Please don't think of this blog as being just about college football; I had hoped to write my second post about a different sport, to get some variety going. But I was spurred to write about this post's topic due to a football game I had the pleasure of watching Saturday that most people (outside of fans of Wisconsin or Indiana football) probably didn't pay too much attention to. The game between Wisconsin and Indiana was supposed to be a blowout. The Vegas line was -21.5 for Wisconsin, which, for those not inclined to betting, means that Wisconsin had to win by at least 22 points for gamblers to make money on a pro-Wisconsin wager. Essentially, the Badgers were considered favorites to beat Indiana by three touchdowns. And why wouldn't they be? Wisconsin came into the game with an 8-1 record, their lone loss coming against an outstanding Michigan State squad, while Indiana had yet to win a Big Ten game and could only boast victories over the likes of Arkansas State and Western Kentucky. In the minds of many, Wisconsin was capable of beating Indiana by far more touchdowns if it so chose. If they wanted to "run up the score," as people say, there was no telling what kind of havoc Wisconsin could wreak on the Hoosiers' porous defense.
This Saturday, fans were given either a rare treat or a bitter pill, depending on how one might look at it. Wisconsin did run up the score. A lot. Regardless of how far ahead they were, the Badgers didn't let up against lowly Indiana. The final score? 83-20, Wisconsin.
Those 83 points marked easily the highest scoring total of any FBS game this year. It also tied a Big Ten Conference game record. Suddenly, Wisconsin, who looked merely mortal in a 34-13 victory last week over mediocre Purdue, now seemed positively superhuman. Meanwhile, Indiana, who looked like potential upset specialists after very close losses against Iowa and Northwestern, were made to look like they belonged in the Pee Wee league. Watching the game alongside other college football enthusiasts was also a thrill, as we were awed at how high the score continued to climb each time we turned back toward the screen. This was becoming a true feat, with Wisconsin excelling in a rare way that, we felt, deserved our attention. It was so rare that it was only 17 points away from tying the NCAA record for points scored against a major college opponent, when Houston put up 100 versus Tulsa in 1968. The Wisconsin basketball team only scored 83+ points three times last season. It was a sight to behold.
But it also raises that pesky question of sportsmanship. "Sportsmanship" is hard to define, but the one thing we definitely know is that it's not covered very well in the rulebook. Most facets of sportsmanship are considered unwritten rules. Respect your opponents. Shake hands after the game. Don't talk trash, and if you do, no low-blows. Don't intentionally injure an opponent. And, of course, don't run up the score.
The concept of running up the score has always been an interesting one to me because of what the score symbolizes. You often hear announcers or writers say that a score was "not indicative of the result" or "not indicative of how badly [one team] dominated [the other team]." This would apparently indicate that, in general, the score does indicate the general flow of the game. I could tell you almost definitively that in a game with a final score of 14-12, the game was very close, there were good defensive efforts, either team could have ended up with the win, both teams made some crucial mistakes, and the game remained exciting until the end. If the final score was 45-7, I could almost always surmise that the winning team looked a lot better than the losing team, that the fourth quarter may as well not have even been played, that the losing team's defense was unprepared for what they faced, and that at least one person on the winning team's offense enjoyed a notable statistical day. The score is not just the way we gauge who won the game, insofar as the team with the higher number has beaten the team with the lower number. The numbers themselves are also created in accordance with what happened within the game.
In this regard, while Wisconsin certainly didn't need those last few touchdowns, or even those last 50 points, wouldn't holding up their offense have created a score that was, in a sense, a lie? If these two teams, playing to the best of their abilities for 60 minutes, would have produced a final score of 83-20, why should Wisconsin be expected to handicap themselves by limiting their offensive output to, say, 50? After all, it's their offensive capability, and they've worked hard to earn the ability to put up 83 against a team like Indiana. Why does football's circle frown on teams putting up the scores they have earned the right to try for, rather than scores meant to win the game but not hurt the other team's feelings?
It's worth taking a look at whose feelings, exactly, we care about here. As you move down the ladder of football levels, you see that kids now play the game when they've barely entered kindergarten. Football already becomes "competitive" just a few years after that. From this level all the way up through high school, most leagues have "mercy" rules, where if a team goes up on another team by a certain number of points, the clock might accelerate to bring the game to an expedited end, or, in some cases, the game might end immediately, so that the worst a team can lose by is a few dozen points. These rules make sense because of the age of the players involved. Leagues prior to high school are often considered instructional and developmental, even as they remain competitive, and most of the kids playing in these leagues are preteens. There's no reason to expect a 9-year old to have to sit there and watch an opposing team put up touchdown after touchdown to embarrass him and his teammates; the levels of competition are often very unbalanced, most of the kids playing are just doing so for the social experience and to have fun, and most of all, kids of that age are not emotionally mature. It's easy to see why the adults that run youth leagues implement mercy rules that prevent opposing coaches from making small children cry with callous and mean-spirited strategy.
Even in high school, one can see why this type of sportsmanship makes sense, even though high school football can often seem like life or death for both the players and the fans. These are not scholarship players, they have also not hit a level of sufficient emotional maturity, and many of them are still playing the game as a fun, extracurricular activity. We've become almost conditioned to think of high school football players as men, but many of them are still 14 or 15 years old, an age where they still have a lot of learning to do and at which football is often a more minor part of their lives, unless they play for very serious teams or expect to be recruited. Even though there are teams and players at the high school level who treat the game much as one would in college, there are obvious reasons to consider that it's better to err on the side of mercy at that level.
