SWC75
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Last year I speculated on what the field for a Division 1A playoff might have looked like if it had started in 1973, the year the NCAA established divisions and began playoffs in the other divisions. It was sort of “fan fiction” - I wasn’t trying to prove anything, just take a peek at what we might have missed. I used a lot of license. I decided that the best playoff format was a 16 team format with automatic bids to conferences who had schools who had won national poll championships previously. Teams which tied for the championship in the automatic qualifying conferences would all go to the tournament. The rest of the field would be chosen based on combined rankings in the polls through 1997 and the BCS standings after that.
The first three rounds would be played in December with the title game alternating in one of the major bowl games. The “majors” to me are the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton Bowls with the Fiesta Bowl joining them in 1986, (when Penn State in reality beat Miami for the title that year). This is more elaborate than the actual playoffs that started in the other divisions in 1973 but I decided to go right to my favored format rather than build it up over the years. The original Division II playoffs involved 8 teams and Division III only 4 teams, (there was no Division 1AA until 1978). There were 6 undefeated Division 1 teams in 1973 and if I did such limited fields with automatic bids, at least one undefeated team would have to have to have been left out and I wanted to avoid that.
What I want to do this year is to figure out the winners and score of the games and also some game details to clarify the picture of “what might have been”. Again, I’m not trying to “prove” who should have been the national champion, just doing some fan fiction to see what a playoff might have been like. My modus operandi for this is to use comparative scores to determine a winner and a margin of victory, then find a game won by that margin and use that score, plus some details from that game, with the names changed to players from the teams in my match-up so I can write-up a brief description of the game. That’s more interesting than just recording a winner or a score.
We all know about comparative scores. A small college team can be made to seem “better” than a national champion if you choose your score carefully to represent the best performance by one team and the worst by another. But run through several lines of comparative scores not chosen to produce a particular result and you can get something more meaningful.
I decided that I’d use five lines of comparative scores between my contestants and average them. That will be enough to avoid freakish results yet permit the occasional upset while allowing for some one-sided games as well. If I used a dozen lines of scores, that might “flatten” the victory margin too much and make it impossible for an underdog to win. Also, this way every game is decided on the same number of lines of scores, instead of one by 5, another by 3, another by 12, etc. I first looked at direct confrontations between the teams during the regular season. Then I looked at common opponents. If I couldn’t get five lines of comparative scores by those methods, I looked at the opponent’s opponents. When I had five lines, I stopped. (If the teams met in the post-season, I’d just use the results of the post season game rather than the comparative scores.)
When I averaged five lines of comparative scores, I was as likely to get a victory margin of 4 or 5 as 3 or 6, or to get a margin of 11 or 12 as 10 or 13. But we know football scores. Games are more likely to be decided by 3 or 6 and 10 or 13 than 4,5,11 or 12 points. I thus established “levels” of victory margin. If my average comparative scores produced a margin of 1, 2 or 3 points, that fell into the 1-3 level. Beyond that was the 4-7 level, 8-10, 11-14, 15-17, 18-21, 22-24, 25-27, 28-30, 31-34, 35-38, 39-42, 43-45, 46-49, etc. If I establish that a team “wins” by, say 9 points, then a game with a margin of victory from 8-10 points can be used to get a final score and game description. This gives me greater flexibility in locating games I can use and results in more “football like” scores.
In choosing the games I will use I will try to use games involving teams similar to the ones in my tournament. That is, if one team is primarily a running team and the other primarily a passing team and the running team had an 8 point advantage when the five lines of comparative scores were averaged, I’ll look for a game where a running team defeated a passing team by 8-10 points. If a team was noted for a strong defense and “lost” by 3 points, a 13-10 game would make more sense than a 41-38 game.
I made no adjustment for home vs. away. I wouldn’t know what adjustment to make and I feel with both teams being good teams, that advantage would be minimal. I think home vs. road means more to mediocre teams.
Here is an example of how it works: the first game in my first tournament from 1973 is Tulane at Alabama. The Green Wave vs. the Crimson Tide. Both were primarily running teams but could pass the ball when they needed to. First let’s figure out who wins and by how much:
There was no post season game between them so we have to go to comparative scores. They didn’t play each other during the regular season, so there’s no direct confrontation.
They had three common opponents. Tulane beat Vanderbilt 24-3. Alabama beat them 44-0. That’s +23 for Alabama. (44-21). Alabama beat LSU 21-7. Tulane shut them out 14-0 a week later. (The Tigers had been 9-0 going into those games.) . That’s a wash. Alabama beat Kentucky 28-14 but the Green Wave crashed vs. the Wildcats 7-34. That’s +41 for Bama. That gives me three comparative score lines and Alabama is up +64.
Tulane beat Boston College 21-16. The Eagles Lost to Miami 10-15. The Tide Blew out the Canes 43-13. That’s +30 for Bama. The Wave clobbered VMI 42-0. The Keydets beat to Virginia Tech, (they used to be rivals), 22-21, making Tulane better than the Hokies by 43 points. But Tech got rolled by the Tide, 6-77, so Alabama wins this one, too, +28. There are several other lines I could construct at this level, (three degrees of separation - Tulane to Boston College to Miami to Alabama), but I decided to stop at five for the reasons noted above. Alabama gains +58 from these two lines of comparative scores.
