Not True: There was college football parity in the 1920's and 1930's

by James
(Denmark)

What you say about lack of parity and ease of running up scores in the '20's and '30's is simply not true. There is much more difference between college football today and '61 than there is between '61 and the '20's and '30's.

First of all, the parity issue: college football saw its greatest parity between the world wars. We'll never see anything like that again. It was the equivalent of 1A having 300 teams. Small schools could and did come out of nowhere and have Top 25 type seasons.

You can get a taste of this by looking at the AP Polls for '36-'40. Here are some of the small schools that had big splashes between the
World Wars: Centre, Centenary, Santa Clara, St. Mary's (California), Fordham, Holy Cross, Detroit, Carnegie, Colgate, West Virginia Wesleyan, Lafayette, not to mention the Ivy League schools who were powers at the time. Even if CFB were not split into divisions today, this sort of thing would not be possible.

And it started to become impossible after WWII. That's when parity started to disappear. So there was far less parity in '61.

Also, if you look at the scores, teams in the '20's and '30's were not scoring more than teams in '61... average scores were not much different. Whereas there is a HUGE difference between today and '61. Heck, there's a pretty big difference between '61 and the '70's.

Anyway, I'll take Alabama '30. You should look up and read about that team. Also, why do you have '28 Ga Tech but not their '17 team?