28 straight losses across two no-win seasons to round out the decade, a streak only since surpassed by Northwestern. UVA rose back to football prominence during the 19-year tenure of George Welsh in the '80s and '90s, though even then they were never a real force outside of their conference, and they're once again in the middle of the pack at best. In 2022, the college became the site of a deadly on-campus shooting carried out by a former player that claimed the lives of three current players and wounded a fourth.\\\

'''Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University''', also known as Virginia Tech, VT or, less frequently, VPI (VPI was commonly used until TheEighties, when the school gradually phased it out in favor of Virginia Tech, though you still hear VPI on occasion in nostalgic or MaliciousMisnaming contexts) is a large public university and senior military college in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. It has well-regarded engineering programs, but is tragically best known as the site of one of the deadliest lone gunman mass shootings in American history in 2007. While the school's athletic program is one of only two Power Five schools to have [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut never won a national championship in any team sport]],[[note]]Pitt has never won an NCAA-awarded team title, but has several football championships and claims two pre-NCAA Tournament basketball natties. Big 12 member UCF also has no NCAA-awarded team titles, but claims a share of the 2017 football natty.[[/note]] the Hokies (more on that name later) have generally been quite good on the football field; as of 2023, they hold the best lifetime win record of any Power Five program to never be selected national champion. The school was a founding member of the [=SoCon=] before going independent in 1965. Coach Frank Beamer returned to his alma mater in 1987 after it had been saddled with numerous sanctions for violations and, after a slow start, made the team into a power through the rest of his 29-season tenure. VT football joined the Big East in 1991, and the Hokies fell one game short of a national title in 1999 with superstar QB Michael Vick under center. They next became the dominant team of the ACC for several years after joining in 2004, though the program has receded to the middle of the pack in recent years.\\\

'''Stanford University''' is easily the most academically prestigious school to also host an FBS football program, regularly ranking in the top 10 universities in the nation. That's not to say that they are any slouches athletically; in fact, the situation is [[AcademicAthlete quite the opposite]]. Stanford's sports teams have collectively earned the school the "Directors' Cup" given to the D-I program for the [[BadassBookworm strongest overall athletics program]] ''nearly every year'' since the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics began awarding it in 1993 (the exceptions being 1993-94, 2020-21, and 2021–22, when they came in second place). This dominance is largely because the private university can afford to sponsor ''36'' sports teams. These teams have won the school ''131 NCAA championships'' as of April 2023, the most of any D-I school, with at least one every year since ''1976''.[[note]]Go to The Other Wiki for the full list; the most dominant programs with double-digit national titles include men's water polo (11), women's swimming (11), and tennis for both genders (17/20).[[/note]]\\\

Their football program has not contributed to that latter number, but only because the NCAA doesn't recognize FBS national championships--their team is still one of the more storied in the West, with a long history that includes playing in the first ever bowl game (where they were blown out by Michigan). The school claimed two national titles in the early 20th century, the first under Pop Warner himself in 1926. Their second national championship season in 1940 was one of the more improbable in college football history, as Clark Shaughnessy inherited a team that had won just a single game the year prior and immediately led his "Wow Boys" on an undefeated campaign thanks to his innovative use of the T-formation, leading to it being adopted nationwide. Shaughnessy left after the following season, and the program never reached such heights again. Its performance has varied tremendously: the team went completely winless in '47 and '60, but it also produced Heisman QB Jim Plunkett in 1970 and launched the careers of great pro-level coaches like Bill Walsh and Dennis Green.[[note]]One of Walsh's three Super Bowl victories with the local 49ers was even won in Stanford Stadium, one of only three college-only stadiums to have hosted the ''other'' Big Game--the others being Rice Stadium in Houston, which the Oilers had abandoned for the Astrodome years before it hosted the Super Bowl, and the Rose Bowl.[[/note]] Generationally talented QB John Elway couldn't get the school to bowl eligibility from 1979-82, though that was due in part to "The Play" in his final college game, when the Stanford band's early storming of the field in their game against hated Bay Area rival Cal caused enough confusion to allow the Golden Bears to score, costing the Cardinal their needed sixth win. After several decades of mediocrity and worse, coach Jim Harbaugh and QB Andrew Luck led the program back to national relevance in the late 2000s, a position Harbaugh's successor David Shaw kept them in for several more years. However, the program has regressed in recent years, a phenomenon widely attributed to the rise of player transfers not meshing well with Stanford's high academic standards. Stanford had been left behind for a short time as the Pac-12 imploded around it, although its incredibly wealthy alumni base, academic prestige, and prowess in Olympic sports[[note]]In the NCAA context, "Olympic sports" typically refers to all sports other than football or basketball, whether or not they're actually contested in the Olympics.[[/note]] led to Stanford being linked to and eventually receiving an ACC invite.\\\

