The 2000 NCAA Division I-A football season ended with the Oklahoma Sooners claiming their first national championship and their first conference championship since the departure of head coach Barry Switzer.
Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops was in his second season as head coach, having been the defensive coordinator of Steve Spurrier's 1996 National Champion Florida Gators, and also having helped Bill Snyder turn the Kansas State Wildcats around in the early 1990s. Stoops erased a three-game losing streak against rival Texas by a score of 63–14, one of the worst defeats in Texas' football history. Despite the lopsided victory, this game marked a return of the Red River Shootout to a rivalry game with national title implications.
The BCS title game was not without controversy, as the system shut fourth-ranked Washington out of the championship game, despite being the only team who had beaten each #2 Miami and #5 Oregon State and having the same 10-1 record as #3 Florida State during the regular season. 10–1 Miami, who handed #3 Florida State their only loss, was ranked higher in both the AP Writers' Poll and the ESPN/USA Today Coaches' Poll, and had the same record as the Seminoles, was also seen as a possible title contender.
Virginia Tech also was left out of the BCS bowls, despite being ranked higher than one of the at-large teams, Notre Dame.
The South Carolina Gamecocks broke a 21-game losing streak, stretching back into 1998, to go 8–4 including a win over Ohio State in the Outback Bowl.
Two new bowl games began in the 2000 season: the Silicon Valley Bowl, which had a contractual tie-in with the WAC, and the Galleryfurniture.com Bowl.
Nevada left the Big West Conference to become the ninth member of the Western Athletic Conference.
Two new teams joined Division I-A football this season; University of Connecticut and University of South Florida.
Read more about 2000 NCAA Division I-A Football Season: Conference Standings, Bowl Championship Series Rankings, Final BCS Standings, Heisman Trophy Voting, Other Major Awards
Famous quotes containing the words division, football and/or season:
“O, if you raise this house against this house
It will the woefullest division prove
That ever fell upon this cursed earth.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“When we reached the lake, about half past eight in the evening, it was still steadily raining, and harder than before; and, in that fresh, cool atmosphere, the hylodes were peeping and the toads ringing about the lake universally, as in the spring with us. It was as if the season had revolved backward two or three months, or I had arrived at the abode of perpetual spring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)