frank, Johnny Vaught and Bear Bryant were neck-in-neck every year when both were coaching. The top teams in the SEC in the 50's and 60's were Bama, LSU, Ole Miss, and Tennessee. In fact, my parents lived in Grenada, MS after WW2 and knew Jake Gibbs and his parents very well, Gibbs being the star QB at Ole Miss during the late 50's who went on to play catcher for the NY Yankees for many years.
It's a regional and cultural thing, much like people in the northeast tend to be provincial; if one asks people in the Great Plains states to name the greatest football program in the south, invariably they will say "Alabama," despite that Alabama hasn't been lately, what it used to be.
Of course, much of this is due to the elite media, for whom football programs in the eastern states, and on the west coast, are the only football programs in America. No rational person would deny that the south has been treated tawdrily by the elite media, and consistently underrated, if not utterly ignored.
And we are all influenced by the elite media, voluntarily or involuntarily.
One tries to recognize that bias and work around it, but consistently Alabama comes up as the greatest in the south. Louisiana State, and in older times Georgia, have always been too erratic to be considered "great," if "consistency" is figured into the equation (and I myself do consider consistency).
Florida State is way too new in college football, and Miami, despite having once fielded the greatest team in the history of college football (the team of the 2001 season), in the long term seems just a flash in the pan. (Remember, I am thinking in terms of decades, generations, not just the recent television season.)
Some years ago, I was surprised to learn that Tennessee has a long and rich history in college football; one learns.
Part of the problem with perceiving the greatest college football programs is that for much of the 20th century (and there was much more to the twentieth century than after 1970 or after 1990), it appears southern teams tended to play each other, while teams from the east, midwest, and west, played all over the map, thus their greater exposure in the news media at the time, and in subsequent history books.
