Bill ConnellyOct 8, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseBill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.Follow on X
No. 6 OU’s Venables analyzes Texas ahead of Red River Rivalry (1:53)Sooners’ Venables claims the Longhorns are two possessions away from being undefeated and harps on limiting their balanced attack of Arch Manning and Quintrevion Wisner. (1:53)
They took down No. 4 Texas in the Cotton Bowl for good measure. This was one of the best teams of all-time, and it came out of relative nowhere.
(* Yes, Auburn claims four titles from between 1957 and 2010, but that doesn’t mean I have to acknowledge them as legitimate.)
A load of key graduations rendered the Cougars unranked to start 1984, but a season-opening road win at No. 3 Pitt had them back in the top 10 by Week 3. It took a couple of tight road wins and an extremely messy run of losses from top teams, but BYU moved to No. 1 after a win at Utah and took down Michigan 24-17 in the Holiday Bowl to win the ring. The sport’s powers didn’t like it very much, but they shouldn’t have lost the games they lost.
The 25th-anniversary champs slot in here. It was a genuine sign of progress that Bob Stoops’ Sooners had gone 7-5 in 1999, and 7-5 was worse than any record they produced between 1970 and 1991. But the offense clicked early, and the defense found another gear as the offense slipped late. They moved to No. 1 heading into November, saw out a number of tough challenges and toppled Florida State in one of the more defense-heavy title games we’ve seen.
From 1957-61 — three years under Don Clark and the first two under John McKay — USC had gone a combined 21-27-2 with only one winning season. The Trojans had only enjoyed two top-five finishes in the 25-year poll era, and they had won only one Rose Bowl since 1944. After becoming a sudden powerhouse in the late-1920s, the program had waned. But then, poof, the Trojans were awesome again.
Led by All-American end Hal Bedsole and quarterback Pete Beathard, they opened the season with a 14-7 win over No. 8 Duke and allowed just 5.5 points per game in the regular season. They slipped by fellow unbeaten Ole Miss, a dominant team enduring a tumultuous fall on campus, in the polls in late-November. And after claiming the title, they went out and won a glorious 42-37 track meet against No. 2 Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl.
Over the previous 17 seasons heading into 1990, Georgia Tech had seen more one-win seasons (two) than ranked finishes (one). Bobby Ross had built some momentum, jumping from 3-8 to 7-4 in his third season in charge, but no one thought much of the Yellow Jackets heading into 1990.
Unlikely … undeserving … take your pick. It would take a few more years before national titles were rewarded after bowls, but Minnesota provided a pretty good case study for why it would be desirable.
It was unlikely that Minnesota would rise as far as it did after such poor play in recent seasons, and it was unlikely that they would jump back to first once they had fallen. But the banner hangs all the same.
Twenty-five years ago, heading into the Red River Rivalry game in 2000, it was hard to know what to make of Oklahoma. The Sooners were 4-0 for the first time in seven years, which was a sign that second-year head coach Bob Stoops was steering the Sooners out of their worst funk since the 1930s. They had gone just 44-45-3 over the previous eight seasons, handcuffed first by NCAA sanctions and then by two poor head coaching hires (the ill-fitting Howard Schnellenberger, then the overwhelmed John Blake). But Stoops had led them to a decent 7-5 campaign in 1999, and with quarterback Josh Heupel slinging the ball around more than 35 times per game — a huge average for both college football in 2000 and for a former option football capitol like OU — the Sooners had a fun offensive identity. They were solid and interesting again, but how good were they, really?
Most of college football’s history has produced reasonably predictable results at the top. That’s certainly true of the current era: Of the last 11 national champions, only one was ranked outside the preseason AP top five: LSU, which won the title in 2019 after starting out way down in sixth. Auburn’s 2010 title is the only one in the last 22 years to come from a team that began the season ranked lower than 11th. Of course, lest you think previous eras were welcoming to underdog runs, it’s important to note that since the AP preseason poll began 75 years ago, only six eventual champions began the season unranked, and only 12 started outside the top 15.
OU’s 2000 run ranks pretty high on the list of unexpected titles, then. But who can top the Sooners? Looking at the last 75 years — and sticking to the 86 teams that finished No. 1 in either the AP or UPI/coaches’ polls (sorry, 2017 UCF) — here are the 20 most surprising and unlikely title runs. For each team, I’ll list their preseason AP rank, their average SP+ ranking over the previous five years and, as a way of looking at how unexpected their title push remained as the year unfolded, the number of weeks they spent at No. 1 in the AP poll before the final rankings.
