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When anything can happen In the age of parity, college upsets not always as they seem
By Stewart Mandel, CNNSI.com The 2001 college football season began like many before it. Oklahoma was the defending national champ, Florida was No. 1 in the polls and Joe Paterno was on the brink of another milestone. All highly identifiable staples in a sport often defined by its familiarity. But by the second Saturday of September, a day ripe with such high-profile matchups as Michigan-Washington and Notre Dame-Nebraska, the eyes of the sport had turned to a most unlikely of powerhouses. The Fresno State Bulldogs, a relative unknown from the long forgotten Western Athletic Conference, had already taken down the Big 12’s Colorado and the Pac-10’s Oregon State. Now, it was rallying from a 20-10 deficit to stun Big Ten heavyweight Wisconsin 32-20, a win that would land quarterback David Carr the cover of Sports Illustrated and Fresno State the No. 11 ranking in the country.
But while most of the country was busy marveling at the Bulldogs’ triple feat, in the one city where such results can cost people money, Tom Vander Hof could only sit back and laugh. “I think sometimes what people call upsets really aren’t upsets,” says Vander Hof, an oddsmaker for Las Vegas Sports Consultants. “I know last year, those early games with Fresno State -- especially when they went to Wisconsin -- that wasn’t thought of as an upset in this office by any means. Not when you saw the talent they had coming back, including Carr.” Such is the state of college football in the age of scholarship limits that not only can Fresno State beat Wisconsin -- or South Florida beat Pittsburgh, or Oregon win twice as many games as Penn State, or Nebraska give up 62 points to Colorado -- but that all, while still capable of raising eyebrows, are logically explainable. “The Alabamas and Notre Dames of 30 years ago, they just didn't get upset,” says Florida State coach Bobby Bowden. “Those were the days when they could sign not only their players but yours, too. Now, with parity, everyone's vulnerable, because they're simply not that much better than anyone else.” South Florida coach Jim Leavitt, for whom scholarship limits allow the opportunity to sign in-state players who might otherwise have wound up at Florida State, Florida or Miami, was hardly flabbergasted last fall when his club -- in only its first year in Division I-A -- went to Pittsburgh and knocked off a Big East bowl team. “Why should they beat us?” says Leavitt “I watched Pittsburgh on film, and I told our guys, if they beat us, that would be a real shame. That'd be an upset on their part.”
The 85-scholarship rule -- college football’s version of a salary cap – taken together with factors like increased facilities spending by schools and inspired coaching by men like Kansas State’s Bill Snyder and Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer, who turned around once dormant programs, have created a climate where only one or two teams, like Miami last season, truly separate themselves from the pack. The result is an increasingly gray area as to what really constitutes an upset. The old coaches adage, “On any given Saturday …” may not hold true 100 percent of the time, but it’s a whole lot more fact-based than ever before. “I always tell our players ‘If we play our best, I think we will win. But boys, if you don't play your best, they're gonna beat you,’” says Bowden. “Now, you believe it, but will they? It's the old human factor with 18 and 19 year olds. “The thing is, you can't be ‘up’ every Saturday. You wish you could, but they way I look at it, you can't get sky high but about four weeks of the year. The times you're not sky high, you've got to hope [the other team is] not.” These days, it takes something extraordinary to truly surprise coaches like Bowden, who for the first time in 14 years was on the receiving end of two so-called upsets last year, and Leavitt, who is busy administering them. But such is not yet true of the general public, which for the most part still finds it incomprehensible that Penn State can lose to Toledo, or Alabama to Central Florida. In fact most fans of Penn State and Alabama -- or Ohio State, Michigan, USC or Notre Dame -- consider it unacceptable when their teams don’t win their customary 10 games per year. “You have to play someone, but it's generally true that it's hard to find anyone you can consistently beat,” says Pac-10 commissioner Thomas Hansen, whose league in recent years has seen the likes of Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State eclipse longtime juggernauts USC and UCLA. “There is great parity in college football, and you do not see Ohio State and Michigan dominating the Big Ten, USC and UCLA dominating the Pac-10 every year. The one exception is Florida State in the ACC, and even they didn't win it last year.” “I think college football is as competitive as it's ever been,” says Mid-American Conference commissioner Rick Chryst. “I don't know if anyone's gone out and documented it, but it seems like it's less blowouts. I grew up in Madison, Wis., and to think that since Penn State's been in the Big Ten, Wisconsin's been to three Rose Bowls, Northwestern to one in the time Penn State's been to one, in the '60s or '70s you wouldn’t be seeing that.” Florida State’s Bowden looks down his non-conference schedule, one that comprises Miami, Florida, Notre Dame, Iowa State and Louisville, and exclaims, “I'm as scared of Louisville as much as anyone. They had a 10-win season, went to a bowl, have a bunch of guys back. But [fans] look at someone like that, they're already counting that one [as a win].” Oddsmaker Vander Hof realizes that Sept. 26 contest at Louisville -- a nationally televised Thursday night game -- will be no gimme for the ‘Noles. Nevertheless, his company, which counts nearly every major Vegas sports book as a client, will likely wind up setting a line that only adds to the perception of FSU as a heavy favorite. For better or worse, the media and fans tend to rely heavily on betting lines as the measuring stick for upsets, but their actual purpose is to ensure that money will be played evenly on each side. “If that was the first game of the year, you’d have to make Florida State a 14- to 17-point favorite,” says Vander Hof. “For me to say, ‘Louisville is a lot better than that, I’m going to make Florida State only a five- or six-point favorite,’ it doesn’t matter because everyone is going to jump on it and drive it up to 14 anyway.” While parity makes today’s game more exciting for fans -- especially those of non-traditional powers -- it makes life maddening for coaches whose job security depends on winning the games their supporters believe they’re supposed to. Scheduling offers little refuge, as literally anyone can rise to prominence in the time between a game is scheduled and when it is played, making the occasional upset -- especially with each team eligible to add a 12th regular-season game -- almost inevitable. “It's kind of like Russian Roulette,” says Bowden. “There's bullet in there somewhere; you don't know when it's gonna come out.” |
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