You are not wrong on UConn football if you're using the term "much history in football" as a synonym for "a long history in 1A football."...
We have been playing the sport as long as anyone. We were Division 1 for many, many years before it split into two divisions. We went 1AA at that time. We made the decision to upgrade in the 90s and officially joined the Big East in 2004. In that BCS league, our overall D1A record was about 20 games over .500 at something like 65-45 from the time we upgraded through the end of Randy Edsall's tenure as coach, which was capped off with an appearance in the 2011 Fiesta Bowl.
We took a hit for a few years because our dumb former AD hired a retread coach, Paul Pasqualoni, and since PP took over, our record has been like 20-40, dropping us to an overall D1A record of exactly .500, 86-86. We don't have the lengthy history to just make the last five years look like a little blip on the radar. Instead, because we are still in relative D1A infancy, our poor seasons the last few years are being viewed as our norm, or what can be expected of us. They are not. For twice as long, and in a BCS league, we had a .600 winning percentage. That's our norm. We are still digging our way out now, but our new coach, Bob Diaco, got us back to bowling this past season and we plan to stay there.
We are not a football lightweight. We won the Big East twice in nine seasons before it broke up, (twice more than Rutgers who had a 15 year head start) appearing in five bowls in that span, including every year from 2007-2010. We averaged 8 wins a year in that span. We have been to the BCS (Hi again, Rutgers). We have some of the best facilities in the country and we dump plenty of money into the team, considering we have a P5 operating budget while collecting G5 checks. Also, if we joined the XII today, we would have more alumni in the NFL than any school in the league not named UT or OU. We are committed. The XII has nothing to worry about with UConn football.
I am not our resident football historian, though. That would be
@Butch and I will let him give you more if he would like.