A few things about the mascot, one of the most unique in college sports: "Cardinal" is singular, not plural, as it's a reference to the color of their uniform rather than the bird. From 1930-71, the school went by the "Indians" before indigenous and student protests led them to revert to the "Cardinals" as a placeholder. Students then lobbied hard for the school to take the name "Robber Barons" as a critique of the school's namesake CorruptCorporateExecutive, industrialist Leland Stanford;[[note]]Though the ''actual'' namesake is Leland Stanford ''Jr.'', the industrialist's only child, who died at age 15 of typhoid while he and his parents were touring Europe. The parents founded the university in their son's memory, and the ''formal'' name is Leland Stanford Junior University. Cue "junior university" jokes from rival fans.[[/note]] the school refused, settling on the singular name in 1981. During that whole debate, a member of the band began dressing up at halftime as the school's seal, a giant tree, as a joke, but the tradition stuck. The school's mascot has been a deliberately shabby-looking tree with legs ever since, the wearer of which has to undergo training to make sure they can withstand all sorts of physical abuse that is frequently put upon it by both Cal and Stanford's own students.

The '''University of Iowa''' is distinct for a number of reasons (including being the first coed public university in the U.S.), but it is perhaps most unique among American universities in that it's historically most known for its wrestling program: Iowa wrestling has been ''dominant'' since the 1970s, winning ''24'' national titles as of 2022. Right now (2024), it's probably even ''more'' known for women's basketball in general and UsefulNotes/CaitlinClark in particular, who's now the leading career scorer in D-I women's history. Their football program has been much less consistent, going through dramatic peaks and valleys in its storied history. Howard Jones (1916-23) led the team on two undefeated championship seasons before making the leap to his legendary run at USC. RB Nile Kinnick won the Heisman in 1939 while leading his "Ironmen" team; following his death a few years later while serving in WWII, the school renamed their stadium after him, making it the only college football stadium named after a Heisman winner. The program reached its peak in the late '50s under Forest Evashevski, claiming three national titles before his early retirement to become AD. He was much less suited for this job, and Iowa football cratered for the next two decades (including going winless in '73). The team's prospects were revived during the lengthy tenure of Hayden Fry (1979-98). His successor, current HC Kirk Ferentz, is the longest-tenured HC in FBS football, having held the position since 1999. Ferentz's tenure has established the Hawkeyes as the StoneWall of college football, almost always sporting excellent defenses that would be competing for national titles were it not consistently hindered by terrible offenses.\\\

Besides the name, Kinnick Stadium has several other notable features. Coach Fry had the opposing team's locker room painted pink, believing that it would pacify and distract opponents. Since 2017, the stadium has been home to perhaps the most heartwarming tradition in all of sports--the Kinnick Wave. Earlier that year, the university opened a new children's hospital across the street from the stadium, and took advantage of the fact that the upper floors have an unobstructed view of the entire playing field to create a lounge area for patients and their families on game days. Immediately after the end of the first quarter, the entire stadium turns toward the hospital (if they aren't already facing that way) and waves at the children. Also, it hosted the most-attended women's basketball game in history, a 2023 preseason exhibition between the Hawkeyes and [=DePaul=] that drew over 55,000.\\\

If you're curious, the "Hawkeye" name comes from ''Literature/TheLastOfTheMohicans'', having been adopted as a nickname for Iowans from the early years of the territory's settlement by the United States. Nothing to do with [[ComicBook/{{Hawkeye}} the archer]]. Their logo is known as the "Tiger Hawk"; Fry adopted it, along with their Pittsburgh Steelers-inspired uniform design, to attempt to overhaul the program's culture to be more tough and gritty.

The '''Atlantic Coast Conference''' (or just '''ACC''') was formed in 1953 by eight schools in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States that seceded from the now-FCS Southern Conference, with the bulk concentrated in UsefulNotes/NorthCarolina. (Founding member South Carolina left the ACC in 1971 in part due to this disparity.) It was the second of today's Power Five to leave the [=SoCon=], after the SEC. The conference has since expanded to include schools from across the ''entire'' United States from as far north as Boston, as far south as Miami, and as far west as California, making the ''Atlantic Coast'' an ArtifactTitle as the conference now hosts two Pacific Coast teams. Many of the ACC's acquisitions came from the dissolved Big East's former powerhouses, making it an unofficial SpiritualSuccessor to the old conference (a reputation bolstered by many of the schools being better known for their basketball programs). The conference also has a strong affiliation with Notre Dam; the Fighting Irish agree to play five games each season against ACC teams.[[note]]Notre Dame already has annual rivalries with Pitt and Boston College as well as a dormant but historically significant rivalry with Miami. In 2020, Notre Dame played a full ACC schedule due to COVID-19.[[/note]\\\

