Misery loves company.
If your college football team isn’t good, there’s a perverse fascination, a point of pride even among fans of struggling teams, about how bad things can get.
“You think your team has it bad? Looks at ours!”
And no program can avoid the inevitable downer season. As Joey Knish once said in “Rounders” after Mike McDermott dropped three stacks of high society during a particularly brutal night of poker at Teddy KGB’s: “Happens to everyone. From time to time everyone goes bust.”
Among those who did so this year: Virginia Tech, which finished 3-8 for its lowest winning percentage since 1992. So just how long has it been since your program went bust? We’re not necessarily looking for rock bottom with this look back, though that depth is reached several times. We’re looking for the last time each team not only didn’t make a bowl game, but didn’t really have a chance at getting to one either.
We’ll put some parameters on it, specifically a sub-.400 winning percentage. Because the COVID-19 year in 2020 led to many abbreviated schedules, we’ll require a team to have played in at least eight games for that season to count.
Without further ado, here’s the last time before this season that each Power 5 school (plus the four soon-to-be Power 5 schools) had a truly forgettable season.
2021
Arizona (1-11): Jedd Fisch wasn’t dealt a great hand in Year 1 — his predecessor, Kevin Sumlin, went 0-5 in the COVID-19 season and had lost 12 consecutive Pac-12 games before getting fired — but the Wildcats still managed only a single win, a 10-3 victory against Cal. A 21-19 loss to Northern Arizona, an FCS team, might have been the obvious low point, if not for a 34-0 blanking by the next team on this list.
Colorado (4-8): The good feelings from Mike MacIntyre’s 10-4 season in 2016 were long gone at this point, with Karl Dorrell unable to get things going after a stellar 4-2 abbreviated 2020 season. The Buffs had the nation’s second-worst offense in total yards, better than only New Mexico, foreshadowing Dorrell’s firing this fall.