In the nine seasons since Bear Bryant’s retirement, Alabama had remained mostly solid, with five top-15 finishes and only one losing season, but neither Ray Perkins nor Bill Curry could escape Bryant’s shadow. Gene Stalling’s Crimson Tide went 11-1 in 1991 and began 1992 in the top 10, but some close wins — and the spectre of a dominant, nearly wire-to-wire Miami — kept the hype tamped down. Still, Bama outlasted Florida in the first SEC Championship to earn a shot at Miami in the Sugar Bowl, and they shocked the world with a dominant 34-13 win.
After Bobby Bowden’s retirement in 2009, FSU had rebounded under Jimbo Fisher, going 31-10 in three years. But the Seminoles had failed to meet preseason expectations in 2011 and 2012, and there was reason for skepticism in 2013, especially with Fisher electing to start a redshirt freshman quarterback named Jameis Winston. But the Noles romped through the regular season unbeaten — average score of their first 13 games: 53-11 — and a comeback win over Auburn in the BCS Championship capped a surprisingly dominant title campaign.
Auburn had established a nice rhythm of seven- or eight-win seasons and Gator Bowl appearances under Ralph “Shug” Jordan, but the Tigers were less than a decade removed from an 0-10 campaign in 1950, and they were banned from the postseason for NCAA violations. Even still, in 1957, they allowed just 28 points all season, setting the tone with a 7-0 shutout of No. 8 Tennessee in the season opener. And with everyone else near the top of the polls losing, they wrapped up the No. 1 ranking in the AP poll with a 40-0 pummeling of a dismal Alabama team. (In a way, the joke was on the Tigers: Bama responded by hiring Bear Bryant.)
Woody Hayes had a way of sneaking up on you. His Buckeyes would peak around just the right collection of experience and talent, then they would start over and disappear for a bit. They won the 1954 national title but went just 7-2 and 6-3 over the next two seasons, barely sneaked into the 1957 preseason polls and then disappeared altogether after an opening-week loss to TCU. The Buckeyes then won their next six games by an average of 33-7 and finished the season with wins over No. 5 Iowa (17-13) and No. 19 Michigan (31-14). With AP No. 1 Auburn ineligible for the postseason, just enough UPI voters felt the need to lean in another direction, and the Buckeyes got the nod.
Hayes and the Buckeyes limped through a sustained period of mediocrity (by their standards) in the 1960s, averaging basically a 6-3 record with only one top-10 finish between 1962-67. In 1967, they boasted immense and obvious talent — All-American tackles (and future first-round picks) Dave Foley and Rufus Mayes, running back Jim Otis — and a 13-0 win over top-ranked Purdue sent them on their way. They finished the season pummeling No. 4 Michigan 50-14 and easing past No. 2 USC 27-16 in the Rose Bowl for Hayes’ first perfect season in 14 years.
Bob Devaney enjoyed immediate success when he arrived at Nebraska in 1962, but the Cornhuskers slipped a bit, going 6-4 in both 1967 and 1968. They rebounded to 9-2 in 1969 and tied No. 3 USC on the road early in the 1970 season, which certainly hinted at upside. But any hopes of a first national title required both No. 1 Texas and No. 2 Ohio State to lose their bowl games. Done and done. Stanford upset Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, Notre Dame thumped Texas in the Cotton Bowl, and a 17-12 win over No. 5 LSU in the Orange Bowl earned NU its first ring.
Syracuse had enjoyed two top-10 finishes in the last three years, but Ben Schwartzwalder had to replace a ton from his eight-win 1958 squad. As it turned out, the replacements were awfully good. Syracuse boasted five All-Americans that season, including unanimous All-American Roger Davis and future Heisman winner Ernie Davis. The offense scored at least 29 points in nine of 10 regular season games, while the defense allowed more than eight points just twice. With a number of SEC heavyweights picking each other off, a 20-18 win at No. 7 Penn State bumped ‘Cuse to No. 1, and a season-ending blowout at No. 17 UCLA kept them there.
Before Nick Saban was hired in 2000, LSU had enjoyed a single top-five finish in its previous 38 seasons and had bowled only three times in 11 years. This was a sleeping giant that seemed increasingly difficult to awaken. Saban engineered a 10-win season in 2001, but his Tigers slipped to 8-5 in 2002. Thanks to a midseason loss to unranked Florida — and a wire-to-wire regular-season run by Oklahoma as the No. 1 team — the Tigers remained under the radar for most of 2003; they didn’t enter the top five until mid-November and needed a gutty 17-14 win over Ole Miss to reach the SEC Championship. But they pummeled Georgia in Atlanta, then shut down OU’s offense in a 21-14 Sugar Bowl win to earn a share of the national title with USC.