A spate of weekly upsets made '07 a memorable year

Applachian State's stunning defeat of Michigan in the Big House set the tone for a season filled with upsets. Tony Ding/Icon SMI

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Talk to some of the participants in this year's historic slate of college football upsets and you're likely to hear a set of uplifting motivational truisms straight out of Remember the Titans.

"Our coaches did a terrific job preparing our players for that game," said Appalachian State coach Jerry Moore, whose defending I-AA national champions shocked then fifth-ranked Michigan on Sept. 1. "They believed they could win that game."

"It's the team that thinks they're going to lose that ends up losing," said Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh, whose Cardinal were 41-point underdogs but shocked No. 2 USC 24-23 on Oct. 6. "Our team played the whole game with the mindset they could win."

While confidence, preparation and the good-old human spirit all invariably played a part in these Cinderellas' improbable victories, there's got to be a more scientific explanation than that, right? Surely if we talked to experts from around the sport, they could offer a few more tangible factors behind this overriding trend of the 2007 season?

"I don't know," said Sun Belt commissioner Wright Waters, whose members scored three upsets (Louisiana-Monroe over Alabama, Troy over Oklahoma State and Florida Atlantic over Minnesota) of BCS-conference foes. "I'm trying to figure it out, too."

One thing's for certain: Parity has reached unprecedented heights in college football, with the 85-scholarship limit the most prominent among several factors that have radically transformed a sport once dominated by a select few.

"If you go back to the '70s and look at Ohio State and Michigan, they would win seven to eight games a year by scores like 50-6 or 66-10," said Harbaugh, a former Wolverines quarterback. "That was before scholarship limitations. Now, whether it's the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, or Pac-10, it's more like an NFL schedule every week. Everyone's competitive."

But the 85-scholarship limit has been in place since 1995 and is not exactly a new development. Increased television exposure and gargantuan financial commitments by schools have contributed to a broader leveling of the playing field that has been enveloping college football for more than a decade. However, that can't sufficiently explain the unprecedented volatility seen in 2007.

Over the course of a three-month regular season, 13 top five teams lost to unranked opponents. Nearly half those victims (six) were ranked No. 2 at the time. The year began with the first win by a I-AA team over a ranked I-A team (Appalachian State over Michigan) and ended with 28-point underdog Pittsburgh (4-7) stunning West Virginia (10-1) on the Mountaineers' home field.

There were three occasions (Oct. 13, Nov. 23-24 and Dec. 1) in which both the No. 1 and 2 teams lost in the same weekend, and another weekend (Sept. 28-29) in which five of the top 10 went down. On Sept. 22, Syracuse -- a 36.5-point underdog -- set a record for the biggest upset by point spread when it knocked off Louisville, only to be eclipsed two weeks later by Stanford.

"There's greater parity, that's a given, but the number of times No. 1 or 2 teams were beaten was extraordinary and unusual, and more than just parity," said Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen, who's been following the sport professionally since 1960. "It took a pretty extraordinary set of coinciding circumstances."

The Fatigue Factor

Waters thinks one of those circumstances was Division I-A's addition of a 12th-regular season game in 2006. (There had been previous experiments with a longer schedule in 2002 and '03.)

"It just seems like this year, in going to games and talking to coaches and kids -- there were a lot of tired football teams this year," said Waters. "You can only expend so much energy."

Fatigue was a commonly cited factor following 2-2 Colorado's improbable upset of then third-ranked Oklahoma on Sept. 29. The Sooners had defeated their first four opponents by an average score of 62-12 and took a 24-7 lead early in the third quarter. But Colorado kept grinding with a ball-control attack, and finished the game with nearly 39 minutes of possession. Both the Sooners' winded defense and their freshman quarterback, Sam Bradford, making his first career conference road start, seemed to collapse under the Rocky Mountain altitude in an eventual 27-24 defeat.

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