The '''University of Iowa''' is distinct for a number of reasons (including being the first coed public university in the U.S.), but it is perhaps most unique among American universities in that it's historically most known for its wrestling program: Iowa wrestling has been ''dominant'' since the 1970s, winning ''24'' national titles as of 2022. Right now (2024), it's probably even ''more'' known for women's basketball in general and UsefulNotes/CaitlinClark in particular (think a white female UsefulNotes/StephenCurry), who's now the leading career scorer in D-I women's history. Their football program has been much less consistent, going through dramatic peaks and valleys in its storied history. Howard Jones (1916-23) led the team on two undefeated championship seasons before making the leap to his legendary run at USC. RB Nile Kinnick won the Heisman in 1939 while leading his "Ironmen" team; following his death a few years later while serving in WWII, the school renamed their stadium after him, making it the only college football stadium named after a Heisman winner. The program reached its peak in the late '50s under Forest Evashevski, claiming three national titles before his early retirement to become AD. He was much less suited for this job, and Iowa football cratered for the next two decades (including going winless in '73). The team's prospects were revived during the lengthy tenure of Hayden Fry (1979-98). His successor, current HC Kirk Ferentz, is the longest-tenured HC in FBS football, having held the position since 1999. Ferentz's tenure has established the Hawkeyes as the StoneWall of college football, almost always sporting excellent defenses that would be competing for national titles were it not consistently hindered by terrible offenses.\\\

'''Notable Historic Players:''' Max Zendejas, Anthony Smith, Michael Bates, Tedy Bruschi, Lance Briggs, Rob Gronkowski, Nick Foles, Khalil Tate\\

The '''University of Iowa''' is distinct for a number of reasons (including being the first coed public university in the U.S.), but it is perhaps most unique among American universities in that it's historically most known for its wrestling program: Iowa wrestling has been ''dominant'' since the 1970s, winning ''24'' national titles as of 2022. Right now (2024), it's probably even ''more'' known for women's basketball in general and Caitlin Clark in particular (think a white female UsefulNotes/StephenCurry), who's now the leading career scorer in D-I women's history. Their football program has been much less consistent, going through dramatic peaks and valleys in its storied history. Howard Jones (1916-23) led the team on two undefeated championship seasons before making the leap to his legendary run at USC. RB Nile Kinnick won the Heisman in 1939 while leading his "Ironmen" team; following his death a few years later while serving in WWII, the school renamed their stadium after him, making it the only college football stadium named after a Heisman winner. The program reached its peak in the late '50s under Forest Evashevski, claiming three national titles before his early retirement to become AD. He was much less suited for this job, and Iowa football cratered for the next two decades (including going winless in '73). The team's prospects were revived during the lengthy tenure of Hayden Fry (1979-98). His successor, current HC Kirk Ferentz, is the longest-tenured HC in FBS football, having held the position since 1999. Ferentz's tenure has established the Hawkeyes as the StoneWall of college football, almost always sporting excellent defenses that would be competing for national titles were it not consistently hindered by terrible offenses.\\\

The '''University of UsefulNotes/{{Miami}}''' is a large private school that was a football (and baseball) powerhouse from the 1980s through the 2000s, having so much success that only the most diehard college fans need to emphasize that it's the FBS "Miami" from Florida rather than Ohio. In fact, Miami was ''so'' dominant for a time that students and fans now just call it "The U"; all other universities need not apply.[[note]]Except in Utah; see the Utah Utes entry in the Big 12 folder.[[/note]] Its football program wasn't always so renowned, however, and in fact was on the verge of collapse or Division I-AA relegation after a fairly disastrous 1970s. Coach Howard Schnellenberger saved the program after his hiring in 1979, delivering on a promise to get the school a national championship in five years before immediately departing for a job opportunity in the pros. This set a precedent that was followed by both of his successors, Jimmy Johnson and Dennis Erickson, who both kept the Canes a national title-winning team (1987 and 1989/91, respectively) but left quickly for pro coaching gigs. The U likewise developed a reputation as an NFL talent factory and produced two Heisman-winning [=QBs=], Vinny Testaverde and Gino Toretta. For nearly a full decade (October 1985-September 1994), the Canes did not lose a single home game at the Orange Bowl, a 58-game streak that is the longest in NCAA history. After nearly half a century as an independent, they joined the Big East in 1991.\\\

