By Michael Bradley
Michael Bradley is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. He is a frequent contributor to Coaching Management.
Coaching Management, 9.4, May 2001, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0904/inbounds.htm
Everyone knew the University of Miami football team needed to make a big impression. Thanks to the vagaries of the Bowl Championship Series formula, the Hurricanes found themselves sitting behind Florida State in the BCS rankings, even though they had beaten the Seminoles earlier in the year.
So, when the University of Pittsburgh came to Miami on Nov. 11, the Hurricanes were in need of the kind of help a big win could provide. Even though the Panthers were headed for a bowl game, they were big underdogs to Miami, which had scored at least 41 points in its previous three games, including a 41-21 thumping of highly regarded Virginia Tech the Saturday before. The stage was set for a rout.
But that rout never materialized. Even though Miami won, 35-7, the Hurricanes did what they could to keep the game from getting too far out of hand. Coach Butch Davis, now with the Cleveland Browns, pulled his starters early in the fourth quarter and ran the ball extensively, even though the Miami passing attack had been clicking.
What could have been a 50-point decision was a decisive, but unhumiliating, 28-point win. Davis, who had said all week that he wasn’t going to resort to blowing out rivals to impress the computer, lived up to those words.
Maybe a 50-point win would have helped the Hurricanes jump past Florida State in the rankings. Maybe not. Davis wasn’t going to find out.
“Crucify me, but it would have been much worse if we had lost [quarterback] Ken Dorsey or [defensive tackle] Damione Lewis to an injury with the game out of reach,” Davis said after the game. “You’d like to think that 35-7 was enough. Everybody says that winning by 20 points is enough, that they don’t give you any more for 20 than they do for 1,000.”
That’s the way it’s supposed to be in sports. A win is a win is a win. Finish with more points, runs, or goals than the other team and move on to the next rival. Rolling it up doesn’t give a team an extra “W”. And embarrassing the other guy doesn’t foster sportsmanship and a sense of fair play. Win the game, shake hands, and go home.
If sports at all levels have shown us anything in the past decade, though, it’s that perfection is a long ways off. Many would say that the old-fashioned ideal of sports as a means of completing the person—sound mind, sound body—has disappeared in the face of the big-money climate of $13 million bowl bids and fat TV checks.
This leaves coaches facing a dilemma. Do they sacrifice sportsmanship and the essence of athletics, just to satisfy a computer or squeeze out a few more votes in the polls? Or, do they take steps to avoid embarrassing an opponent, even if the cost is passing up future glory, and often money, for their own team?
Poll Parties
In contrast to football, college basketball teams are rewarded for their victories and given more praise for playing a difficult schedule. It doesn’t matter whether Team A beats Team B by one point or 41. Because the college hoops national champions (at all levels, men’s and women’s) are determined by tournaments, margin of victory doesn’t matter.
But that’s not the way it is in college football, at least not in Division I-A. For as long as there have been polls determining who gets to call themselves the best, teams have been tempted to pad the score. If a Big Ten program beats someone 55-0, that opens eyes out West the same way Eastern attentions are attracted by a 63-0 drubbing down South. Since no one can watch every single game, pollsters often rely on margin of victory to determine which teams are better.
The theory is that if a school wins by 60 points, it must be something special, even if the opposition was suspect. And this kind of thinking feeds on itself. If one team beats Midwest Tech by 40, the next team feels it needs to beat Midwest Tech by 45 to impress anyone.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that all coaches look at the margin of victory, especially early in the season, with their non-conference schedules,” says Tommy Tuberville, who has guided Auburn University back into national prominence. “If you get an opportunity to go into the BCS’ top level, you make sure you do everything you can to impress the pollsters and move up quickly.
“The sooner you get up in the polls, the better off you are if you lose, because you don’t fall as far,” he continues. “You want to make a good impression.”
Once Bitten, Twice Shy
Other coaches, however, follow Davis’ example, even if it may hurt them in the long run. In 1994, Penn State entered its game at Indiana as the nation’s top-ranked team. The Hoosiers were seen as little more than a speed bump on the Nittany Lions’ path to the Rose Bowl and a possible national title. Though this was in the days before the BCS or any of its predecessors, Penn State and teams like it still had to worry about making statements to the pollsters, the better to secure high rankings.