At the college level, however, things change. These are men at least 18 years old, and very likely older. They are attending expensive universities free of charge in exchange for their football playing, a form of payment even if most people don't want to admit it. They are no longer at the level where they are playing football just for the fun of it or so that they can make friends; they are officially playing football competitively, for institutions that often make a lot of money from the game and have national fanbases. What exactly is the issue with running up the score in these games? Are you afraid of hurting the feelings of grown men who are playing this sport by choice? Do you think the feelings of those men are better helped by pretending that you couldn't have scored another 30 points if you wanted to, even though everyone in the stadium knows you could have? When, exactly, can we tell people to "man up;" that, if they don't like the minor emotional struggles of what is essentially their job, they are free to start paying for their own educations?
This becomes even more amplified at the professional level, where I wouldn't have even thought I'd have to explain why this concept is bunk, though national sportswriters constantly crow about sportsmanship in the NFL (see the New England Patriots of the mid-2000's). Most players in the NFL pull in salaries in excess of $1 million. The minimum salary for a rookie, with no bonus, is about $300,000, an amount of money that most of us could never hope to make. These are men in their 20's or 30's being paid like kings to play football; if we are still worried about "hurting their feelings" when a score gets too high (and, mind you, the score gets too high because that losing team is clearly not effectively doing what it is paid to do), then what are they being paid for?
But at the college level, there is even another factor: the BCS, where style points matter. Two thirds of the BCS rankings are made up of human polls, polls where voters will likely look merely at the scores of the games from that Saturday as most are beat writers, former players, or other such types who may be inclined to only watch one or two games live. And when one of those voters stumbles upon the Wisconsin game, what do you think is more likely to elevate his or her ranking of the Badgers: a final score of 50-20, or a final score of 83-20? The former makes it look like Wisconsin dominated the Hoosiers; the latter makes it look like Wisconsin is in a league all its own. When coaches have to fight tooth and nail to earn inclusion within the top two spots, and with a team like Wisconsin actually having a legitimate-if-outside chance of making the BCS Championship Game, how could you blame coach Bret Bielema for appealing to voters as best he can? Heck, as I observed in my last post, Oregon has gotten its love by putting up gaudy numbers week after week (side note: anyone catch how Oregon only managed a meager 15 points when faced with a decent defense?). Why shouldn't Wisconsin's reaction be to outshine the Ducks?
But we can set the BCS argument aside for a minute, because only a handful of teams really need to care about that anyway. The bigger question is still one of why people really care about sportsmanship at the college level, at least in this instance. It makes sense to care about it in terms of not intentionally injuring an opponent, because causing physical harm goes beyond the parameters of the game and deeply affects one's personal life. It makes sense to care about a player shaking hands, because not doing so makes it look like a player personally dislikes the other team, which also goes outside the parameters of the game. But the score of the game, definitionally, is within the parameters of the game. Yes, having the other team score 83 points against you might make you feel sad after the game. But if you're a defensive back and you get torched by a wide receiver during the game, that will probably make you sad as well. Should wide receivers slow down in the interest of sportsmanship? Should defensive players intentionally drop easy interceptions so that the quarterback doesn't feel bad? Players or teams on the wrong end of in-game events never feel happy about it. So why do we care about this instance of making the other team feel bad?
The obvious answer is that it's excessive. If Indiana wasn't going to beat Wisconsin back when the score was 76-20 with two minutes to play, there was no need to make the score 83-20 after that. The biggest comeback victory in college football history was only 35 points, and those points certainly weren't all scored within two minutes, so unless you think Indiana is going to make history, there's not much reason to pad your lead from 56 points to 63 points. Part of the response to this argument comes from the above discussion about the nature of the score. A game is 60 minutes long, not 58, and both teams signed up to play all 60. If Wisconsin was good enough to score again, there's no reason to criticize them for legitimately playing that final two minutes, especially when playing "all 60 minutes" is the mantra of so many football coaches. Laying down for those final two minutes would have degraded the value of the final score and caused it to be less indicative of the skill level between these two teams, causing Wisconsin to potentially suffer in the BCS poll and causing the game to have, theoretically, less real meaning (however negligible that difference would be).
And if you do believe that winning is the only thing that really matters in a game, and not the final score, consider that each score does bring with it a greater chance of victory, even if those returns diminish as the score differential becomes wider. It's incredibly difficult to believe Indiana would have come back to win the game, but it wasn't even close to being a mathematical impossibility, just an extreme improbability. In 2006, when Northwestern led Michigan State by 35 points, they probably knew that no FBS team had ever come back from more than a 31-point deficit, and thought victory was assured. 38 unanswered points later, a new record was set. Who is to say that Bielema was wrong to do everything in his power to prevent the improbable from happening? Can you ever be too sure of a victory? Bielema gets paid a lot of money to win as many games for Wisconsin as he can. Isn't he earning his money by taking every precaution to ensure that those wins come? And anyway, why should he care about the "feelings" of a bunch of grown men who chose to play football at Indiana and whose prime objective that day was to beat Wisconsin? If you were head of security at a bank, and you had the opportunity to put an additional safeguard on the vault door, even if it was thought to be virtually impenetrable prior to the safeguard, would a factor in your choice to implement that safeguard be that it might further hurt a robber's feelings if he failed to get through it? It seems like a no-brainer to improve your job performance in this way, even if it means only increasing your effectiveness by a fraction of a fraction of a percent. So why wouldn't Bielema be given the same courtesy to do his job?
A football team's job is to score as many points as it can and prevent the other team from scoring as many points as it can. If it can do these two things, it can win as many games as it is physically able to. At lower levels of competition, football players have more important jobs: to have fun, to grow as people, to expand their horizons, to make friends. These objectives mean running up the score should take a back seat. But at the college and professional levels, grown men are being compensated to play football by choice, and the only negative offshoot of running up the score is making the losing team feel inferior.
But if the winning team can put up 83 points, the losing team is inferior. So why are people so afraid to accept that?
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