The '''University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill'''[[note]]Since 1972, "University of North Carolina", without a location, has been the name of the state's ''public university system''. This also includes the state's other four FBS schools in Appalachian State, Charlotte, East Carolina, and NC State, 11 other universities, and a [[MyFriendsAndZoidberg residential]] [[NonIndicativeName high school]].[[/note]] is one of the nation's oldest and most academically renowned public universities. It is likewise a powerhouse of D-I athletics, with 47 national championships split between programs that include one of the greatest in college basketball history (7 national titles,[[note]]one not recognized by the NCAA[[/note]] the second-highest all-time win percentage, and a host of all-time great alumni including UsefulNotes/MichaelJordan), ''the'' greatest in American women's soccer (''22'' national titles[[note]]With 21 since the NCAA started handing out official national championships in 1982, they own just over half of all possible victories.[[/note]] and their own host of all-time great alums, most notably Mia Hamm) and very esteemed women's field hockey (9) and men's lacrosse (5) teams. Their football program is... generally ''less'' renowned, though it has experienced several notable peaks and valleys. The Tar Heels' biggest contribution to football history was being the very first college team to successfully use the forward pass in 1895; it was also a founding member of the [=SoCon=] and ACC. Mack Brown launched his successful HC career with a decade-long tenure (1988-97) before moving on to Texas, [[HesBack only to return to the school in 2019]] after coming out of [[TenMinuteRetirement retirement]].\\\

The '''University of Pittsburgh''' (typically abbreviated as just "Pitt") is the oldest university west of the Allegheny Mountains. It was a very old college football powerhouse that was dominant from the 1900s to the 1930s, winning eight claimed national championships (and several more unclaimed) under the successive tenures of legendary coaches Pop Warner (1914-23, including three undefeated seasons from 1915-17) and former Pitt All-American Jock Sutherland (1924-38). The program also introduced numerous football innovations, including being the first team to wear numbers on their jerseys in 1908, and they were the featured team in both the first live radio broadcast of a college football game in 1921 and the first live national TV broadcast of any sporting event against Duke in 1951. However, the Panthers haven't been consistently strong since Sutherland quit to protest the school's intentional deemphasis on the program. Pitt saw a brief resurgence after hiring coach Johnny Majors in 1973 and produced a ninth national title and a Heisman winner in RB Tony Dorsett in 1976. Majors immediately signed with Tennessee after that year, and while they stayed competitive under Jackie Sherrill and QB Dan Marino for a few more years, the Panthers returned to the middle of the pack by the mid-'80s. After decades as an independent, Pitt joined the Big East in 1991 and made the jump to the ACC in 2013 after the former conference fell apart. Despite not contending nationally at the college level for nearly half a century, Pitt has continued to punch well above its weight class in terms of producing high level talent: it sits in the top five of all schools in terms of players who have entered the Pro Hall of Fame. However, because the NCAA does not officially award football championships, Pitt is one of four power-conference schools that has never won an NCAA team championship.[[note]]The Panthers also have two men's basketball championships awarded by the now-defunct Helms Athletic Foundation, which awarded retrospective natties from the era before the first NCAA tournament in 1939.[[/note]]\\\

Pitt has one of the more unique campuses of any American university. Located right in the middle of its eponymous city, the school had to build up rather than out; indeed, the school's most famous feature is its centerpiece Cathedral of Learning, a 42-story Gothic tower that is the tallest academic building in the Western Hemisphere and is lit up gold after Pitt football victories. The football team played out of the on-campus Pitt Stadium starting in 1925, which the school shared with the Pittsburgh Steelers in the years before Three Rivers Stadium was built across the Allegheny River. However, as Pitt Stadium aged, the Panthers' popularity waned. As the school needed more housing for its student body, the university demolished its stadium after 1999 and moved in with the Steelers; their presence at the new Heinz Field (now Acrisure Stadium) contributed to the Steelers having some of the worst turf in the NFL through the 2000s. Pitt's fiercest athletic rivals are West Virginia (located roughly 75 miles apart; games between them are known as "the Backyard Brawl") and Penn State (which was so acrimonious the schools had to take over a decade off from facing each other).

'''Southern Methodist University''' was founded as the flagship university of the Methodist church's southern branch, though it filed to split from the formal control of the church in 2019.[[note]]Internal schisms in the church led many to fear that more conservative leadership would arise and seek to enforce their beliefs, particularly anti-LGBTQ+ ones, on the long-nonsectarian school.[[/note]] The Dallas-based school is otherwise most famous for being the home of the UsefulNotes/GeorgeWBush presidential center and for its unique football history. The Mustangs were once a powerhouse, notably claiming a national title in 1935, producing Heisman-winning back Doak Walker in 1948, and claiming another two titles in the early '80s under coaches Ron Meyer and Bobby Collins. However, SMU fell to near irrelevance almost immediately after those dominant seasons thanks to the infamous "death penalty" issued in 1987. For the first and only time in its history, the NCAA decided to terminate the SMU football program after it was discovered that the school had been paying the players on its national-title contending team out of a slush fund while under probation for other issues. The program was barred from all play in 1987 and from home games in 1988, but the school decided not to play at all in the latter season due to inability to field a remotely competitive team. The Mustangs immediately plummeted to the college football basement when they returned thanks to the heavy sanctions, and they spent decades struggling to even get above the .500 mark. SMU managed its first 10-win season in over 30 years in 2019, and won its first post-death penalty conference title in 2023, its last season in The American.\\\

