College Football

What happened to college football in the Northeast?

What happened to college football in the Northeast?

IT WAS LATE November 1984, and Boston College had just made history.

The play is iconic. Doug Flutie has one last shot to beat defending champion Miami at the old Orange Bowl. He drops back — zeroes on the clock — and launches a Hail Mary toward the end zone. The Hurricanes’ defensive backs didn’t think he had the arm for it, and the pass sails over their heads, landing in the waiting arms of Eagles receiver Gerard Phelan for a touchdown. The moment instantly becomes part of college football lore.

When BC’s plane lands at Logan International Airport a few hours later, a crowd of hundreds of Eagles fans are waiting. For a moment, at least, Boston is a college football town.

“The excitement was real,” Flutie recently told ESPN. “People cared. It was a real thing where we were on par with the pro sports in this town.”

That was nearly four decades ago, and while BC has had its share of success since, it’s rare that the Eagles, or any of the other programs along the Northeast’s I-95 corridor, manage to crack the sports zeitgeist. That region — New England, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C. — is home to roughly one-fifth of the country’s population, yet the massive potential audience has rarely translated into financial, recruiting or on-field success for the 12 FBS schools that call the Northeast home.

It’s impossible to tell the story of college football without the Northeast. During its peak in the 1970s, northeastern schools made regular appearances near the top of the polls, averaging at least one team in the top 10 every week of the decade. But those numbers have dipped consistently since, with only Penn State cracking the top 10 in the past 13 years.

Syracuse was a national force in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Orange finished the season ranked in the Top 25 nine times between 1987 and 2001. It’s happened just once since.

Pittsburgh won the 1976 national championship and finished in the AP top 10 in six of seven seasons between ’76 and ’82. It hasn’t spent so much as a week in the top 10 since 2009 despite last year’s ACC title.

From 1973 through 1985, Maryland won eight or more games 11 times. It hasn’t won more than seven in a season in the past decade.

As a group, the 12 teams representing the northeastern states — plus nearby West Virginia — have a .466 winning percentage in the playoff era (just .427 in conference play and .404 in Power 5 vs. Power 5 matchups), represent three of the nation’s four teams…

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