The Evolution of Fairness
It was a gift from the football gods.
With a perfect season and a trip to the BCS National Championship game on the line, the Oklahoma State Cowboys (OSU) had the ball in double overtime needing to score. To add to the drama, they had already missed a potentially game-clinching field goal earlier in regulation, but for now they still controlled their fate. Quarterback Brandon Weeden looked poised, took a shotgun snap, glanced over the middle, and fired a dart…
It really is worth watching to relive the amazement that Iowa State fans, let alone the rest of the country, felt in that moment. The pass was tipped, then intercepted, and Iowa State would go on to win the game and crush OSU’s chance at a perfect season and a championship appearance. More than a decade later, however, despite the drama, few outside of each team’s respective fans and the college-football obsessed remember this moment. It was one of many notable upsets that have occurred in college football history.
So why do I?
I remember because of what almost wasn’t. This game has remained a formative sports memory, and one that has colored how I view fairness in sports. Allow me to elaborate.
Only two weeks earlier, #1 ranked Louisiana State (LSU) had traveled to Tuscaloosa, AL, to take on the #2 ranked Crimson Tide. With each team sporting a dominant defense, analysts expected a slugfest. What happened instead was more competitive and phsyical than even they had imagined - it would be dubbed The Defensive Game of the Century. It was one of the best football games I have ever seen.
LSU would prevail 9 to 6 in an incredibly low-scoring affair. LSU’s passing attack (if you can call it that) was virtually non-existent against Alabama’s suffocating defense, totaling less than 100 yards and committing two turnovers. The running game fared better, but they were still forced to punt the ball 6 times. As the score line indicates, Alabama had plenty of their own struggles, including two interceptions and less than 100 total yards rushing. It was a tough, physical, and somewhat messy game, but ultimately the better team prevailed.
Or did they?
What I’ve failed to mention up to this point is that Alabama missed an astounding 4 field goals! One was blocked, to give credit to the LSU special teams, and two more were from 50+ yards away, but the lack of composure from Alabama’s kickers was noticeable. More to the point, I felt strongly while watching this game that Alabama was the better team. The Crimson Tide were more threatening, pushing deep into LSU territory on numerous occasions before succumbing to uncharacteristic unforced errors. LSU’s offense by comparison was anemic, and the win ultimately came down to capitalizing on Alabama’s self-imposed mistakes.
The frustrating yet beautiful thing about football is that sometimes the “better” team doesn’t get the victory. Little moments, small margins, and the inevitability of luck can produce the most spectacular and unexpected outcomes. If the “better” team always won, it would be a far more boring sport.
Still, I wasn’t the only one guilty of thinking (knowing?) that Alabama was the best college football team in the country. As Iowa State fans stormed the field to celebrate their historic upset, there was a sense of jubilation among the college football media. No one wanted to say it out loud, an unspoken etiquette, but everyone knew an OSU - LSU title game would be a boring bloodbath. The Cowboys didn’t stand a chance. OSU’s loss in Iowa meant that the table was set for an LSU - Alabama rematch in the National Championship game. The best game of the season was getting a replay.
Alas, the title game rematch would not live up to the hype. The Crimson Tide rolled to a 21-0 victory, securing the Alabama’s 14th national championship. The game would, however, vindicate the belief that I and many others had had about who the best college football team in the country really was.
It was uncomfortable to think, however, how close this reality was to being distorted. It wasn’t crazy to imagine, even probable to imagine, that OSU would comfortably overcome their 6-4 opponent in Iowa that fateful night. In that parallel universe, Alabama never gets its chance at redemption (I know, bust out the tiny violin). LSU inevitably dominates OSU, and a different history is written. Alabama in 2011 stands out in my mind because it was an example of the right outcome being reached by chance.
In a sport as competitive and fickle as football, officials owe it to the players, the fans, and the spirit of the competition to reduce chance where possible. To be clear, to eliminate chance altogether would be impossible and uninteresting; it’s football not chess. But there are clearly elements of the game - notably the structure of the competition - that introduce unnecessary arbitrariness, and the playoff structure was a big one.
Only three years later the NCAA would finally introduce the College Football Playoff to the celebration of fans like myself. Beyond being an obvious cash cow, the playoff structure helped to address an obvious dilemma that had faced the Bowl Championship Series for decades - what happens if there are more than two teams in the country deserving of a shot at the national title? For years the question had been decided off the field, with a vote. In some years that was uncontroversial and easy; in others, it wasn’t. The awkward question would often linger, are these really the two best teams?
The first year of the playoff vindicated its existence as #4 seed Ohio State “upset” the two teams they faced and claimed the first ever National Championship of the College Football Playoff era. In the years since, two additional championships were claimed by a #3 or #4 seed, teams that would never have even been able to qualify in the old format. The model has been so successful that the playoff format is expanding to 12 teams in 2024!
The College Football Playoff is a triumph for improving the fairness of college football, and one that has simultaneously increased the entertainment value of the final product. Many other leagues would do well to heed this lesson. Not necessarily the specific implementation of a playoff, but the recognition that where arbitrary rules and structures exist, they should be eliminated.
There’s this mistaken belief, however, especially when it comes to the legacy of storied sports, that change is intrinsically bad. The English Premier League offers a classic example. I’m in the midst of reading Michael Cox’s The Mixer, which recounts how tactics and rules have changed during the Premier League’s 25 year history (at the time of publication). In 1992, the back-pass rule was changed such that goalkeepers could no longer use their hands if a ball was deliberately kicked to them by a teammate. It’s a rule so simple and so ingrained that you probably don’t even think about it today if you watch soccer.
It was transformative. Cox would describe the rule as “the beginning of a new, exciting, more entertaining era of the game, the watershed moment that prompted sweeping changes to create a more fast-paced, technically proficient sport.”
That is not how it was thought of at the time. Arsenal’s George Graham claimed the new rule wouldn’t “enhance the game at all”, while Leed’s Howard Wilkinson predicted that “the experiment will prove counter-productive”. Time would prove them wrong, of course, but this sort of resistance to productive changes should sound frustratingly familiar.
Today, a degree of arbitrariness still permeates modern sport. In a follow-up to this piece, I’ll be taking a closer look at some of the critical and oft controversial rules and systems that are in practice across soccer, football, and baseball that have made the product worse for fans, and worse for fairness. Given the time, money, and attention we as a society collectively bestow upon the sporting world, it is bewildering to me why we continue to put up with some of these transgressions.
Credit where credit is due, however. The College Football Playoff is a shining example of how to reduce unnecessary randomness and improve the quality of competition. There are positive examples in other sports that I will be sure to call out as well. For now, the new season can’t come fast enough.