For most of its history, SMU played in the Cotton Bowl (aka "The House That Doak Built") across town. After playing there for over forty years, the Mustangs moved into the Dallas Cowboys' stadium in 1978, just in time for their run of remarkable success; their equally remarkable fall from grace forced them to return to their much smaller on-campus stadium and the increasingly outdated Cotton Bowl before building their current home in 2000.[[note]]Like Houston did a decade-plus later, SMU tore down its on-campus stadium to build its current one.[[/note]] The consequences of the penalty ensured that SMU was left behind after the dissolution of the SWC. The school has been constantly campaigning to rejoin their former conference mates, only to be left out of the Big 12 during each realignment. This has been incredibly frustrating, as the Mustangs first had to watch hated crosstown rival TCU and geographically distant West Virginia join in 2012, then saw three fellow members of their own conference (including Houston) successfully apply in 2021. For a short time in 2023, SMU was heavily linked with a move to the Pac-12, which had been rocked by the impending departure of mainstays UCLA and USC for the Big Ten. However, with the Pac on the verge of folding entirely, that came off the table... only for SMU to become linked with a move to the ACC. SMU's ridiculously wealthy alumni base allowed the school to make the ACC an offer that eventually proved too good to pass up--SMU will not take any ACC media revenue for its first ''nine years'' of conference membership.[[note]]In summer 2023, the school's AD, president, and board chairman (the last being a billionaire in his own right and also a major booster) convinced a group of 12 major boosters [[https://sports.yahoo.com/inside-smus-pursuit-of-the-power-five--its-a-couple-hundred-million-dollars-im-not-losing-sleep-over-it-125139541.html to fill most, if not all, of the gap]] left by not taking conference media revenue. The room, which included two scions of the wealthy Hunt family (Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark and his uncle Ray) and SMU's stadium namesake Gerry Ford, had a combined net worth of more than $15 billion.[[/note]] This was enough for the ACC to give the Mustangs their long-sought power conference invite effective in 2024.

The '''University of California, Berkeley''' has been known for decades as ''the'' left-wing public school StrawmanU and is acclaimed more for its very strong academic output than its athletics. That is an indication of just how influential California's first land-grant university has been in politics, business, and the sciences for well over a century, because [[BadassBookworm its athletics program is still a juggernaut]]; Berkeley claims over 40 NCAA national titles in various sports, and its men's water polo team leads D-I with 16 national titles as of 2022.[[note]]Outside of the NCAA, men's crew (18) and rugby (a staggering ''28'') are dominant on the national stage.[[/note]] However, its football team hasn't been a true power for decades, likely due to the school's stringent academic standards. The team ''used'' to be very strong in the early 20th century and was actually the first on the West Coast to attain national success in the sport. Coach Andy Smith's "Wonder Teams" posted five straight seasons (1920-24) with no losses and four ties, earning four national titles before his untimely death in 1926. The team stayed fairly competitive for several more years, earning one more national title with their 1937 "Thunder Team", but they declined when the school altered its admissions priorities after a few recruiting violations during the tenure of coach Pappy Waldorf (1947-56). The Golden Bears have had a few scattered moments of football success since then, with their most memorable victory coming with "The Play" against hated Bay Area rival Stanford (see their entry below). However, their only consistent run of success since the 1950s came under Jeff Tedford in the 2000s, and they have since regressed to mediocrity.\\\

"Cal" gets to go by the name of its state rather than its city due to being the first UC campus, which only fragmented into semi-autonomous schools in the mid-20th century. Before the 2024 collapse of the Pac-12, it was one of the only two founding Pac-12 members that had uninterrupted membership in the Pac-12 and its predecessors, with Washington being the other. Their picturesque Memorial Stadium was built at the tail end of their dominant run in the early 1920s. The site's topography grants some attendees an excellent view of San Francisco Bay, though the best spot to take in that view is on "Tightwad Hill", a site right above the western stands where fans can get a free (albeit distant) view of the games. Unfortunately, the stadium is built right on top of a fault line, requiring a large-scale renovation after it literally began to break in half in the 2000s. After the Big Ten and Big 12 raided the Pac-12, Cal seemed all but certain to lose power conference status, and to make matters even worse for the Bears, no athletic department in the country was carrying more debt at the time--a reported ''$450 million''. However, Cal and Stanford eventually got a lifeline in the form of an ACC invitation, though both schools made major financial concessions to receive it.