For three quarters, the Lions did just that, throttling the overmatched Hoosiers. Then, Coach Joe Paterno called off his starters. IU rallied for three fourth-quarter touchdowns, the last featuring a two-point conversion at the gun that narrowed the count to 35-29. Paterno didn’t care. A win was a win, right?
Wrong. On Monday, he found out how wrong when the Lions were dropped to second, behind Nebraska, in the polls. Because many voters didn’t see that Penn State had eased up in the fourth quarter, and that Indiana had scored against Nittany Lion reserves, they thought the lowly Hoosiers had narrowly missed an upset. Even though Penn State finished the year a perfect 12-0, it finished second in both polls, in part because of Paterno’s good sportsmanship.
So now coaches are wary of letting the same thing happen to their teams. “You can’t worry about the other team if it’s a mismatch,” Tuberville says. “You might change some of the things you do on offense or defense, so the score is not so bad, but you have to worry about yourself, first.”
Playoffs Offer No Panacea
In Division I-AA, Villanova University Head Coach Andy Talley says it’s about wins, not blowing out someone. Since I-AA has a 16-team tournament, just about all the deserving teams in the nation get a chance at the title, not just two schools. So, simply winning nine or 10 games is enough. Eight usually cuts it. Yes, teams are seeded in the tourney, but the top spots generally go to conference champions and undefeated clubs, not those who can impress a computer by blowing out an inferior opponent.
“We don’t have computer ratings and a strength of schedule component,” Talley says. “Usually, eight wins is the signpost that gets you in.”
Divisions II and III have tournaments, too, and they rely on automatic bids to conference champions to fill much of the field. But even here there is a side of the seeding process that can sometimes provoke a coach to pile it on: home field advantage.
Last year, Widener University Head Coach Bill Zwaan says he was told by some members of the selection committee that his Pioneers needed “an impressive win” in their season finale against 1-8 Juniata College to assure themselves of a first-round home game. That didn’t sit too well with Zwaan.
“You can win impressively without running up the score,” he says. “Even though people were telling me those things, I just wanted to win.”
So, the Pioneers beat Juniata, but “only” 37-22. The next week, Widener began the Division III playoffs on the road in Schenectady, N.Y., against Union College.
Trinity University (Texas) Head Coach Steve Mohr agrees that Divisions II and III place less emphasis on factors that could entice a coach to chase big margins of victory. At those levels, he feels history plays a bigger role. Teams with winning traditions get increased consideration because they are proven commodities. That may not sound so fair, but at least it doesn’t entice the big boys to flex their muscles for four quarters against overmatched rivals.
“I think the seedings are in the hands of a group of people who know the competition and recognize a team’s success in the past,” Mohr says. “Up-and-comers have something to prove if they don’t have any experience in the playoffs. Trinity has been to the Final Four two of the last three years. We don’t have to bury our competition. We have a reputation.”
High School Heavyweights
Most state high school associations have tried to eliminate margin of victory from their playoff equations. In some states, everybody makes the playoffs, so simply winning and advancing is everything. Survive the league, and you get to the regionals. Win there, and it’s on to the state tourney.
Others, like Pennsylvania, reward teams that play and beat schools of similar or larger sizes. Class AAA teams that beat larger AAAA schools get extra credit, while those who play smaller AA rivals suffer in the rankings.
In Kansas, the magic number is 13. That’s the maximum margin of victory a selection committee will consider when seeding teams with similar records for the postseason. That means a 28-14 win counts the same as a 62-0 whitewashing. The aim is to make sure teams show their dominance but don’t flaunt it.
But, despite these efforts to make routs irrelevant, some outside factors are working their influence on the system. Newspapers and on-line services across the country rate high school teams at both the state and national levels, and often the only way to differentiate between schools that don’t play each other is by margin of victory.
“Wins are what matter in the playoff picture in Florida,” says David Wilson, Head Coach at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, which won Florida’s 1999 6A (large school) title. “Unfortunately, though, score is coming into play. There are a lot of polls in the state of Florida now, and the margin of victory has influenced some of the coaches.”
