We haven't won a football championship in 70 years. We've had 2 consensus all americans in the last 25 years. We have only gone to 19 bowls in the past 72 years and we are 8-11 in them. We've won the Big Ten 4 times in 57 years. If football frames the success of our college sports program, we are horrendous.
It's indisputable that we have the widest range of football season outcomes in the BT since the early '60s. ~ 15 years ago I had a book of Big Ten football history. When I looked at the bar charts of W/L for each program over its history we had the wildest swings from 1965 onward. Occasional strong seasons/titles and long stretches of abysmal performance. Not even NW, Minnesota or Indiana could touch us there. (IU's last Rose Bowl, IIRC, was in '68; it has been generally mediocre, but not awful, with iron consistency. Minnestoa? '62. Same observation.)
However, none of this is magic. It's about coaching. Purdue has had, since the '70s, for example, Jim Young and Joe Tiller for 17 seasons, and some strong, exciting teams as a result. Iowa sucked when I was a kid in the '70s. It didn't finish higher than 6th and was usually 8th-10th. Then it hired Hayden Fry in '79 and, boy howdy, things changed quickly. Same with Wisconsin when it hired Alvarez in '90. In the early '80s when I was in high school there existed serious discussion about kicking N'western out of the conference because its revenue sports teams were so consistently awful. Then Gary Barnett showed up in the '90s.
In the late '80s I would have bet (had I possessed it at the time) a large sum against the chance of
EITHER of NW or Wisc going to the Rose Bowl before 2000. Betting on
BOTH OF THEM going to the Rose Bowl before 2000? Heck, the odds of getting hit by a meteorite were higher at that time.
But, hey, both earned trips to Pasadena before the decade was even half over. Why? Alvarez and Barnett.
Our coaches over the past 30 years have been middling to poor with occasional flashes of enough brilliance in several areas of coaching/recruiting that we managed to have breakout seasons a handful of times at best. But that's it. The reason why our football program was fairly strong in the '80s came down to Mike White and John Mackovic, who were much-above-average coaches.
It's not magic. We've needed a strong, creative, smart, mature coach who can recruit and manage a staff that develops a complete team. These guys are few and far between. Acknowledging my limited expertise on the subject, it seems to me indisputable that we are in a better position on that front than we've been since Mack left for Austin in Dec. '91. That's what we've got to hang our hats on at this point.