CFB Most Influential Programs
#5 Grambling State Tigers
School: Grambling State Tigers
First Game: 1928
Winning Percentage: .686
Appearances in AP/Rank: N/A
Average AP Ranking: N/A
National Titles:15
Claim to Fame: Icon of college football coach Eddie Robinson coached 55 years at Grambling, turning it into the standard for HBCU and smaller schools for college football.
Why I have them in my Collection: Grambling is the pinnacle of sustained success and excellence when it comes to college football. As any HBCU can attest to, they have done more with less when it comes to support (or lack thereof) from state legislatures, and that was painfully obvious in the segregated past. Despite this, Grambling became a program that not only churned out over 200 NFL players, but also names that are so synonymous with college football that national awards are named after them.
The FCS coach of the year award is named after the great Eddie Robinson.
The FCS best defensive player of the year award named after NFL Hall of Famer and Grambling defensive tackle Buck Buchanan.
Buck is one of 4 Grambling NFL hall of Famers, all of whom played under coach Eddie Robinson.
Doug Williams, Grambling alum and future Grambling head coach, was also the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl with Washington in the 1980s.
In 1976 Grambling also was the first college football team along with Morgan State to play a game in Tokyo, Japan. The Tigers would return to play and defeat Temple in Tokyo the following year as well.
Grambling is also a part of the most famous HBCU “classic” game which they play against Southern every year in New Orleans. The Bayou Classic is nationally televised, and as a result is one of the better known classics. In years past, it would potentially not only decide who won the SWAC, but also who would claim the black college national championship as well. Of the HBCU classics it is probably the most corporate feeling, but that does not take away from the significance and reach of the game.
All of those accolades and markers are nice, but what makes Grambling as a program so integral to the fabric that is college football is the fact that Eddie Robinson and his staff were giving players a chance to play football at a collegiate level that they would not have had otherwise, especially in such abundance. Grambling, along with other HBCUs by providing little black boys with a road to collegiate education and athletics, helped create pipelines with high schools in the segregated south that otherwise would have been barren at best. While the occasional school up north would take a few black players, Eddie Robinson and his fellow coaches were taking hundreds, providing hundreds of opportunities for players and coaching development alike.
This is something that is often overlooked when talking about the significance of HBCUs to college football development and the NFL as well. While LSU refused to take black players, Southern was taking them in droves. FAMU became the standard of college football excellence in the state of Florida because their public schools would never look at the players that FAMU was taking. Eddie Robinson was doing this at Grambling for 5 and a half decades. That’s an insane amount of time. The legacy of HBCUs is as much about the players and coaches they helped develop as it is how just by existing they helped create a hotbed of high school football players that otherwise would not have existed.
We’re keeping these short I promise. There will be people who gripe about Grambling being ranked ahead of some schools, especially the one previously mentioned. But I will absolutely say that when it comes to the number of young men affected by the existence of Grambling football and coach Robinson as college football icons, to say they impacted hundreds of thousands if not millions, is likely even an understatement.
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