This season will mark the 10th anniversary of the last LSU football team to win a national championship.
So where does that 2007 squad place among the greatest LSU teams of all time?
Methodology
To find out, I set up a grading system that measures many factors of all of LSU's 14 teams that won a national championship and/or a conference championship.
The system uses a weighted bell curve that places a heavy emphasis on winning national championships, but also gives significant credit for conference record, wins against ranked opponents and having a large number of players on the first-team All-American or first-team all-conference teams. It also awards extra value for high rankings in sports-reference.com's Simple Rating System (SRS) and Strength of Schedule (SOS) metrics. (Note: The 1896 Tigers won the SIAA championship but are not included in this analysis due to not having a SRS or SOS rating for that season.)
This system was designed to allow teams from any era to be able to compete on a level field with teams from other eras. The idea here is that the Bernie Moore, Paul Dietzel or Charlie McClendon championship teams should not be punished for playing in eras that had fewer games per season, but rather should be measured on the relative strength of their particular accomplishments.
The system was also adjusted to a 0-100 point scale, with 100 being the best ranking a team could achieve.
Now that we have the preliminaries out of the way, let's take a look at the top five teams in LSU history.