'''Clemson University''' was originally founded as an agriculture/military academy built on the former home of [[UsefulNotes/TheVicePresidentsOfTheUnitedStates controversial vice president John C. Calhoun]] before a civilian retool in the 1950s. Its football team has been the ACC's traditional power since the formation of the conference, winning 20 ACC titles. Prior to being a charter member of the ACC, it was a charter member of [=SoCon=] and before that a member of the SIAA. It had eras of success in each conference. John Heisman himself coached the team to conference titles in the early 1900s and gave them the "Tiger" moniker (though no Clemson athlete has yet won the Heisman Trophy). Frank Howard shaped the program into what it is today during his [[LongRunner thirty-year reign]] from 1940-69 and implemented most of its most well-known traditions. After the program slumped in the '70s, 33-year-old coach Danny Ford brought the team to an unexpected national title in 1981, though NCAA violations and sanctions in later years cost the school some prestige. While the team was fairly middling in the '90s and 2000s thanks to the rise of Florida State, coach Dabo Swinney and generational QB talents Deshaun Watson and Trevor Lawrence made the Tigers one of the only real challengers to the SEC's (and Alabama's) dominance of the 2010s' national championships, leading the school to titles in 2016 and '18 and coming a game short in '15 and '19. The Tigers' six-year ACC title and CFP berth streak ended in 2021.\\\

'''Duke University''' is better known as one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the U.S. than a football school, and is likely even ''better'' known for its men's basketball program that won five national championships during the four-decade tenure of coach Mike Krzyzewski.[[note]]Though their most decorated sports program is actually their women's golf team, which has won seven national championships since 1999.[[/note]] Their football team, on the other hand, has been the ButtMonkey of the ACC for decades. After a slow start to the program, the school accomplished a major coup by hiring successful Alabama coach Wallace Wade in 1931 after joining [=SoCon=]. Wade led the team for the next two decades (save for his stint in the military during WWII), and his "Iron Dukes" dominated the conference and went unscored upon in 1938 until losing in the Rose Bowl. His successor, Bill Murray, kept the team dominant in the early years of the ACC. The program has essentially been in freefall since then, only briefly rebounding under Steve Spurrier, who left town to coach his alma mater as soon as he led the Devils to their last conference title. Duke posted consecutive no-win seasons in 2000-01 in the midst of a 23-game losing streak, then had ''another'' winless season in 2006 wedged between two one-win years; this makes them the only FBS program to have ''two'' streaks of 20+ losses in their entire history, let alone in such proximity. Duke had a modest resurgence in TheNewTens under David Cutcliffe, even [[TookALevelInBadass making the conference title game in 2013]] only to get {{curbstomp|Battle}}ed by eventual national champion Florida State; even Cutcliffe still had a losing record at Duke when he was let go at the end of the 2021 season.\\\

The oldest institute of higher learning in the state of UsefulNotes/{{Florida}}, '''Florida State University''' had a delayed start to its football program due to spending much of its history as a women's college. However, once the post-World War II GI Bill increased college demand in the post-war era, the school brought back male students and with them its football team. While Florida State has had great success in a variety of athletics, winning 21 total national championships across numerous sports and being home to a baseball program that is the second-winningest in college history but [[EveryYearTheyFizzleOut still hasn't won a championship]], football is their crown jewel. This is thanks in no small part to HC Bobby Bowden, who led the team for [[LongRunner over 30 years]] (1976-2009) and shaped it into one of the most dominant teams in the nation. From 1982-2017, Florida State appeared in a record 36 straight bowl games; from 1985-95, they won each of those bowls, also a record. In the '90s, FSU joined the ACC after four decades as an independent, put up the best winning percentage in major-college football in the decade[[labelnote:*]]second in all of NCAA football to D-III Mount Union, at .941 to FSU's .890[[/labelnote]], and won at least a share of the conference championship nine straight times from 1992-2000 and thrice more in the 2000s. During that era, the Seminoles appeared in five national championship games and won two, both under unique Heisman-winning [=QBs=], Charlie Ward (the only Heisman winner to enter [[UsefulNotes/NationalBasketballAssociation the NBA]]) in 1993 and Chris Weinke (the oldest Heisman winner, a 28-year-old former minor league baseball player) in 1999. Bowden retired following an academic cheating scandal that resulted in several rescinded wins. Jimbo Fisher led a resurgent Seminoles to a third national title in 2013 with a third Heisman QB, freshman Jameis Winston. Unfortunately, the Seminoles increasingly garnered a reputation as the lowest performing academic team in the Power Five, Fisher left the school in 2017, and the once-proud program struggled for several years. They eventually rebounded in the early 2020s, posting an undefeated conference title run in 2023, though an injury to their starting QB and the perceived need to leave room for an SEC team made the Seminoles the only undefeated Power Five champion to miss out on a spot in the 4-team CFP. Besides resulting in a wave of opt-outs that contributed to them losing their subsequent bowl game by the widest margin in ''bowl history'', this only added further pressure for the school to find a way to get out of the ACC and move to a more esteemed conference.\\\

