College football in the 2000s: Oklahoma may have had the best team and the best program

As I continue to work backwards into college football's history to do these year-in-review posts, I figure it would be fun to stop at the end of each decade and take stock. At SB Nation, I shared the top 10 programs of each decade (per my S&P+ percentile ratings), but I only shared the top 10 of each decade.

So now that I've worked back through 2000, let's pause and look at the decade as a whole. Now, obviously decade rankings are pretty arbitrary -- looking at 2000-09 doesn't really tell us anything more meaningful than look at 1996-2005 or 2004-13 or whatever. Still, we tend to cluster years and eras in this way, so it makes sense to look at it the ratings in this way.

We'll look at two lists below: the top 50 teams of the decade, and a full-scale ranking of all programs from the decade.

NOTE: If you want to keep yelling at me about how the 2008 Oklahoma team is overrated or how the 2001 Miami team is underrated, that's fine. Go for it. But it's well-covered territory. I understand your feelings on the matter, and they have been noted. Honestly, these ratings surprised me a bit, too. But realize this (and yes, I'm basically speaking to Miami fans right now):

1. We're basically talking about the difference between the 99.7 percentile and the 99.4 percentile. All of the teams at the top of this list were awesome and nearly indistinguishable from each other. Tiny strength of schedule differences and single-game brilliance/mediocrity ended up making the difference here.

2. These are not my opinions. This is just the output of a pretty good formula, designed to add context to the conversation ... and we don't have much context for any historical conversation without numbers.

3. 2001 Miami was the best team from 1996-04, nearly a decade. And 2000 Miami was second-best. So within that cycle of college football, this was still the best of the best.

50 Best Teams of the 2000s

Only 9 national champions are in bold there because 2002 Ohio State ranked 60th. (You know, because these numbers haven't annoyed Miami fans enough recently...)

By my count, eight programs are represented at least three times in this list, accounting for 36 of the 50 teams by themselves: Oklahoma (7), USC (6), Florida (6), Miami (4), Ohio State (4), Texas (3), LSU (3), and Virginia Tech (3). But as you'll see below, Texas' extreme consistency still made the Longhorns perhaps the second-best program of the decade.

The 10 worst teams of the 2000s, by the way? 2004 Florida A&M (0.3%), 2000 ULM (0.5%), 2001 Arkansas State (0.8%), 2000 USF (0.9%), 2008 Idaho (1.0%), 2003 Arkansas State (1.4%), 2003 UTEP (1.5%), 2005 Buffalo (1.6%), 2000 Buffalo (1.7%), and 2009 NMSU (1.7%).

Ranking FBS programs by average S&P+ percentile rating

Next up: a look at 1999.