The 2014 college football season starts this weekend. College football is a peculiar sport in a few ways. It’s a very short season — most teams play 11 or 12 games. There’s no real pre-season, so teams don’t get that much of a chance to warm up. Any loss during the regular season almost eliminates most teams from championship contention. Add to these three factors, the fact that colleges are able to schedule their own opponents for the first three or four weeks of the year, before conference play begins, and you get a recipe for… a pretty boring first weekend of football.
Why is that? Well, there’s a real incentive for the top teams to win their first several games. There’s a ton of money involved. Top teams are expected to go almost undefeated every year and the financial difference to their university between going into the fifth or sixth game of the season undefeated or with one early loss is immense. So, many top teams schedule what they think are going to be very easy games for the first few weeks of the season. They actually pay smaller or weaker teams to go on the road and play them in their home stadiums. Last year the biggest single game payment was made by Alabama to Colorado State. Alabama paid $1,500,000 for Colorado State to travel to Tuscaloosa where they lost, as expected but not arranged, 31-6. Losing is not part of the deal, but it’s part of the deal.
This isn’t all bad, it gives small teams a chance to make lots of money and also to play spoiler. Some of them can make a name for themselves by playing better than expected or even upsetting the host team. But it does mean that big established teams play a lot more at home than smaller teams which doesn’t seem fair if you think about the players as people who have families and friends who want to see them in person. It also means that a LOT of the games in the first few weeks are really not worth watching.
Using the preseason Associated Press Preseason Top 25 and Jeff Sagarin’s ranking of all teams, I put together an analysis of the opening weekend games to see which of the top 25 teams had scheduled easy games, moderate games, and which had scheduled games against opponents of relatively even strength to them. The term cupcake is a commonly used term to refer to a game a good team schedules against a weaker team and should win. I rolled with it and invented the terms “dinner roll” to refer to the not-so-unfair games that some teams scheduled and “spinach” to refer to an evenly matched game. From my perspective, it’s these spinach games that we should watch this weekend.
Without further ado, here is the first ever Dear Sports Fan infographic:
