Florida Atlantic

If watching Ohio State gives you a sense of the history and tradition of college football, the Buckeyes' opening round opponent reminds us that college football also features variety and change.

In 1960, Woody Hayes was nearing the end of his first decade as the OSU football coach -- and Florida Atlantic University did not exist.  But in 1961, the Florida state legislature decided to create a new university in Boca Raton.  Florida Atlantic University opened on September 14, 1964.  At first, it only took students who had already earned at least an associate degree from a community college.  In 1984, however, FAU began admitting freshmen.  In 1989, the legislature designated FAU as the lead state university serving Broward County.  By 1999, FAU had six different campuses across the country.  Today, it has almost 25,000 undergraduates.

FAU had no intercollegiate athletics until 1979, and played its first football season in 2001.  Howard Schnellenberger, who had won a national championship for Miami of Florida in 1983, launched the program and served as head coach until 2011.  For the first four years, the FAU Owls were an independent in I-AA football, or whatever that level was called at that time.  Then they moved up to I-A and started playing in the Sun Belt Conference.  Starting in 2013-14, the Owls moved into Conference USA.

Schnellenberger, who had one of the strangest coaching careers in NCAA history, had some success at FAU.  In 2003 -- only the third season of football -- the Owls made the I-AA playoffs.  They beat Bethune-Cookman and Northern Arizona to reach the semi-finals, where they were ousted by Colgate.  In 2007, the Owls went 8-5 and won their first bowl game, beating Memphis 44-27 in the New Orleans Bowl.  The next year, the Owls finished 7-6 after beating Central Michigan 24-21 in the Motor City Bowl.

Schnellenberger retired after a 1-11 season in 2011, and the Owls didn't do much for the next few years.  For the 2017 season, however, the Owls hired Lane Kiffin, formerly of Tennessee and USC.  Kiffin went 11-3 in his first year at the helm, beating Akron 50-3 in the Boca Raton Bowl.  Then last year, the team slipped to a 5-7 record.  This year, Athlon picks them to finish third in the C-USA East, behind Marshall and Florida International.

FAU may not seem like that big a deal in the world of college football, but from my perspective it is part of one of the most important stories in the last few decades.  Florida was a very sparsely populated state at the beginning of the 20th century, which meant that for many decades its only I-A football programs were Florida, Florida State, and Miami of Florida.  In the 1980's and 1990's, these teams feasted on the enormous football-playing population of Florida, while states like Texas and California divided their talent among a much larger number of teams.  Between 1983 and 2001, Miami won five national championships, Florida State won two, and Florida won one.  Anyone who remembers college football from that era will recall the extent to which the three Florida schools dominated the sport.  But now Florida has at least four more I-A schools:  Central Florida, South Florida, Florida Atlantic, and Florida International.  If you took all of the best players on those teams, and put them on the three original Florida schools, they would probably still be the powerhouses we remember.  But these days, college football is dominated by Clemson and Alabama, and Florida's Big Three -- while still very important -- are not as dominant as they used to be.  Florida's infrastructure caught up to its population, and that fact has significantly changed college football.

According to the oddsmakers, Ohio State is supposed to win today by 27 points in a game that will feature 63 1/2 points of total offense.  That works out to a score of something like 45-18 for the Buckeyes, and would make a nice easy start to the new season.