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The lover football the college that was dedicated was prepared to hope for the arrival that was not hoped for. Their teams’s fate, anyway, there is to the training teenage child relatively small and played in front of the hostile crowd. The thing happened.
But even by its own unpredictable standards, college football this season has been totally nuts, and bowl season figures to be even nuttier. Since 1975, according to Las Vegas oddsmakers, only four teams that were underdogs of 35 points or more have ended up winning, and two of them did so this year. On six different weekends this fall, the second-best team in the country lost to an unranked opponent. Heading into December, West Virginia needed only one more victory to play for the national championship and promptly lost to Pittsburgh, a team it was supposed to beat by four touchdowns. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Mike Seba, a senior oddsmaker for Las Vegas Sports Consultants, which sets point spreads for casinos in Las Vegas. “Anybody can win now. It’s just incredible.”
The last college-football season to see more than one major shocker was 1985, when Oregon State beat Washington and Texas-El Paso beat Brigham Young in games where both winners were more than 33-point underdogs. But according to handicappers, two of the three largest point-spread upsets in the last 32 years happened this season — and that doesn’t include what was arguably the biggest upset of all.
In September, Appalachian State, which plays in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA), traveled to Ann Arbor and beat the then-No. 5-ranked Michigan Wolverines, the winningest team in college football history. Most casinos didn’t even take bets on the game.
A Level Playing Field
Perhaps nothing has leveled the playing field in college football more than the emergence of pass-oriented offenses like the “spread,” a system that uses as many as five wide receivers at once. In previous eras when teams ran the football on most plays, the team with the deeper talent pool almost always won. As more teams adopt this go-for-broke strategy, it’s becoming easier for one or two particularly gifted players — like a quarterback — to have a bigger impact on the outcome. Teams that run the spread, including Appalachian State, Louisiana-Monroe and Illinois, were responsible for many of the year’s biggest upsets.
Scholarship restrictions implemented by the NCAA in 1994 have helped to prevent elite schools from hoarding the best players the way they once did, while the increasing number of outlets broadcasting college games has put more schools on television — which helps immensely with recruiting. Richer TV rights deals and bowl-game purses have also persuaded more schools to invest in their football programs.
No upset was more dramatic than Stanford’s one-point victory over then No. 2-ranked USC in October at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Over the past decade, USC has won more than 80% of its home games, while Stanford has lost almost two-thirds of its road games. In the last five years USC has had 17 players selected in the first two rounds of the NFL draft while Stanford has had two.
But with under a minute to play and his team down by six points, Stanford quarterback Tavita Pritchard, who was making his first start, found a rare advantage against the USC defense. His primary receiver, Mark Bradford, was the only Stanford player on the field who had been ranked among the top 100 high-school players in the country by the recruiting site Rivals.com. The USC player who was covering him, cornerback Mozique McCurtis, was one of the few Trojans in the game who had not been a top recruit. Mr. Bradford caught a pass for the game-winning touchdown.
Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh confessed that before the game, he figured his team would be hard-pressed to advance the ball 10 yards, let alone win. “I just knew it was going to be tough to pick up a first down,” he says.
Bracing for Turbulence
As bowl season kicks into gear, oddsmakers are bracing for more turbulence. The bowls, they say, have always been less predictable than the regular season thanks to the long layoffs teams have, the neutral fields they play on and the general lack of familiarity with opponents. This season’s rash of upsets has narrowed the margins between elite teams and also-rans and made it more difficult to handicap games. Even Ohio State and LSU, the teams playing in the BCS national championship game on Jan. 7, lost to unranked teams this season. “I expect a lot more upsets,” says Leo Shafto, a football oddsmaker for BetUs.com, an online sportsbook.
One obvious contender is Kansas State’s 41-21 shellacking of Texas in Austin. The Wildcats were 15-point underdogs but ended up winning the game by 20, creating a remarkable 35-point swing. Illinois’ defeat of then-No. 1 Ohio State in Columbus last month ranks near the top. In the last 10 years, Illinois has won only 35% of its road games, while the Buckeyes have won 84% of their games at home.
Another measure is how the teams were ranked at game time. When Syracuse beat Louisville on Sept. 22, Ken Massey, a statistician whose ratings help determine the BCS champion, had Syracuse ranked No. 103 in the country and Louisville No. 25 — one of the largest gaps any team has overcome this season.
Jeff Sagarin, a former stock analyst in Indiana whose ratings are also used by the BCS, says the best way to gauge an upset is to compare the two teams’ statistics after the full season. According to Mr. Sagarin’s formula, the year’s most surprising game was Stanford’s upending of USC. The Trojans’ final Sagarin rating of 88.3 was 29% higher than the Cardinal’s.
Closing the Point Spread
This analysis is confirmed by another measure — the closing Las Vegas point spread on the game. According to LVSC, the spread for Stanford-USC (basically a rough measure of how many points bettors think the favorite should win by) gave USC a whopping 39.5-point advantage. That Stanford actually won the game is a fact many bettors are still trying to comprehend.
Then there’s the question of the difference in the programs’ financial resources. When Louisiana-Monroe beat Alabama at home by seven points in November, it was nothing short of a fiscal miracle. Louisiana-Monroe’s total football expenses last season were $2.6 million, according to the U.S. Education Department. That’s about $19 million less than Alabama’s.
But here’s the real mismatch: Alabama’s new head coach, Nick Saban, earns $4 million a year — the highest salary in major college football. Louisiana-Monroe’s coach, Charlie Weatherbie, earns $130,000, which is one of the lowest salaries.
That means Mr. Saban makes more in two weeks than Mr. Weatherbie earns in a year.
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