So, there’s no denying we’ve had an exciting start to the ’22 season, with plenty of tasty upsets spicing things up. In certain quarters, that’s been seen as an indication of increasing parity in college football. [HINT: It’s not.]
Pat Forde suggests it’s something else that I, too, have considered: an increase in late game fuck ups.
There have been 67 one-score games thus far this season, which seems to be on par with most years. But it does seem like we’ve had an inordinate number of games in which defenses couldn’t hold leads, or the kicking game malfunctioned at crunch time, or penalty flags flew at an inopportune moment, or coaches temporarily took leave of their senses.
In other words, as many close games have been lost as won.
Anybody else feeling it?
Get The Picture 
Anyone who hates the FU ‘turds (and even the ones who love them who are honest with themselves) know this is true.
That is an 0-3 football team that is incredibly fortunate to be 2-1.
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I’m thinking things could get out of hand in Knoxville Saturday, and if Heupel has any sense at all, he won’t let off the gas.
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Talking to my co-worker who is a Vol, they hope that the gas is pressed to the floor for the entire day as well regardless of score. They’ve lost so much to UF lately that they want blood.
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The Turds are extremely lucky. USF imploded at the end of that game.
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Kirby chooses not to participate in this parity desired.
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Could be a side effect of the quick hook when head coaches “aren’t living up to expectations”. Seems like the trend is to toss the old to try to find that hot new and upcoming coach to transform your program. A lot of football coaching wisdom gets discarded.
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Is this a Falcons blog? Thankfully, I’ve realized after too much experience that fucking things up is just part of their DNA. More thankfully tho, I am a Bulldogs fan first and foremost. Keeps me sane.
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Same. I would say that it has been not just a Falcons problem (though Dan Quinn’s calling card appeared to be mismanagement of the clock – even AFTER Dan hired someone to be an in-game advisor on clock management). There is a lot of clock management problems in the NFL now. And you see it on Saturdays as well. Geoff Collins comes to mind right off the top of my head.
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Could be the roster turnover and lack of experience in crunch time.
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If said hc had a 18-20 point cushion late in the 4th quarter and ends up with an “L”, said hc should either donate that weeks check to a charitable group, give it to the student section in $100 bills, reimburse the school fan base that sat through the debacle, or just fucking commit “hara-kiri” on the 50 yard line, in private…
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As much as it could be lack of experience, I think there is another factor here. There are a lot of coaches trying to show that they are “special” and are doing something “different” to the point that they are making poor coaching decisions.
My example here is Scott Frost with his onside kick against Northwestern essentially submarining his own team.
With all the money being paid out to coaches these days, there seems to be this expectation that the coaches need to put their “stamp” on each game with some trickery, incredible coaching decision, etc. rather than coming up with a solid game plan with good athletes.
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Hey… Oregon and South Carolina had one-score games against Georgia…
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I see what you did there.
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That’s one more than Stamford had.
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South Florida is sure feeling it. Had the Gators beat, but then choked away even a chance at OT.
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FSU tried everything possible to lose to both LSU and Louisville, only to be outdone by both their opponents.
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And two ricochet Hail Marys on the same day. Liberty’s didn’t work out (missed 2 point conversion) but App State’s did.
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I think that a lot of the volatile nature of the games this season is just a by product of the average player just being a better athlete in general these days. It’s not parity but it’s smaller programs modeling their training after the top P5 as much as they can.
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I know that certain quarters want to deny the parity argument forever, and in the face of just about all evidence, because that might affect the perception of their school/conference’s lordly dominance; but even if we accept that tOSU, Bama, and Dawgs are way better & that is, in fact, same as it ever was…what about the rest?
Seems to me teams 4-40 are about as parity’d as ever. (Or does that not count in the argument?)
(One could make a case that it’s Dawgs lording alone, and teams 2-40 are kinda mixed up, no?)
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All that said, I wouldn’t perosnally want NFL-style parity. But it is nice that there seems to be a fair amount of intrigue re: whose non-Dawg cream is creamiest.
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Absolutely. Would anyone here be surprised to see any team ranked, say 5-50 get upset by a lower ranked team? That’s parity right there. College football this year is a ladder with a couple schools at the top rung and everyone else rising and falling week to week.
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Too many quick-fixes via the Portal.
It can be an useful tool, but if you don’t evaluate & integrate well, you just have a bunch of new guys on the team.
Still reeling from the lack of a “normal” recruiting season during COVID, so teams are missing on evals and takes.
Poor coaching hires / poor environments.
The latter being situations like Tennessee, where they are recovering from a series of poor hiring decisions. Honestly, Pitts is the biggest outlier (successful) in regards to hiring a guy that has been successful despite years of poor AD decisions. And he got a bit of a scare last week.
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I don’t really have an opinion about failures by various teams. Nothing so far has seemed all that out of the ordinary to me. To your point about Pittman, Arkansas has real problems in their secondary that people will exploit all year, and the early turnovers put them in a hole last week. Fortunately for them, their offense is good enough to rally against a bad team.
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