There is no college football carousel.
Teams don’t move in cycles. This was not preordained. Florida was not simply due.
Coming off consecutive years as national championship contenders, the Gators have run a public-perception medley from fashionable preseason darling to underachiever to late bloomer to just plain bad. And now everyone wants an explanation — how do you fall from the country’s elite to the kiddie table?
Some argue that Florida simply isn’t talented enough, that turning your program into an NFL machine replacing current pros with future pros is impossible. The best high school players want to start immediately, and they won’t start immediately at a school already loaded, as the theory goes.
What you are left with is the ebb and flow of two fun seasons followed by a couple of depressing dry spells. While you enjoyed Tim Tebow and Percy Harvin, you missed out on the next Tim Tebow and Percy Harvin because no one team can have all that power.
But the recruiting trails have always been kind to Florida coaches, regardless of how many starters their team was returning. Every scholarship player currently on the Gators was part of an elite recruiting class.
Since 2007, Florida has hauled in a trio of top-three classes, according to Rivals.com. The lone exception was in 2009, when the Gators returned almost every important player from their national championship squad.
But even then, when every other coach held legitimate ammunition against Florida, Urban Meyer still recruited the 11th-best group in the nation. If a recruit voiced concerns about waiting on the sidelines, Meyer could play his trump card, pulling a couple of rings out of his desk and asking, “Are you serious about winning one of these?”
Any player who wants a national title has just a handful of schools to choose from because college football is a blueblood league. In the last 10 years, only nine teams have played in a national championship game.
If there really was some sort of unavoidable cycle, these nine teams would each have about four or five bad seasons between championship runs. But that isn’t the case.
Three losses is the barrier between a good season and a bad one. Depending on preseason expectations, a three-loss year might be seen as a disappointment. But losing three games in a power conference is still usually good enough for a January bowl game
And if at some point in the last three seasons you played for a championship, losing north of three games is disappointing.
Using three losses as the threshold, Miami and Nebraska are the only teams that collapsed after playing for a championship. Florida, LSU and Alabama all experienced bad seasons more than twice in the last 10 years, but most of those failures can be attributed to previous, less competent coaches (Ron Zook, Gerry DiNardo and Mike Shula).
The other four teams (Oklahoma, Ohio State, USC and Texas) played at least eight good seasons before this year. Recruits never shied from those already talent-rich teams.
And Miami did not nosedive because of its inability to recruit. The Hurricanes have strung together a run of bad seasons from 2006 to today, but every recruiting class since 2003 has been ranked in the top 20.
Nebraska, on the other hand, to sign big-name recruits. The Cornhuskers have only hauled in three top-20 classes in the past 10 years, and the group that signed after its 2001 national championship appearance was ranked 40th.
But chalking up Nebraska’s recruiting impotence to having too much pre-existing talent is a weak. The Cornhuskers followed their championship run with a 7-7 season, and their subsequent recruiting class was ranked 42nd. No matter how many positions were up for grabs, Nebraska wasn’t bringing in talent.
If teams play through cycles, Florida’s struggles would be inevitable, as would its eventual bounceback. But no team at Florida’s level has experienced cycles in the last 10 years, the Gators included.
Texas is having its first bad season since 1997, but its last four recruiting classes have been ranked, on average, seventh-best in the nation, even though each one of those teams was already loaded.
There is no cycle. At least Florida fans better hope not. If there is, the Gators won’t be good again until 2012.
And the world’s going to be ending then, anyway. It’s been preordained by the Mayan gods.