Now, about the name: FSU adopted the "Seminole" name after Florida's [[UsefulNotes/NativeAmericans most famous indigenous tribe]], which successfully resisted European and American colonization of the peninsula for decades. Like most uses of Native American names and iconography for sports mascots, the Seminole nickname has been under scrutiny and criticism from several indigenous groups for decades. However, FSU is in an interesting position regarding their nickname. Unlike most teams, they have the ''official endorsement of the Seminole Tribe'' to use the name, having consulted with them about the depiction and use of their image since the '70s (around the time the tribal leadership developed the first NativeAmericanCasino and became extremely wealthy), which gave the school an exemption from the sanctions the NCAA placed on other schools with Native mascots that led to them being otherwise phased out in the early 21st century.[[note]]The agreement is with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, one of three federally recognized Seminole tribes. The much smaller Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida has taken no public position. The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, descendants of forcibly relocated Seminoles with nearly four times the enrolled membership of the Florida tribes combined, has been publicly ambivalent on FSU's branding but has not seriously objected.[[/note]] Rather than a typical "mascot", Florida State has a "symbol", with a student dressed as a real Seminole leader Osceola who rides a horse named Renegade to midfield and plants a burning spear in the turf to start games.

'''Georgia Institute of Technology''' sits in the heart of Midtown Atlanta. Their football program has a storied history, with some of the strongest traditions in college history and several ups and downs over the decades. They experienced their first major success in the SIAA under John Heisman in the first part of the 20th century (though the school has never produced a Heisman Trophy winner). His 16-year tenure (1904-19) saw three especially notable events. First, Grant Field opened as a rudimentary stadium in 1905, with the first permanent stands opened in 1913[[note]]The original west stand is still intact. Rather than demolishing the west side stands to rebuild them, the current west grandstand was built ''over'' the original[[/note]]. Tech plays at this very site today, making Bobby Dodd Stadium (Grant Field remained the name of the playing surface until it got a [[ProductPlacementName sponsorship]] from Hyundai in 2023) the oldest in FBS. Second, Tech scored the most [[CurbStompBattle lopsided win]] in college football history in 1916, annihilating a makeshift team from Cumberland, a small school in the Nashville area, 222–0. Finally, the team won their first national title in 1917, the first to be claimed by a Southern school.[[note]]A few others have been retroactively awarded to earlier seasons from Southern programs.[[/note]] After Heisman left Atlanta, William Alexander kept the ship afloat through 25 inconsistent seasons (1920-44), leading the program to become charter members of both [=SoCon=] and the SEC and securing eight conference championships and a national title in 1928. He was followed by Bobby Dodd, the stadium's current namesake who coached for 22 years and amassed more wins than any coach in the school's history. However, Dodd's personal frustration with the SEC's refusal to curb the other members over-recruiting policies led to Tech's president pulling them out of the SEC in 1964. They then played as an independent until joining the ACC in 1979 (with football starting conference play in 1983). The Jackets managed to have a brief renaissance in the late '80s, capped off by a split national title in 1990 under Bobby Ross, before settling in as generally a mid-pack ACC team.\\\

Just like in basketball, the school's fiercest rival is Kentucky, though the intrastate opponents only started playing each other regularly in 1994.[[note]]Their last six matchups, all Kentucky wins, had been over 70 years before this. The modern men's basketball rivalry didn't start until 1983, after no regular-season games for 60 years.[[/note]] They have played in what's now L&N Stadium since 1998. Originally a horseshoe, it has undergone several expansions to reflect the recent ascent of Louisville athletics (and potentially to distract from their many off-field controversies, most of them involving basketball). For a number of years in the 2010s, Louisville had been the only FBS program that earned more than half of its athletic revenue from men's basketball, but a noticeable decline in the basketball program changed this.

The term "Power Five" only began being used in the 2000s and is already technically an ArtifactTitle. There are few official differences between these five Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the other five, but it remains widely used by sports media and fans. However, the landscape of college football is ever changing; it wasn't long ago when there was a "Power Six" that included the now defunct Big East, and the impact of frequent realignments may have deeper ramifications for the categorization in the near future. It's now all but certain that there will only be a "Power 4" in 2024, since 10 of the 12 members of the Pac-12 will leave for other power conferences after the 2023 season.

