So your team got blown out, huh... Join the club

Does misery love company? You bet. And with the plague of blowout loses on the college gridiron over the last couple of years there has been plenty of company to go around. Virtually every program has had a bitter taste of humble pie -- served up cold and stale...and freely available for rival fans to gloat over... until it's their turn.

A case in point would be my alma mater -- Auburn. Under Head Coach Tommy Tuberville, the team has taken the field 58 times and been took to the wood shed (lost by two TDs or more) 13 times, or a little over 22% of the time. By contrast, to count up the previous 13 "blowouts" you would have to go back 97 more games -- to the November 3, 1990 debacle in Gainesville.

Perhaps even more telling is to break it down by coaches. Under Pat Dye the Tigers lost by two touchdowns or more 11 times in 145 games -- or 7.7% of the time. In the following 65 games under Terry Bowden Auburn got whacked in identical fashion seven times, or at a 10.8% rate. So the current squad is nearly three times as likely to get hammered than Dye coached teams.

In the era of scholarship limitations one would intuitively believe there should be relatively few runaways. But to the contrary, there seem to be more runaways than ever in college football. But why so many "bad" games?

There are several reasons.

Fast Break Football

One of the main reasons simply relates to how the game is played. With more passing plays being called there will be more plays period. This is simply due to the fact the clock stops on every incomplete pass. The extra plays translate into more pressure on the opposing defense and more opportunities to score and eventually the law of averages catches up and the bigger numbers come. A parallel can be drawn between NCAA basketball over the same time. In the early '80s there was no shot clock and Dean Smith's "four corner offense" found a home in lots of places outside of Chapel Hill. As a result there were fewer plays -- fewer shots -- fewer blowouts. This was the era of 53-50 final scores. Such a score today would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. In contrast, thus far in 2003 there have been 19 different occasions where a team has scored 61 or more in a game (I know you astute college football fans realize overtime has something to do with that statistic, but it doesn't explain them all).

No More Calling off the Dogs

Style of play has made big wins more likely as well. This is what I refer to as the "Spurrier effect." When the aforementioned coached at the University of Florida he seemed to have a relentless pursuit of embarrassing the other team. He would have run up the score against his mother if she had the misfortune of coaching across the field from him. His mindset was, "it's my job to try and score and your job to try and stop me. I'm not responsible for your defense." This philosophy -- along with a severe case of arrogance -- made Spurrier a lot of enemies while he was in Gainesville. But a funny thing happened since his heyday, other "more respectable" coaches began adopting that same "take no prisoners" creed and tried to quietly annihilate opponents. They may not have worn/thrown a visor on the sidelines, but the second and third stringers stayed on those sidelines a little longer than they used to.

A classic illustration of how the times have changed came from the Auburn-Georgia Tech game in 1986 with Auburn Coach Pat Dye ordering QB Jeff Burger to kneel at the Tech two-yard line and let the clock expire. Burger began to do this but Tech put up no resistance since it was obvious what Auburn planned to do. Offensive lineman Jim Thompson seeing this grabbed Burger by the arm and motioned for him to go ahead and dive across the goal line for the cheap touchdown. Burger did and Tech head Coach Bill Curry was none too pleased. And who could blame him? Dye was barbecued as well, although without merit in this case. Fast forward that same scene to today and it's somewhat unlikely that call to kneel would even be made. And that is a direct reflection of...

The BCS/Pollster Influence

When rewards are based in part on margin of victory, the incentive to mercilessly smoke the other team -- even by way of the cheapest touchdowns -- can't be ignored. Just ask Penn State Head Coach Joe Paterno what "easing up" can cost you, as he did against Indiana and it cost him a shot at the National Title. Adding more incentive to padding scores is the fact that most coaches don't even cast their own vote in the supposed "Coaches Poll." In actuality, the Sports Information Director does this for him. The idea being "coaches are too busy to put any time into this kind of stuff." Well in practical terms, SIDs are busy too, so they catch scores, watch some highlights on ESPN and cast their proxy vote based on little else. So why not run it up and impress the real pollsters?

No Lead is Safe

In a related manner, most any team is going to add scores in hopes of building an insurmountable lead. But in this day and age, what lead is safe? Ask Minnesota. Their answer is probably different than it was before their nightmare against Michigan earlier this year.

So in a final word, should your team get crushed on a given Saturday you can launch a blood-thirsty salvo on talk radio the next Monday, fire off a vicious post on the bulletin board, and have a coronary in the process. Or you can philosophically say, well it's the sign of the times. It happens to everybody and we'll get 'em next Saturday!

OK, that being said, just spell the coach's name correctly when you go online.