Upset Machine Go BRRRRRR
On the strange upsets in the NFL after a weekend where no fewer than three of them took place
College football is a fun sport to watch if you ignore the endgame. Every year, there are wacky possibilities for the playoff in early October, but within a month, the foundation settles, and the same upper crust blue bloods are jockeying for position, whether or not they deserve it. If you dare question the dogma, you’ll get no fewer than three of the useful idiots in the sport’s media telling you that it doesn’t matter if Ohio State lost on their own home field to Oregon, who were missing their best player, Kayvon Thibodeaux, they deserve to be ranked ahead of the Ducks. That’s before you even get to the mental gymnastics it takes to rank several one-loss Power Five conference teams ahead of an undefeated mid-major. Cincinnati is currently ranked number two in the media and coaches polls, and they would be number two if the old BCS rankings were still in effect with all their computers and algorithms deciding who the best teams were. The Bearcats sit at number six in the playoff rankings decided by 13 gout-afflicted geezers who make up the clandestine playoff committee, which I imagine meets in some smoky room in a compartment of NCAA buildings either in Indianapolis or Kansas City. People are mad. It’s true that their anger is justified and also futile.
Outside of a group of 20 teams (most of which reside in the SEC) or so, the goal of your season isn’t the playoffs anyway. There are other, far more enriching reasons to play the game for the Group of Five or the have-nots that reside in the Power Five. Did anyone think that if Wake Forest had remained undefeated that they’d get in even over a two-loss Alabama team? I’d have been shocked, but no one has to worry about them crashing the party now that they lost, hilariously enough, a non-conference game to conference opponent North Carolina. Folks compare college football to the Barclay’s Premier League in England, but I guaran-damn-tee that the run Leicester City went on in 2016 will never have an analogue in FBS college football again. The last new team to crash the party and win a National Championship was the University of Florida in 1996. The game has stratified to levels unseen before, and even before the mad rush for money and the extreme polarization in recruiting, the club of champions wasn’t that big in the first place.
Given that in order to get close to the playoff, you have to be perfect while the upper crusts have off years, upsets in college football can be disastrous. Obviously, a team like Alabama or Oklahoma can absorb one loss to a lesser team, but if you’re Iowa, Arizona State, or Pittsburgh, good luck if your slate isn’t perfect, and if you’re Central Florida, Boise State, or Cincinnati, well, maybe you should have played with the big boys in the SEC. Oh wait, the SEC isn’t open for expansion? But you just let in Oklahoma and Texas! FUCKING TEXAS! They haven’t been contenders since Vince Young hepped up to Nashville! Sure, the upset is the most exciting thing for neutral fans and for sheer excitement. Watching any sport solely for the endgame is nerd behavior anyway. You need to enjoy the ride. However, no matter how small the pull, there are still going to be stakes. People are going to have skin in the game. The tightrope act can be so nerve-wracking, and too many fans of college teams have their days, months, years wrecked by a single upset.
That’s why I prefer when the bad teams win in the NFL a lot more. They say that in college football, the regular season MATTERS. In theory, that might seem correct. Fewer teams alive to win the title means every game should matter, but as the seasons have unfolded, it’s visibly clear that is not the case, or else we, the public, wouldn’t have Stewart Mandel and Brett McMurphy telling us that we’re wrong for thinking that Oregon is better than Ohio State because head to head should mean something, or that Cincinnati actually doesn’t have any quality wins when one of the teams they beat, Notre Dame, was ranked at number ten in the same playoff tier. The NFL is different in that the games actually do matter. There’s no shadowy cabal of rich old farts deciding who makes the playoffs. Teams get in by record, and then there is an extensive series of tiebreakers to decide seeding. By definition, every game matters until a team is locked into their position for the end of the year, be it draft position or playoff seeding.
The beautiful thing about the NFL is that no game is really guaranteed either way. Sure, some games do go the way you expect them to in emphatic manner. For example, on October 24, the New York Jets visited the New England Patriots. Bill Belichick has typically owned the junior New York football club, and given that he got to face a rookie quarterback (a class of player his defenses FEAST against) and then a QB who was in the league for three years before taking his first snap in that game, it shouldn’t be surprising that even with a rookie QB of their own, the Patriots feasted to the tune of a 54-13 victory.
But then those same Jets took on teams that are supposed to be good this year and won. October 3, they beat the Tennessee Titans, a team that at the time had their best player, running back Derrick Henry, healthy and productive. The week after taking a shellacking from the Patriots, they went out and punched the then-AFC leading Cincinnati Bengals in the mouth, capturing a 34-31 win in regulation. These wins are incredible because they’re unexpected, and because they will probably end up mattering, if not for make-or-break in the playoffs, but for seeding at least.
This past week was a bounty of weirdo upsets. It’s one thing to get one game that goes way against the grain. Two games, okay, maybe there’s a full moon. But this past week, you saw the Jaguars stifle the AFC-favorite Buffalo Bills in a game where Jags defensive end Josh Allen tackled, sacked, intercepted, and recovered a fumble by Bills quarterback Josh Allen, 9-6. The Denver Broncos went into Texas Stadium and punched a Dallas Cowboys team getting their MVP-candidate quarterback Dak Prescott back in the mouth, 30-16 (a game where Dallas didn’t score until they were down 30-0 midway through the fourth quarter). The New Orleans Saints, who rode high defeating the defending champs the Tampa Bay Buccaneers with journeyman Trevor Siemian at quarterback last week, stumbled at home to an Atlanta Falcon team that had looked lifeless at times during the season. The New York Giants, another poorly-coached team with several star players injured, upended a Las Vegas Raiders team that to that point in the season looked good. And finally, even though the Titans are still a good team, they went to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles without their best player, gained only 149 yards on offense, and beat the heavily-favored Rams by two scores. Five games went way against expectation. That’s a bounty!
Sure, weeks like these are hell for bettors, and analysts who like pretty correlations with R-squared values approaching one with few outliers pull their hair from their heads seeing things like the high-powered Bills offense struggle against a Jacksonville defense that couldn’t stop the fucking Houston Texans. However, it’s funny in the moment to see vaunted teams who may just be your division rivals trip over their own two feet against teams they would beat nine times out of ten if the NFL’s brutality didn’t have such an effect on the human body to allow that many games in one season. It’s also exciting to look back at a season and see which bullshit losses hurt teams jockeying for position. The hyperfocus on the draft makes bad teams winning games that knock them out of position to get the player they want can even be more hilarious. There’s schadenfreude, excitement, chaos… all the good things that make sports fun.
Sure, I doubt people outside Cowboys fans and other NFC East fans who like to stick it to the cocksure and mouthy nationwide fanbase for “America’s Team” (barf) will remember this game in three weeks. College upsets have a lot more shine to them. People still talk about Appalachian State beating Michigan all those years later. Hell, Pitt and West Virginia are on similar planes historically, but people still fondly/bitterly remember (depending where one’s allegiances lie) the 2007 Backyard Brawl where the Panthers stunned a Mountaineers team fixing to make a claim to get into the BCS picture, 13-9. Nothing is going to take the excitement of a good college upset away. Again, like I wrote last year around this time in the piece I linked above, there’s far more worth in a college season than which blue blood powerhouse gets to be in the playoff in a given season.
But when you add in meaning to the chaos of an upset, then overall, things feel like they mean more. Your season doesn’t end on a bullshit loss, but it makes the final assessment of the year that much more interesting. It’s not exactly why the NFL is better than college. Again, the higher education-level of football has its charms. If you live in a college town or are wired the way college fans are, you’ll find reasons to latch onto that game over the NFL. Given that I grew up in a pro sports city in Philly, I have my affinity for the NFL, all the customs and mores that come with it. The meaning that comes with the excitement makes it all worthwhile to me. Even if they shake the losses off and the Bills and Cowboys kick it back to 1993 to meet in the Super Bowl, we’ll always have week nine of the regular season when they both went “wtf plugins?” in the same, 1PM Eastern slate of games.