ESPN ranks Kentucky as the 10th-best football team...of the 1950s.

Over at ESPN, Bill Connelly ranked college football teams over the last 100 years, breaking them up into the top 10 per decade. Kentucky squeaked onto the list, ranking as the 10th-best team of the 1950s.

It will never cease to amaze me that Kentucky had both Bear Bryant and Adolph Rupp as their football and basketball coaches at the same time. Two of the greatest coaches in college history were both in Lexington winning at unparalleled clips for the same university, and we rarely talk about it aside from spreading the debunked rumor that Rupp received a Cadillac as a bonus while Bryant got either a wristwatch or a lighter.

In 1950, Bryant led Kentucky to an 11-1 season, culminating in a Sugar Bowl victory over the No. 1 team in the nation, Oklahoma. He followed that up by winning the Cotton Bowl in 1951. Bryant went on to a 31-11 record between 1950-1953 before departing for Texas A&M.

Blanton Collier took over as head coach and led the ‘Cats to a 31-27 combined record between 1954 and 1959, though the team did not play in any bowl games.

Connelly used an ESPN favorite, the SP+ ranking system, which is a predictive model of the most sustainable aspects of football, not necessarily a résumé ranking tool. In this system, Kentucky finished No. 1 in 1950 and No. 5 in 1951.

In more recent years, according to the SP+ system, Kentucky surprisingly ranked as the 6th-best team in 2022, the 11th-best team in both 2021 and 2019, and as high as 3rd in 2018. That is much better than what I would have guessed.

Here is ESPN’s full summary of its analysis over the last 100 years in terms of the number of top-10 appearances for each team per decade.

Not including the incomplete 2020s, 39 programs showed up in the top 10 for at least one decade.

7 times: Alabama, Ohio State

5 times: Michigan, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas

4 times: Georgia, LSU, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Penn State

3 times: Army, Miami, Texas A&M, USC

2 times: Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Michigan State, Minnesota, Ole Miss, UCLA, Wisconsin

1 time: Clemson, Dartmouth, Duke, Fordham, Kentucky, Oklahoma State, Penn, Pitt, Purdue, TCU, Texas Tech, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Virginia Tech

ESPN