{"id":75909,"date":"2025-05-24T17:20:14","date_gmt":"2025-05-24T17:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/75909\/"},"modified":"2025-05-24T17:20:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-24T17:20:14","slug":"florida-gators-10th-best-football-program-of-the-2000s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/75909\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida Gators 10th best football program of the 2000s"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Florida Gators, winners of two national titles this century, are the 10th best program in college football since 2000, according to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/6375442\/2025\/05\/23\/college-football-best-program-rankings-2000s\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">The Athletic<\/a>. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/athletic\/author\/stewart-mandel\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Stewart Mandel<\/a> compiled a list of the 25 top programs over the past 25 years using the following criteria: Overall winning percentage, BCS or New Year\u2019s Six bowl appearances (including last year\u2019s first-round CFP games), national championships, conference championships*, wins against ranked opponents (via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/stathead.com\/football\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Stathead<\/a>), percentage of total weeks spent in the AP Top 25 and top 10 (via\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.collegepollarchive.com\/football\/ap\/appearances-total.cfm?sort=top25app&amp;from=2000&amp;to=2024\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">College Poll Archive<\/a>) and, as a counterbalance, their number of losing seasons.<\/p>\n<p>Multiple Florida Gators coaches have had 10-win seasons this century<\/p>\n<p>Here is what he said about the Gators: \u201cThis one surprised me, given the Gators peaked in 2009 under <a href=\"https:\/\/www.on3.com\/db\/coach\/urban-meyer-132190\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Urban Meyer<\/a>. But believe it or not, five coaches \u2014 Steve Spurrier (who left in 2001), Meyer, Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen \u2014 notched at least one 10-win season. Meyer won two national titles in three years and Mullen went to three consecutive New Year\u2019s Six bowls.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Who came in at No. 1 on Mandel\u2019s list might surprise many. To him, it\u2019s Ohio State in the top spot over Alabama. The Buckeyes have won three national championships since 2000 while the Crimson Tide have six. Both programs have claimed nine conference crowns during the same stretch. Overall, though, Ohio State (.840 to .781) had the higher winning percentage of the two.<\/p>\n<p>Wrote Mandel: \u201cOnly one program has spent nearly the entire century competing at an elite level \u2014 and it\u2019s not Alabama, which was mediocre for six of the eight seasons before Nick Saban got rolling. Whereas Ohio State had only five seasons out of 25 in which it won fewer than 10 games (and one of those was an eight-game 2020 season). It\u2019s won three national championships, played for three more, and craziest of all, it has been ranked in the Top 25 in nearly 93 percent of the 411 AP polls since 2000.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Other programs of note in Mandel\u2019s rankings: No. 4 Georgia, No. 5 LSU, No. 9 Texas, No. 12 Florida State, No. 14 Miami.<\/p>\n<p>The article did have one glaring mistake. It listed Florida and FSU as having identical resumes since 2000, including only one national title each. The Florida Gators, of course, won championships in 2006 and 2008. However, this misuse appears to be a copy-and-paste mistake, not one that impacted Florida\u2019s ranking on Mandel\u2019s list. We think anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Florida Gators, winners of two national titles this century, are the 10th best program in college football&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75910,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1301,7,49,48,1788],"class_list":{"0":"post-75909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-florida-gators","9":"tag-football","10":"tag-ncaa","11":"tag-ncaa-football","12":"tag-regwall"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/114563961654070942","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}