Best common name teams in Division I college football

One of college sports’ most profound, yet subtle idiosyncrasies are the nicknames of the teams. For example, only in collegiate sports can five teams call themselves Golden… Somethings, like the Golden Bears, Golden Eagles, Golden Gophers, Golden Flash or the Golden Hurricane. There is a Wolfpack and a Wolf Pack. There are Cardinals and a Cardinal. There’s a good chance that if your favorite team isn’t called some form of Tiger, Wildcat or Eagle, it plays in a conference that has at least one of them.

Because the NCAA has three divisions with more sports and member programs than you can remember, it’s fitting to look at the highest level of the sport that moves the meter from now until January. With Division I (aka the Football Bowl Subdivision, or FBS) boasting 128 programs, it seems that there’s a great opportunity to look at who are the best of the common name lot.

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Tigers

FBS has five different programs called the Tigers, with lairs in Memphis, Clemson, Auburn, LSU and Missouri. With Mizzou leaving the Big 12 four years ago for the SEC, America’s most hyped football conference has three Tigers. Talk about redundancy.

Historically, the nation’s best Tigers come out of LSU, though against Auburn, the difference isn’t that drastic when you consider that both programs have been around since the 1890s. LSU has a slightly better overall record, two more consensus All-Americans, one more claimed national title and two more conference crowns than Auburn. Yet, Auburn has two more Heisman Trophy winners, a better bowl game record and one more unclaimed national title. You can thank the pre-playoff life of big-time college football for the confusion.

Of course, Clemson just came off a national championship appearance, so Deshaun Watson and company are the nation’s best striped beasts.

Wildcats

Possibly the quintessential school sports team name, four programs – Arizona, Northwestern, Kentucky and Kansas State – adorn the Wildcats moniker, with each probably having more renown for basketball than football. With that said, the leaders of this pack on the gridiron are… well, just pick ‘em.

Believe it or not, Kentucky has some claim to a national championship in 1950 thanks to the infamous Sagarin computer model (though this claim came 54 years after the fact). Yet, Kansas State has had more recent success in the second coaching tenure of Bill Snyder, its greatest coach in program history by far. Northwestern has been known for its high graduating rate among student-athletes. Despite slipping last season, Arizona has been a better program under Rich Rodriguez.

Bulldogs

Bulldogs are largely misunderstood creatures as they are haggard but cuddly, strong but sweet. Well, except in sports. Georgia, Fresno State, Mississippi State and Louisiana Tech have them, and with the exception of La. Tech, they have made some waves over the years in college football.

Forgive the fact that they hadn’t won a national title in 36 years for a moment. Georgia is unquestionably the most accomplished of these programs with two national titles (and four unclaimed by national polls), two Heisman Trophy winners, 24 consensus All-Americans and twelve SEC championships. Mississippi State is almost an opposite of Georgia in terms of prestige, with a losing record to every team in the SEC (even the new ones), but they’ve had some of their greatest heights in recent memory thanks to Dallas Cowboys soon-to-be starting QB Dak Prescott. Despite a poor run at bowl games in recent years, the mid-major Fresno State has been a dynamo of a program since the late seventies, as the central California school regularly churns out NFL talent.

Huskies

Three programs take on the Huskies brand: Washington, Northern Illinois and Connecticut. Washington is by far the most successful of the three in Division I football with two national titles (and two more unclaimed from 1984 and 1990). While recent years have not been as kind, UW is considered one of the top quarterbacking programs in the country with all but three of the last twenty signal callers going to the NFL.

Eagles

A sore subject for some alumni years later, the former Eastern Michigan Hurons became the Eagles in 1991 after the state’s Department for Civil Rights suggested that all schools using Native American imagery cease the use of them. Georgia Southern dominated Division I-AA (the Football Championship Subdivision) for years, with six national titles before jumping onto D-I in 2014 when they promptly won the Sun Belt Conference championship. Boston College doesn’t register much of a pulse in Beantown for football these days, but they were a truly strong program in the Tom O’Brien era in the early 2000s. BC takes a lot of pride in being a program that produces top notch offensive linemen, plus they gave the Atlanta Falcons Matt Ryan, which could be a gift and a curse every other Sunday.

Owls

Rice, Temple and Florida Atlantic attempt to soar quite often, but on the gridiron, the results haven’t been pretty. FAU has only played football since 2001, with legendary former University of Miami head coach Howard Schnellenberger running the show for the first ten years. Despite being the youngest program to ever make a bowl game in 2007, FAU has lived at the bottom of Conference USA. Rice, another C-USA team, has about nine decades more of football history, with most of it just as poor as FAU. However, those Owls flew highest while being mentioned in one of the most famous speeches in US history. Temple has played football since 1894, but last year was their first ten-win season, which included possibly the biggest win in its history over Penn State. (Apologies to all of you Nittany Lions fans.)

Aggies

Unless you attend Utah State, Texas A&M or New Mexico State, you have little to no clue what an Aggie actually is. Long story short, Aggies aren’t animals or inanimate objects, but the name of the actual students who attend these “land-grant” schools. In terms of football, the most successful are in College Station, Texas where a former Heisman Trophy winner made his name before crashing and burning just as quickly in the NFL. You know, Johnny Whatshisname.

Interestingly enough, New Mexico State has the dubious distinction of holding the longest active no-bowl game season in FBS, having not played in a bowl game since beating fellow Aggies-in-arms, Utah State, in the 1960 Sun Bowl.

Panthers

Three schools are home to the Panthers: Florida International, Georgia State and Pittsburgh. Only Pitt has had any significant standing in college football as not only one of its longest-running programs (first season was in 1890), but also as a claimant to nine national championships.

Of course, you are forgiven if you completely forgot that Pitt hasn’t had national relevance in quite some time, as they haven’t won a national title in forty years and had just one 10-win season since 1981. But Pitt gave us eight members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame (including Dan Marino, Tony Dorsett and Mike Ditka) and at least two more future inductees in Larry Fitzgerald and Darrelle Revis.

Cougars

Obviously we aren’t talking about those kind of cougars, especially at BYU. The now-independent program not only has the 1984 national championship in its ranks, but the lone left-handed quarterback in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (the great Steve Young) and a largely consistently competitive program since the 1970s. Houston has the 20^th most wins in college football since 2006 and finished last season ranked No. 8 in the country.  Washington State isn’t helped by playing in the Pac-12 with teams like Oregon and USC, yet they produced two of the more memorable college quarterbacks in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s: Drew Bledsoe and Ryan Leaf.