But many high school coaches still try to resist such pressure. Eden Prairie High School, in suburban Minneapolis, has 111 players on the varsity alone, which means Head Coach Mike Grant and his staff need to have tremendous organizational powers just to make sure everybody gets enough work in practice. Think that’s tough? Then how difficult would it be to make sure all of those players participated in a game? Or six games? That’s what happened last year, as Eden Prairie rolled to its third state championship in as many seasons.
Six times Grant played them all, the better to keep everybody happy and make sure no opponent was embarrassed. “I’ve probably had 15 different coaches come up to me after games and thank me for not running it up,” Grant says.
Grant believes teams that run it up are serving the wrong masters. He readily admits that parents want to see big point totals. He also knows that players love to see the scoreboard spin. And of course, coaches want to see their schools high in the rankings and read about how their team is an unstoppable juggernaut.
“But what happens is that some guys lose focus about why they coach,” Grant says. “I’m thinking of that kid at the end of the bench, whose parents are there to see him play.”
Setting Priorities
There may be several justifications for running up the score when it comes to computer ratings, bowl berths, and playoff seeds. But most coaches agree that the one overriding argument against piling it on is pure sportsmanship.
Grant remembers one year, when he was coaching at another school, that a rival was beating his team, 48-7, late in the game. Despite the score, the opposition’s starting quarterback was still throwing the ball to his top receiver. Meanwhile, the coaching staff on the other sideline was waving at Grant’s team.
Two years later, Grant had a chance for revenge. “We could have beat them 60-0, but we won 27-0,” he says. “You have to remove your ego and remember that you’re not just doing it to the other coach, you’re doing it to the kids.”
For coaches facing an outmanned opponent, the challenge is balancing sportsmanship with the best interest of their players. That’s why you’ll see the second team at Olathe (Kan.) North High School working just as hard as the first string, even if the game is long past decided. They have gone through the same arduous week of practice as the starters and want to prove to the coaches that they deserve more playing time down the road.
“I have no problem scoring as many points as we can when our second team is in,” Olathe North Head Coach Gene Weir says. “They’ve got to learn to play, too. There’s a fine line between when you quit taking care of your kids to take care of the other guy’s kids.”
And sometimes, what one coach sees as taking care of his team may be seen quite differently by the coach on the opposite sideline. Villanova’s Talley has a pair of examples. One year, his team was heading toward the I-AA playoffs when it met Fordham, whose head coach was a Villanova alum. The Wildcats scored late in a game that was already decided to stretch the advantage to more than 20 points.
“We wanted to make a statement for the playoff selection committee,” Talley admits. “After the game, [Fordham’s coach] came across the field screaming at me.”
In 1992, Villanova was leading the nation in scoring defense and was playing Bucknell. The Bison were driving for a late score in a game that was clearly Villanova’s, when Talley put the first-team defense back in to preserve a shutout and keep the Wildcats atop the national rankings. “Bucknell wasn’t happy,” Talley says.
But Talley considers those two instances isolated examples and knows that coaches who make it a practice of embarrassing opponents will be humbled themselves some day. “Some coaches run it up; some don’t,” he says. “If a coach runs it up on me and I get a chance for revenge, we’ll drill him.”
However, even with a philosophy of win the game first, clear the bench second, and avoid any injuries above all, it is sometimes difficult to convince teams on the wrong end of a big score that there was no intention of running it up. On some occasions, though, a big loss simply reflects the difference in talent and has to be accepted by both sides as an accurate representation of the gap between the programs. Last year, for instance, Widener advanced to the NCAA Division III semifinal game, where it was routed, 70-30, by a Mount Union College wrecking machine.
“It sounds like they ran it up, but they didn’t,” Zwaan says. “Nothing in that game said they were trying to humble us. That was a great football team, and even when they were kicking our butts, they were congratulating us on the good plays we made.”
With routs an inevitable part of every season, perhaps the best course is for coaches to teach their team how to play well and how to handle being big winners. Grant remembers a game a couple years ago in which Eden Prairie was walloping an opponent, 35-7. Late in the game, his team recovered a fumble on the opponent’s 10-yard line. The players wanted to pound it in for another score, but Grant ordered his quarterback to take a knee four consecutive times.
“I told the kids we were going to show everybody what class was,” Grant says.
And that’s something no computer can measure.