College football fans would be surprised to see some historic brands that have not enjoyed a 10-win season for several years. Consider that the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Texas A&M Aggies have not posted a 10-win season for at least 11 years. The UCLA Bruins, Auburn Tigers, and Stanford Cardinal are past big College Football Betting winners. But they haven’t posted a double-digit season for at least six years. Meanwhile, the Miami Hurricanes have not posted a 10-win campaign in five years. The key reasons are poor leadership, conference realignment, and inability to adjust to NIL and the transfer portal.
Texas A&M – Still on the Hamster Wheel
It isn’t easy to fathom why the Texas A&M Aggies have not had a 10-win season since 2012. And have only two such campaigns since 1995. Texas A&M has one of the most passionate and devoted fan bases in college football. Their donor class prints money. Further, the program wants for nothing. College Station is located in the fertile recruiting territory of East Texas, near Houston. But Texas A&M continues to come up short.
The last period of sustained sportsbook success for the Aggies was 1991-94. To show, they posted four consecutive double-digit win seasons as members of the now-dissolved Southwest Conference. Therein lies the key reason for the Aggies’ dry spell. Consider Texas A&M’s fall began when it moved to the Big 12 Conference. And they continued in the SEC. Like its former SWC rival Arkansas, Texas A&M has not been an effective program since it left that conference.
No Big Red In Lost Decade
Bo Pelini led the Nebraska Cornhuskers to a 10-2 season in 2012. It was the third time in the previous four College Football Betting campaigns that Nebraska reached such heights. Since then, Nebraska has not been able to reach the 10-win benchmark.
Previously, before there was Alabama, there was Nebraska. The Cornhuskers won three national championships from 1970-1997, with several near misses. From 1963 through 2001, Nebraska finished in the final AP Top-10 poll 28 times. Thus, the Big Red was long hailed for its consistent excellence.
When the SWC folded with four top programs merging into the Big Eight in 1996, the tide began to change for Nebraska. First, the SWC schools demanded that Prop 48 partial academic qualifiers be banned from the Big 12. Nebraska was notorious for turning academic-challenged kids into college graduates through its football program. Legendary Hall of Fame coach Tom Osborne warned that this change would be a significant challenge for Nebraska. Subsequently, he retired a year later.
However, Nebraska also did much to destroy itself. Osborne’s successor, Frank Solich, began his Big Red career as a player in the early 1960s. Late on, he served as Osborne’s top assistant took over. After going 9-3 in his sixth season and posting three double-digit win campaigns with three Top-8 or better final AP rankings, Solich was fired. Pelini rallied the program a bit and never won less than nine games. Yet he was fired after going 9-4 in 2014.
Nebraska forsook its winning formula and decades-long relationships to become a floundering program. Correlating the move to the Big Ten has been a more difficult challenge than expected.
War Eagle Won’t Fly
The Auburn Tigers have been an erratic program since the retirement of Pat Dye in 1992. Since 1994, Auburn has only six 10-win seasons. War Eagle has only one double-digit win season (2017) in the past ten campaigns. A revolving door of coaches and overly meddlesome booster factions have been the biggest problem at Auburn.