i wasn't around in the early days. i only started in like, 2007 or something (only! 15 years, good grief... i need to retire again). IMO, when a game is really early, there are tons of great imbalances, and i think some of those really early years like 2004 era, it sounds more like a beta test than a polished game.
my original GOAT is oldresorter. it obviously says something that his original GOAT was plumpy, but i only ever was able to track down like 5-6 titles by plumpy in those early days? i guess i am just not sure the game was around long enough, in stable enough form, to have a GOAT, that early. nothing against plumpy! sounds like a good guy. and a lot of old timers all looked at him as being on another level, which says quite a lot. if you want to know who the best is, you don't poll the overall community, you poll the top 25.
by the time i came around, the game had several hundred seasons simulated across the worlds. the game had more or less stabilized, a lot of the really wonky stuff had been worked out already. it was clear on the day i joined that OR was the goat, for a few reasons. he had the most titles by a mile, which isn't always the best indicator, due to number of teams carried, but its certainly a big indicator, and OR's lead was quite substantial. on the raw dominance front, there were only 3 programs who had 3peats, and two were ORs, including the game's only d1 3peat. props to rails on having a 5 peat and a separate 3 peat all from the same program, that was legendary.
perhaps above all, in my way of thinking anyway, Tark was the first new world ever, and it seems like more or less, a who's who of HD coaches joined in the hopes of obtaining the first A+ programs and all that. when you have so many top coaches competing like that, if one coach really outshines the rest, that means a lot. OR towered over early tark like a giant, with the greatest d1 and d3 program game-wide, not only at that moment but of all time up to that point. he truly had no rival.
that's why OR is the original GOAT in my mind. and very possibly still retains that title.
in fairness, if i were to make a case against OR as the all time GOAT, it would go like this. the major success all came in 1.0, not 2.0 or 3.0, which leaves room perhaps for a similar argument i made against plumpy here, that OR's great successes were all fairly early. also, pulldowns were absolute BS back then. i read the forums at a frantic pace, so by my 2nd season ever, i understood pulldowns - but i was in a pretty small minority. i thought my 2nd ever class was 1 seed material, which was demonstrated to be true, they pulled the 2nd #1 seed as seniors. which should never happen. the advantage of knowing pulldowns meant that i didn't feel that any coach who didn't know pulldowns, was competition for me, even though i was still a rookie. however, there were also 180 coaches in those divisions back then. did OR and rails really have less competition than d2/d3 with the 60 or 70 coaches we've seen recently? tough sell. also, one could also argue that at the onset of a d1 world, there is less competition, which is at least half true - when OR first arrived at uconn and has his way with d1 tark, lots of BCS jobs were empty. but he also beat out the cream of the crop of HD coaches, in getting to high d1 early. a group of very good, very motivated coaches. i think that speaks louder, but an argument could be made there.
anyway, IMO, no matter how you slice it, emphasizing the disadvantages, minimizing the success, and even if you call plumpy the original GOAT... OR was the GOAT of the overall 1.0 era (pre-potential). by a mile. so if he wants to call plumpy the original GOAT, i am ok with that, nobody has a better vantage point on the subject than he does.