DOMINANCE IN THE ESPN MAGAZINE ERA: A LOOK AT TEAMS

Who have been the most dominant teams since this Magazine launched?

No team in the past 10 years can touch the 2001 Miami Hurricanes for single-season supremacy. In one set of back-to-back weekends, they destroyed two nationally ranked foes by a combined 124-7. (Yes, that's a record.) Miami had Clinton Portis and Willis McGahee. It also had Frank Gore and Najeh Davenport. And those were just the running backs. Seventeen of those Canes eventually were first-round NFL picks. (Yes, that's a record too.)

To determine the past decade's top one-season team performances, we assigned champions a score based on how much their scoring differential exceeded that of the average title winner in their sport over that time (math geeks will recognize this as a standard deviation). In college football, more than in any other sport, the best teams routinely run up the score. But no one ever did it like The U: It destroyed opponents by more than double the margin of all other college football national champions. That's called piling on.

(1) 2001 U. of Miami football 2.60
(2) 2001-02 UConn women's basketball 1.97
(3) 1998 New York Yankees 1.93
(4) 1999 St. Louis Rams 1.70
(5) 1999 DC United 1.58
(6) 1998 Houston Comets 1.53
(7) 2000 Houston Comets 1.50
(8) 2000-01 Colorado Avalanche 1.33
(9) 2007 Houston Dynamo 1.33
(10) 1998-99 Dallas Stars 1.31

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