Travis Haney Tweet

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Yeah we have been a really bad football program for most of our history. It takes a long time to reverse that image.

To me, this is a common misperception...or at least an overstatement. If you actually dive into the numbers, taking away the forfeits that should never have happened, we have not actually been "really bad for most of our history".

In fact, we've only been "really bad" a total of about 29 years of our nearly 120 years of playing football. We've just been so bad during a lot of those chunks that our overall record looks pretty bad.

I'm not talking about the occasional losing season or 3 in a 10-year-or so stretch, but rather when we've been mostly below .500 in those chunks. That's only happened from:
1928-1934
1958-1973
2001-2006 (Really bad)

Outside of those chunks, we've been mostly average...sometimes good, and sometimes pretty damn good. If you take away the 19 forfeits, we'd actually have a winning record all-time.

Furthermore, if you took away just the Bama series, you know, the most dominant football program of all time, we'd then be 542-464-36. BTW, did you know we've played Bama in Tuscaloosa 52 times, but in Starkville just 22 times? Did you know from the beginning of our Bama series through 1968, we had to play them as a visiting team 37 times, vs just 14 as a home team?

Would it surprise you to learn...if you look at seasons where we played at least 7 games, we have:
54 winning seasons
50 losing seasons
4 break even

Certainly we have not been a powerhouse, or even a very-good team throughout our history. But we not actually as historically bad as most of our fans seem to think.