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The Power Four => Big Ten => Topic started by: medinabuckeye1 on February 03, 2026, 07:11:47 PM

Title: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: medinabuckeye1 on February 03, 2026, 07:11:47 PM
All data from College Poll Archive (https://www.collegepollarchive.com/football/index.cfm).  

I've broken the 90 years of AP Polls into six 15 year segments and I plan to make a post like this each week for six weeks, one for each segment.  Here is the previous post for the first 15 years of AP Polls (https://www.cfb51.com/big-ten/90-years-of-ap-polls-the-first-15-1936-1950/).  Each week I'll list the top 25 programs of that segment as measured by total appearances, top-10 appearances, and top-5 appearances.  For this week I'm showing the top-25 from 1951-1965 along with all of the teams that are top-25 for the first 30 years and for the entire 90 years just so you can see how good or bad they were in each segment.  Here goes:

AP Poll Appearances:
(https://i.imgur.com/g7MOO1C.png)
Specific note for this particular segment:  The AP Poll included 20 teams from 1936-1960 then only 10 from 1061-1967 then back to 20 and eventually 25.  It matters here because five of the current 15 years (1961-1965 out of 1951-1965) only had 10 teams.  

AP Top-10 appearances:
(https://i.imgur.com/5Nts51x.png)

AP Top-5 Appearances:
(https://i.imgur.com/75waqFW.png)
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: ManHawk on February 04, 2026, 11:59:14 AM
I would have expected Minnesota to be higher, at least top 10.  I thought they still had some good teams in the 50's and early 60"s.  Guess they were not as good as I thought.
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: medinabuckeye1 on February 04, 2026, 12:40:57 PM
Quote from: ManHawk on February 04, 2026, 11:59:14 AM
I would have expected Minnesota to be higher, at least top 10.  I thought they still had some good teams in the 50's and early 60"s.  Guess they were not as good as I thought.
They claim a NC in 1960 but it is a dubious claim by modern standards and it was kinda out-of-the-blue. They really never recovered after WWII. Until the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, (https://youtu.be/V8lT1o0sDwI?si=ILgiU6g7mYm8oeo2) Minnesota was a top notch program, since then they haven't been. 
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: Brutus Buckeye on February 04, 2026, 12:58:48 PM
I didn't know that Army and Navy hung on that long after WWII. 
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: Brutus Buckeye on February 04, 2026, 12:59:37 PM
Also wouldn't have expected MSU and Ole Miss to be 1 and 2. 
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: medinabuckeye1 on February 04, 2026, 03:32:53 PM
Quote from: ManHawk on February 04, 2026, 11:59:14 AM
I would have expected Minnesota to be higher, at least top 10.  I thought they still had some good teams in the 50's and early 60"s.  Guess they were not as good as I thought.
More detail on the Gophers:
The peaks of Minnesota football were the early 1900s and the mid-30s through 1941.  Here are their League titles:
They won seven league titles in 12 years from 1900-1911.  That is REALLY good.  Then from 1933-1941 the Gophers won seven league titles in 9 years only missing in 1936 and 1939.  They also won three of the first six AP National Championships in 1936, 1940, and 1941.  

1960 was very different.  They hadn't won a league title in almost 20 years (1941) and hadn't had a winning season nor finished ranked since 1956.  Then they out-of-the-blue won the league and national titles in 1960.  Minnesota had an unusually easy league schedule in 1960.  The two teams that they missed finished 3rd and 4th in the league.  They did beat second place Iowa but that was their only win over a team that finished above .500 in the league.  Also, there was no post-bowl AP Poll in 1960 so Minnesota won the NC on the basis of the regular season (where they had a really easy schedule) and didn't get dinged for losing the Rose Bowl.  

On the Rose Bowl loss, it was really unusual for a Big Ten team to lose in those days.  The BigTen/Pac contract started for the 1947 Rose Bowl (1946 season) and the Big Ten won the first six straight with Ohio State and Northwestern each winning one while Michigan and Illinois each won two.  Wisconsin lost the 1953 (52 season) and 1960 (59 season) Rose Bowls but the Big Ten won the other 12 from 1947 (46 season) through 1960 (59 season) then Minnesota lost.  Big Ten Rose Bowl records from 1947 (46 season) through 1961 (60 season):

Minnesota's other post-WWII league title came in the goofy season of 1967.  The league title was shared by Indiana, Minnesota, and Purdue.  That was the most recent title for Purdue until 2000 and for Indiana until a few weeks ago.  It is STILL the most recent league title for the Gophers.  

Here are the league standings from 1967 with who they lost to and who they missed for the top teams:

It should be noted that in the games among the top-3:

IMHO the best teams were:


Much like 1961, Minnesota's league title in 1967 was completely out-of-the-blue.  That isn't the same thing as winning a slew of league titles and NC's like they did in the late 30s and early 40s.  
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: medinabuckeye1 on February 04, 2026, 05:16:28 PM
Quote from: Brutus Buckeye on February 04, 2026, 12:59:37 PM
Also wouldn't have expected MSU and Ole Miss to be 1 and 2.
For both of them 1951-1965 roughly coincides with their one glorious era.  Appearance rankings:
The other programs with the most appearances from 1951-1965 are mostly all also near the top for the whole 90 years:

Outside of that one era, both programs are borderline top-25 at best but from 51-65 they were dynamite.  
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: medinabuckeye1 on February 05, 2026, 11:27:47 AM
At the risk of turning this whole thing into a history lesson, I once heard that Michigan State's success from 1951-1965 was based on MSU being one of the first northern schools to aggressively recruit southern black athletes.  I don't know how true that is, maybe @ELA (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=55) or someone else can comment on the validity of that?  

