Almost anywhere you go on campus you hear about how bad the UB football team is. But let's put the Bulls current 14-game losing streak in context. It's not that bad, especially for a team that has only been in Division I since 1999.
Buffalo is nowhere near the all-time worst college football teams like many people around campus make them out to be.
In fact, the Bulls would have to lose every game for the next five seasons to near the fearsome Prairie View Panthers' all-time mark of 80 straight losses. You think UB is bad now? Imagine sitting through the Panthers 1991 season when they scored just 48 points all season, while allowing an average of 56 points per game.
The Bulls are not as bad as the Northwestern Wildcats of the late '70s and early '80s. The Wildcats lost a Division I-A record of 34 games in a row. The Wildcats were so bad that after losing 61-14 to the Michigan State Spartans, Northwestern fans tore down the goal posts and went throughout the town of Evanston yelling, "We're the worst!"
UB is not even the worst Mid-American Conference team of all time. The Eastern Michigan Eagles lost 27 straight between 1980 and 1982.
Second place on the MAC's all-time worst teams list are the Northern Illinois Huskies of the early 1990s.
The Huskies should be the team everyone around the Bulls should look to for hope. The Huskies lost 23 games in a row in the late nineties, but now they're the No. 20 team in the nation.
The Huskies found a way to bring in great recruits such as Ryan Diem, Justin McCareins, Darrel Hill and Michael Turner. Diem is a starter for the Colts, McCareins and Hill are NFL receivers, and Turner is quickly becoming a legitimate Heisman candidate.
Northern Illinois weathered the storm of being one of the absolute worst teams in the nation to become one of its best. It took NIU head coach Joe Novak, last year's MAC coach of the year, three horrible seasons to get the Huskies headed in the right direction.
This is just Bulls' head coach Jim Hofher's third year as coach.
The Bulls have been ranked very well with their last few recruiting classes and the talent this team already has in players like Dave Dawson and Aaron Leeper may mean the Bulls are not too far away from pulling an NIU-like turn around.
So, next time you decide to rip into the Bulls for being the "worst team ever," realize they've got five more seasons to go before they get there.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
