drewhoover.com · 1936–2026 · updated 2026-10-09

Streak King

Longeststreaks

Since 1936, FBS teams have won 58% of their 78,488 games against unranked opponents.

20 of 16,034 streaks

What to read next

Hostile Territory — every head coach's true road record against AP top-10 teams since 1990, one chip per game.

How Many Rings? — every person on a national-championship staff since 1990, ranked by rings, each one cited.

All-time FBS records — all 136 programs ranked by total wins, win percentage and bowl record.

Using a streak from here

If a streak from this page ends up in your article, broadcast, podcast or thread, please cite it: name the site and link to the streak where sensible; the url encodes the streak's definition into it.

The site is free and serves no ads. If you enjoyed using it, consider buying me some server compute or donating to The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (I am a monthly donor, FTR).

Method

  • Window: 1936–2026, from the first AP poll, 63,855 games.
  • Teams: The teams are this season's FBS teams. There was no FBS before 1978; before then a team counts in the seasons James Howell lists it as a 'major' college program. A team's games count only from its latest move up (Temple's from 1971, Appalachian State's from 2014).
  • Streak Rules:
    • A game qualifies when it matches every word in the definition. Non-qualifying games neither extend nor break a streak — “hasn't lost to Auburn since 1998” stays alive through seasons they don't play.
    • Ties (pre-1996) end winning and losing streaks; an undefeated streak counts wins and ties.
    • A game a team doesn’t play neither extends nor breaks a run, the same as a game that doesn’t qualify, which is how the record book has always counted it. Two kinds of postseason go unplayed, and they deserve different treatment. When the team itself turned a game down — a declined bid, a school’s standing no-bowl policy, a self-imposed ban — the streak carried on without being put at risk, and a reader can decide what that is worth. The longest winning streaks that lived through a bowl the team chose not to play, each with its source:When a rule the team was under kept it home — a conference that barred bowls or allowed only the Rose Bowl, a no-repeat rule, an NCAA ban — the team had no game to turn down, and deserves no criticism for following it. The longest winning streaks that lived through a postseason a rule kept the team out of:
    • A winning or losing streak can ask for a margin: “winning by 10+” counts games won by 10 or more, and any other result — a loss or a closer win alike — ends it. The margin is on the outcome, not a condition, because a condition only decides which games count, never what breaks the run.
    • A covering streak counts games where the team beat the closing spread, and a not-covering streak counts games where it didn't: a push ends either, and a game without a line (every game before 1978, and a few after) doesn't count at all.
    • The 40 conditions make 81,611 possible streak definitions, 510,973 counting winning, losing, undefeated, covering, not covering, and winning or losing by 10+ separately; the conditions that take a parameter (a state, conference, opponent, month, team color, or mascot) push that past 142 million.
    • The odds shown are the chance that luck alone produces a streak that long: every team (or, all-time, every place a run could start) gets that many tries at the field's rate.
    • A team's page shows the most interesting streak definitions according to a complicated and imperfect heuristic that takes into account the streak occurring by chance, among other factors. You can read it in the source code if you're so inclined (open a PR if you disagree with me!).
    • 'Power conference' means: the six BCS automatic-qualifying conferences from 1998, the Power 5 from 2014, the Power 4 from 2024.
      • The American gets to count for 2013, because it inherited the Big East's automatic berth.
      • Notre Dame counts as a power conference opponent since power conferences allowed ND to count as such to meet scheduling requirements.
      • Army also met this requirement for the Big Ten and SEC, but not unanimously so it doesn't get the same treatment.
      • The term 'power conference' has no formal meaning before 1998, so older games don't qualify.
    • Full moons are worked out to the minute with Jean Meeus’s lunar-phase method. A game is a werewolf game when the moon is full within a day of 8pm Eastern on game day.
    • A team's regular off-campus home field (Legion Field for Alabama, War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock for Arkansas, and similar) counts as a home game, except in some circumstances like the Iron Bowl.
    • The rate under the streak definition pools today's 136 FBS teams' games, each from that team's side. A game between two of them counts once each way and comes out even; a game against anyone else (an FCS team, a program that has since dropped out) counts once, and FBS teams win most of those. So a condition that favors neither side, like a full moon, can sit a little above 50%. I haven't found a neutral condition that disfavors FBS teams, but would love to hear about one!
  • Sources:
    • Scores, sites and closing spreads for 1978–2013 come from Warren Repole's Sunshine Forecast files. His site is gone; the files survive only in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which is worth a donation. The 78 rows we found wrong and the 38 games the files lack are published as repole-errata, CC0.
    • James Howell's historical scores supply every game before 1978, confirm every 1978–2013 result, and mark conference games before 2009. Howell doesn't say whose home game an off-campus game was; before 1978 a city counts as a team's home field when it played at least 5 regular-season games there against at least 3 opponents.
    • cfbfastR (ESPN) supplies every game from 2014 on, conference games from 2009, and spreads as the median closing line across books.
    • College Poll Archive supplies the AP polls. The AP ranked 20 teams through 1960, 10 in 1961–67, 20 through 1988 and 25 since, and had no preseason poll before 1950, so early-season games from those years can't qualify for a rank word.
    • CollegeFootballData supplies head-coach tenures, halftime scores (2001 on) and time of possession (2004 on).
    • Readers catch what the sources miss. r/CFB's HurricaneRex spotted that Washington State's 2025 games weren't counting as games against a first-year head coach: CFBD credits the bowl to an interim, and his one game fit the season opener just as well, which made Jimmy Rogers look like a mid-season hire. If a streak here looks wrong to you, it might be — say so.