Anyway, at the time I think that most northern schools didn't exclude local blacks.  For example, Jesse Owens was on Ohio State's track team in the 1930s before winning a slew of medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (quite an offense to the hosts at the time).  Similarly, I know that the Ohio State football team had black players at least as far back as the early 1940s.  That said, Jesse Owens grew up in Cleveland and AFAIK all of Ohio State's black athletes from that era were locals.  I don't think that Ohio State was going down to Alabama and Mississippi to recruit black athletes.  

Based on this understanding, I think the situation for a top notch black athlete from say the 1940s or prior was that if they were lucky enough to grow up in the North they would be recruited by the local school but if they grew up in the South they were excluded by the local schools and nobody from the North was poking around looking for them so they were pretty much screwed.  

As a practical matter this meant that there weren't a lot of black athletes at all because prior to the Great Migration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American)) there simply weren't all that many black people in the North.  Ie, Ohio State gladly took Jesse Owens and didn't exclude local black athletes generally but there simply weren't all that many black people in Ohio and Ohio State wasn't sending anyone down South to look for overlooked black athletes.  

My understanding is that Michigan State was one of the first Northern Schools to actually send recruiters down to the South to find the overlooked talent.  Fortunately for the country but unfortunately for MSU, this strategy had a shelf-life because first other Northern schools copied it and later the Southern schools stopped excluding black athletes and started recruiting the local black athletes themselves.  I *THINK* that is why MSU was so wildly successful from roughly 1951-1965 but was roughly a borderline top-25 program both before and since.  
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: ELA on February 05, 2026, 11:50:52 AM
Quote from: medinabuckeye1 on February 05, 2026, 11:27:47 AM
At the risk of turning this whole thing into a history lesson, I once heard that Michigan State's success from 1951-1965 was based on MSU being one of the first northern schools to aggressively recruit southern black athletes.  I don't know how true that is, maybe @ELA (https://www.cfb51.com/index.php?action=profile;u=55) or someone else can comment on the validity of that? 

Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: Brutus Buckeye on February 05, 2026, 01:14:24 PM
Quote from: medinabuckeye1 on February 04, 2026, 03:32:53 PM
More detail on the Gophers:
The peaks of Minnesota football were the early 1900s and the mid-30s through 1941.  Here are their League titles:
  • 1900
  • 1903
  • 1904
  • 1906
  • 1909
  • 1910
  • 1911
  • 1915
  • 1927
  • 1933
  • 1934
  • 1935
  • 1937
  • 1938
  • 1940
  • 1941
  • 1960
  • 1967
. 
.

Those must have been some hard fought little brown jug contests form the ots to the 30s.

For the Wolverines:  

[th]Claimed national championships[/th]
1901 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1901_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1902 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1903 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1903_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1904 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1918 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1923 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1932 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1933 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1947 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1948 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1997 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team)

Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: medinabuckeye1 on February 05, 2026, 02:11:14 PM
Quote from: Brutus Buckeye on February 05, 2026, 01:14:24 PM
Those must have been some hard fought little brown jug contests form the ots to the 30s.

For the Wolverines: 

[th]Claimed national championships[/th]

1901 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1901_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1902 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1902_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1903 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1903_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1904 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1918 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1923 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1932 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1933 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1933_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1947 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1948 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 1997 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team), 2023 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Michigan_Wolverines_football_team)


As I mentioned, Minnesota had two peaks.  They won eight league titles in 16 seasons from 1900-1915 and another seven in nine seasons from 1933-1941.  To put it in perspective, Minnesota is a charter member of the league and never left so they have played 130 seasons of Western/BigTen/Big11Ten/B1G football and they have 18 league titles.  That is good for third most behind only Michigan and Ohio State but note that it has been almost 60 years since their last one.  They won 15 in the 25 seasons from 1900-1915 and 1933-1941 and a grand total of three in the other 105 seasons that they have been in this league.  

As far as their record against Michigan during their peaks, one went one way and one went the other.  When they were really good from 1900-1915 they only played Michigan four times and went 0-3-1.  However, from 1933-1942 they went 9-0-1 against Michigan.  Again for perspective, Minnesota only has 25 wins over Michigan in 105 tries from 1892-2023.  More than one-third of those wins came in a nine-year winning streak from 1934-1942.  Minnesota also won six out of eight against the Wolverines from 1960-1967 (Michigan sucked for most of the 60s until Bo arrived).  Those two streaks and the fact that Minnesota won the first two (1892 in Minneapolis, 1893 in Ann Arbor) account for 17 of Minnesota's 25 wins over the Wolverines.  The other eight are pretty much all just random upsets roughly once every decade or two.  
Title: Re: 90 Years of AP Polls, the second 15: 1951-1965:
Post by: medinabuckeye1 on February 05, 2026, 02:11:50 PM
Quote from: ELA on February 05, 2026, 11:50:52 AM
  • Duffy Daugherty: A Man Ahead of His Time by David Claerbaut (2018): Published by Michigan State University Press, this biography highlights Daugherty’s 19-year tenure, his humor, his 1966 "Game of the Century" team, and his success as a trailblazer in recruiting Black athletes.
  • Raye of Light: Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football, and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans by Tom Shanahan (2014): This book documents Daugherty's role in creating an "underground railroad" to recruit Black players from the segregated South, specifically focusing on quarterback Jimmy Raye.
  • The Right Thing to Do: The True Pioneers of College Football Integration by Tom Shanahan (2024): A newer work that further highlights Daugherty’s impact on integration, specifically correcting myths surrounding other coaches and highlighting his proactive efforts in the 1960s.
Thank you for sharing.  I think that pretty much confirms my understanding.