This page lays out the alignments of college football conferences as of the upcoming 2024 season and provides a description of their more prominent programs. Below are descriptions of each of the conferences and of the individual programs. Win-loss records are (mostly) accurate as of the end of the 2023 season.[[note]]Disclaimer: Listing win-loss numbers and even national championships is ''complicated'', to say the least. College programs (and even colleges themselves) frequently dissolve and reform, change divisions and conferences, play in games not recognized by the NCAA, have wins officially rescinded due to rule violations, and do other things that make it hard to judge schools' true performance. Since the NCAA doesn't even officially ''recognize'' a national champion at the FBS level, teams are often inconsistent with what titles they acknowledge, sometimes leaving them unclaimed even if picked by numerous selectors and other times jumping on a title given by a random panel that no other school takes seriously. We try to provide context and qualifications when possible, but this isn't The Other Wiki.[[/note]] For information on the other five FBS college conferences, check out UsefulNotes/GroupOfFiveConferences. For independent schools and FCS conferences, see UsefulNotes/CollegiateAmericanFootballConferences. Notre Dame is also listed on that page, since it's considered Power 5 but is not a football member of such a conference.

The '''Atlantic Coast Conference''' (or just '''ACC''') was formed in 1953 by eight schools in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States that seceded from the now-FCS Southern Conference, with the bulk concentrated in UsefulNotes/NorthCarolina. (Founding member South Carolina left the ACC in 1971 in part due to this disparity.) It was the second of today's Power Five to leave the [=SoCon=], after the SEC. The conference has since expanded to include schools from across the Eastern United States from as far north as Boston, as far south as Miami, and as far west as Notre Dame in Indiana (but not for football[[note]]The Fighting Irish agreed to play five games each season against ACC teams. Notre Dame already has annual rivalries with Pitt and Boston College as well as a dormant but historically significant rivalry with Miami. In 2020, Notre Dame played a full ACC schedule due to COVID-19.[[/note]]). In 2014, Louisville replaced charter member Maryland, which left for the Big Ten. It was the last of many former Big East powerhouses to find their way to the ACC, making it an unofficial SpiritualSuccessor to the old conference (a reputation bolstered by many of the schools being better known for their basketball programs).\\\

From 2005-22, the conference was divided into Atlantic[[note]]Boston, Clemson, Florida State, Louisville, NC State, Syracuse, Wake Forest[[/note]] and Coastal[[note]]Duke, Georgia Tech, Miami, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Virginia, Virginia Tech[[/note]] divisions, with teams always playing each team within their own division and a dedicated cross-division "rival", with the other five games being a rotation through the opposing division and four inter-conference matches. The Coastal became something of an EnsembleDarkhorse in the college football world for its remarkable parity, as all seven of its members won the division in the span of seven seasons (2013-19; every single Coastal rep team lost to the Atlantic's blue blood juggernauts Florida State and Clemson). In 2023, the ACC abandoned its divisions in favor of a "3–5–5" format in which each team has 3 permanent opponents and plays 5 other conference games. The 5 non-permanent opponents flip every year. The format is organized to allow each team to play all of its non-permanent opponents once home and once away in a four-year cycle (not coincidentally, the standard length of a college playing career). The conference championship game will feature the top two teams in the conference standings.\\\

The ACC's biggest football brands are increasingly frustrated with the league's current media deal. Not only does the current deal leave the ACC well behind the Big Ten and SEC, it doesn't expire until ''2036''--by which time both of the latter two conferences will have negotiated new deals. Florida State in particular has made public noises about wanting out of the ACC. This led the conference to kick the tires on three schools, none of which are anywhere near the ACC's traditional footprint--SMU (UsefulNotes/{{DFW|Metroplex}}) and San Francisco Bay Area rivals Cal and Stanford. Thanks to ''major'' financial concessions made by all three schools, the ACC eventually voted to bring them in for 2024.

Eagles players have an AcademicAthlete reputation due to the rigors of their school. Due to being the only two Catholic FBS schools, BC has a good rivalry with Notre Dame (their matchups being referred to as a "Holy War"), and they have pretty long-standing rivalries with Syracuse and inter-state competitor [=UMass=]. However, the school they've played the ''most'' in their history is Holy Cross. Alumni Stadium has been their home since 1957, with its most recent major renovation being in 1995. One unusual feature of the stadium is that it's physically attached to BC's basketball and hockey arena, Conte Forum (aka Kelley Rink). Several luxury boxes in the complex have views of both the football field and arena floor. (FCS school South Dakota has a similar setup.)