2014 College Football Headlines You Never Would've Believed 5 Years Ago
Every college football season brings headlines that are hard to comprehend in the moment.
Imagine how harder they would have been five years ago.
Five years doesn't sound like an eternity on paper, but a lot has changed in the interim between 2009 and 2014. Coaches have moved across the country. Programs have risen and decayed.
But a lot of this change has taken place with a creeping normality that makes it difficult to notice as it's happening. Like a frog in a boiling pot of water, we can't always tell the climate is changing until it's unrecognizably different.
Here are a few headlines that were hard to comprehend in 2014 but would have been impossible to comprehend five years ago.
Sound off below if you can think of anything else.
Florida State Went 13-0 and Finished Behind Two 12-1 Teams
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The BCS system was all about finding the two best teams.
If at any point during the BCS era an undefeated team from a Power Five conference was ranked behind two one-loss teams, there would have been riots. If that team happened to be riding a 29-game win streak while defending a national title—as is the case with Florida State—those riots would have been extra…um…riotous.
But the College Football Playoff does not concern itself with who is No. 2. It concerns itself with who is No. 4. So it didn't come as much of a shock—nor did it incite too much outrage—when Florida State ranked No. 3 behind 12-1 Alabama and 12-1 Oregon.
The only thing that changed is which team will wear colors and which team will wear white when the Seminoles play the Ducks in the Rose Bowl Jan. 1. It was hardly a blip on the radar.
But in 2009, FSU at No. 3 would have been the story of the season.
Baylor and TCU: Co-Big 12 Champions
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Five years ago Baylor had just finished the second season of the Art Briles era with a 4-8 record. It had won an average of three games per year since 1997. It had never won a Big 12 title.
But this year Baylor won its second Big 12 title in a row, sharing it with a co-champion, TCU, that was just as surprising as the Bears.
Even though TCU was good five seasons ago—winning 11 games for the third time in four years—it was a member of the lesser Mountain West Conference and was thought to have no chance of competing with the big boys. Even if the Horned Frogs ever did gain inclusion in the Big 12, it would be decades before they could compete with Texas.
Right?
As it were, they beat Texas 48-10 on Thanksgiving.
Frank Beamer on the Hot Seat at Virginia Tech
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Frank Beamer built Virginia Tech into a powerhouse and will one day have a statue in Blacksburg. If anyone in the country deserved Julius Caesar-type job security, he likely would have been on the short list.
In 2009, the Hokies won 10 or more games for the sixth consecutive season (in what would prove to be an eight-season run). They failed to win the ACC, but that was OK because they had won it the previous two seasons (and would win it the next season too).
But so much has changed in the past two seasons that Beamer no longer has an argument for Dictator Perpetuo. Virginia Tech went 6-6 this regular season and nearly missed a bowl game for the first time since 1992, needing to beat Virginia in the season finale to reach .500.
Worse yet, hometown recruits such as defensive end Josh Sweat—the No. 6 overall player on the 247Sports composite rankings and a lifelong Hokies fan—are defecting for the likes of Florida State.
Has the game passed Beamer by? Is he hurting the program he built by refusing to let someone new build on top of him?
Today, these are legitimate questions.
Five years ago, they would have been blasphemy.
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
Both Mississippi Schools Finish Top 10
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Mississippi State finished No. 7 in the College Football Playoff standings. Ole Miss finished two spots back at No. 9.
The Bulldogs' last top-10 finish in the Associated Press poll came in 1940. The Rebels' last top-10 finish in the AP poll came in 1969.
How in the world did we get here?
That both Mississippi schools fared so well this season was a surprise to the modern viewer, but not nearly as much as it would have been to the five-years-ago viewer. We knew coming into the season that Mississippi State was deep and loaded with upperclassmen, and we knew all about Ole Miss' talented sophomore class.
The creeping normality associated with these things made the Bulldogs and Rebels surprising playoff contenders, but not shocking ones. If someone said in 2009 that this would happen, though, the surprise would turn to shock in roughly 1.2 milliseconds.
Georgia Southern Sweeps Sun Belt During FBS Transition
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Georgia Southern proved in 2014 that the talent gap between lower-tier FBS football and upper-tier FCS football is negligible.
In fact, it doesn't even exist.
The Eagles upset Florida in 2013 and moved up to the Sun Belt on a transitional basis this season. Even though they were not eligible to play in a bowl game, they promptly swept all eight of their conference games and finished with a 9-3 record that only included losses to Georgia Tech, NC State and Navy—all pretty good teams.
According to Jason Kirk of SB Nation, Georgia Southern ranks higher in Football Outsiders' F/+ ratings than 18 of the teams that did make a bowl game this season, including all three from the Sun Belt.
"Add in the fact (fact!) that GSU's option run offense is more fun to watch than the average offense, and it's clear bowl season's juuust a little bit worse without the Eagles in it," Kirk wrote.
Five years ago, the thought of Georgia Southern having any sort of impact on bowl season would be hard to wrap one's mind around.
UAB Folds Football Program
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UAB announced last week that it would discontinue its football program due to budgetary reasons, per ESPN.com.
"The fiscal realities we face—both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint—are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the athletic department and UAB," president Ray Watts announced in an official statement.
The Blazers had not been a fruitful program this past decade, but no FBS school had folded since Pacific in 1995. Watching it happen again was difficult to swallow in 2014 and would have been equally difficult to swallow five seasons ago.
No matter the timing, this always would have been hard to believe.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
