The quiet period of the spring gives college football fans a chance to assess where the sport is relative to where it was more than a decade ago. We recently heard current Georgia head coach and former Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart speak glowingly about his Crimson Tide teams from the early 2010s.
“I tell people all the time … our best Alabama teams — I’m going to go 2012, 13, 14, 15 — would beat the dog out of all these teams right now because they could practice different and they were deeper,” Smart said on The Next Round Live.
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Smart continued, “The game has not changed that much from 2012 to 2025, but the roster has. And those teams would ‘Clubber Lang’ somebody. They would just physically beat you.”
Smart’s point about roster construction is well taken. At that point in the timeline, a select few schools in the SEC and the Big Ten gobbled up the vast majority of the nation’s talent. Deep reserves on Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State and Michigan could’ve been superstars at any other program.
Given the profile of those schools, players were willing to wait their turn for a chance to start in games that were a cut above from a competition perspective. They could’ve transferred, but that usually meant sitting out a year, which made it a six-one-way half-dozen the other proposition.
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Others like Josh Pate believe that the 1990s represented the best era of college football. Given the stark differences between then and now (no social media, no college football playoff, etc), it is difficult to compare the 90’s with the present day.
Whether discussing the 1990’s or the early part of the 2010’s in relation to the modern-day version of college football, it feels like one thing is clear. Parity, or the means to achieve parity, is much more prevalent than it ever has been. We still have schools in power conferences working with significantly larger budgets than their competitors, but many more schools have a chance to bring in top talent more frequently than they ever have before.
It would be interesting to think about a school like Indiana and its chances to turn a fledgling football program around if the relaxed transfer rules and expanded college football playoff didn’t exist. The notion that more schools have a chance to win a national championship feels like a step in the right direction.
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With that said, there’s also a case to be made for Smart’s golden age, which featured legitimate NFL talent up and down a few chosen rosters.
It all comes down to preference and perception, like most things.
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This article originally appeared on College Sports Wire: What was the most compelling era in college football history?
