Beyond the White and Gold

Reading the scorecard for college football games, one can usually anticipate the type of games that will be played on a Saturday. There will be a marquee matchup, pitting two highly ranked teams against each other in a bid for one to move up in the rankings. There will be competitive conference games, showcasing the best each conference has to offer to the nation. While these games are the most attractive to viewers and fans, there is usually another game that always makes its way on to the local markets: the guaranteed blowouts.

Michigan withstanding, these games are usually less about the competition and more about the point differential. There are numerous reasons for this, usually linked to the football team's need to make sure to pad its win total, just in case they cannot win the tougher games. Starters can go off after the first quarter and the second, third and sometimes even fourth string can get their taste of play time. This leaves the victors with a great sense of accomplishment and the loser rethinking their careers.

So is it wrong to run up the score in football? It is never right to run up the score, but in places like the college world, it is an unfortunate necessity.

On a moral level, it does not seem right to score unnecessarily. Once you have proved your dominance against a team, is it right to assert it over and over again? The point is stated, yet the team continues to score points. It proves nothing except a team's need for a larger margin of victory and its need to feel the self satisfaction of beating a clearly inferior opponent.

Still, it seems like a practice that isn't going to change anytime soon. During a poll of the media and the coaches, the voters will inevitably have not watched a single second of most of the games. If they are coaches forced to vote the day after their own game, they must rely on statistics to tell the story of the game. Often, they can just pick up a paper and look at the score to judge how well a team performed on a certain weekend. For example, our own team was bumped up in the rankings after embarrassing Samford, 69-14. Not many teams can claim to move into the top-15 of the rankings after a win against a former Division I-AA team. If a team "only" wins by 21 points, it could tell a coach that the team just was good, but not good enough.

Of course, at Tech, blowouts are just a part of our tradition. In the most lopsided victory in the history of NCAA football, the then Tech Engineers blew out the Cumberland College Bulldogs, 222-0. The game saw Tech ring up 63 points in the first quarter and score 12 defensive/special teams touchdowns. One could argue that Tech is the reason why blowouts are so popular today.

The sad truth is that college teams are forced to participate in this exercise of focusing on the points rather than the play or else they will see a sudden drop in the rankings. These squads do not dare to slow down when up by 45, anticipating that another touchdown could be the difference in rankings and maybe even more national exposure. Just as its normal for a team to schedule its rivalry at the end of the season, its also necessary for a team to look to the perennial losers. Almost all the football factories do it, making sure they keep themselves among the elite. Thus, teams and coaches need to reevaluate the process of judging a team's performance or else unsportsman-like acts like this will continue.

These games show a fundamental problem with college football. It is impossible to accurately assess a game by just a score, but pollsters continue to do so and encourage football teams to schedule these teams on their upcoming trips. It is a lazy habit that promotes a practice that has little to no value for either team.

If college teams make an effort to make a difficult schedule and pollsters begin to watch more games, the college game as a whole would significantly improve. It would not only encourage competition and fair play (something that most colleges should do in the first place) but would empahsize the idea that just because one can beat up on an opponent does not mean that one should.

Sports, after all, is a competitive sport and should not be taken as a place where one team displays their dominance just for the sake of it. If that were to occur, college football would be better for it.