That’s +122 for Alabama over five lines of comparative scores, an average of 24.4 per line. That puts the Tide in the 22-24 range for winning margin. I have box scores for all the major college bowl games that year but none had that range of victory margins. I don’t have the regular season box scores from that era but I do have the major college bowl game box scores-they are in the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia. There were no major college bowl games won by 22-24 points in the 1973 season. Nor were there any in the 1972 season. In 1971, Mississippi beat Georgia Tech in the Peach Bowl 41-18. And Penn State beat Texas 30-6 in the Cotton Bowl. I’ve done some research and I think both Mississippi and Georgia Tech passed the ball a little more often in 1971 than Alabama and Tulane did in 1973. I also think 30-6 sounds more like an Alabama -Tulane score of that era than 41-18. So I’ll use the details of Penn State’s victory over the Texas in the 1/1/72 Cotton Bowl to dramatize Alabama’s victory over Tulane in my 1973 national championship tournament, although I might switch some of the events around a bit if it makes it more interesting.
That Texas - Penn State game started out as a field goal battle with the Longhorns taking a 6-3 lead at halftime. Penn State blew them away in the second half, Lydell Mitchell going over from the one and then John Hufnagel throwing a 65 yard touchdown pass to John Skarzynski to really break it open. The Lions got two more field goals and then Hufnagel went over from the 4 for the final score. State outgained Texas 376-242 and outrushed them 239-159. Texas lost three fumbles and Penn State had one interception.
Alabama used two quarterbacks in 1973: Gary Rutledge and Richard Todd. Rutledge was more of a traditional wishbone quarterback. Todd played for the Jets in the NFL and was a superior passer. Therefore I’ll have him throw the 65 yard TD pass. Alabama’s leading receiver that year was Wayne Wheeler, who caught only 19 balls but for a 27.9 average, so he’ll catch it. Todd is described in Street & Smiths as “a horse of a running back” so I’ll let him score the last touchdown. Their leading rusher was Wilbur Jackson so he’ll score Mitchell’s TD. I don’t see Tulane going in at halftime at what was then called Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa with a 6-3 lead over Alabama. I also don’t think they’d have run for 159 yards on the Tide or held them to 239. The one stat I do like is that Mitchell ran for 146 yards and one score. So in my summary I’ll just say:
At Tuscaloosa: ALABAMA 30 TULANE 6
The game stated out as a battle of field goals with Tulane actually taking a 6-3 lead at one point. But then Alabama took over with a series of long drives. Two of them resulted in short touchdown runs by Wilbur Jackson and Richard Todd. Two produced field goals. But the play of the game was a beautiful 65 yard bomb from Todd to Wayne Wheeler which broke it open. Jackson rushed for 146 yards for the Crimson Tide.
The point is to give us a picture of a game that might have happened if a playoff had taken place. What I’ll do now in a separate post is to repeat the post for each individual year from last year to show how the teams were chosen and then do a summary like the one above for each game. I won’t go over how I figured it out, as I have done here. I just wanted to provide an example so you can see what this is based on.
The first three rounds would be played in December with the title game alternating in one of the major bowl games. The “majors” to me are the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Cotton Bowls with the Fiesta Bowl joining them in 1986, (when Penn State in reality beat Miami for the title that year). This is more elaborate than the actual playoffs that started in the other divisions in 1973 but I decided to go right to my favored format rather than build it up over the years. The original Division II playoffs involved 8 teams and Division III only 4 teams, (there was no Division 1AA until 1978). There were 6 undefeated Division 1 teams in 1973 and if I did such limited fields with automatic bids, at least one undefeated team would have to have to have been left out and I wanted to avoid that.
What I want to do this year is to figure out the winners and score of the games and also some game details to clarify the picture of “what might have been”. Again, I’m not trying to “prove” who should have been the national champion, just doing some fan fiction to see what a playoff might have been like. My modus operandi for this is to use comparative scores to determine a winner and a margin of victory, then find a game won by that margin and use that score, plus some details from that game, with the names changed to players from the teams in my match-up so I can write-up a brief description of the game. That’s more interesting than just recording a winner or a score.
We all know about comparative scores. A small college team can be made to seem “better” than a national champion if you choose your score carefully to represent the best performance by one team and the worst by another. But run through several lines of comparative scores not chosen to produce a particular result and you can get something more meaningful.
I decided that I’d use five lines of comparative scores between my contestants and average them. That will be enough to avoid freakish results yet permit the occasional upset while allowing for some one-sided games as well. If I used a dozen lines of scores, that might “flatten” the victory margin too much and make it impossible for an underdog to win. Also, this way every game is decided on the same number of lines of scores, instead of one by 5, another by 3, another by 12, etc. I first looked at direct confrontations between the teams during the regular season. Then I looked at common opponents. If I couldn’t get five lines of comparative scores by those methods, I looked at the opponent’s opponents. When I had five lines, I stopped. (If the teams met in the post-season, I’d just use the results of the post season game rather than the comparative scores.)
When I averaged five lines of comparative scores, I was as likely to get a victory margin of 4 or 5 as 3 or 6, or to get a margin of 11 or 12 as 10 or 13. But we know football scores. Games are more likely to be decided by 3 or 6 and 10 or 13 than 4,5,11 or 12 points. I thus established “levels” of victory margin. If my average comparative scores produced a margin of 1, 2 or 3 points, that fell into the 1-3 level. Beyond that was the 4-7 level, 8-10, 11-14, 15-17, 18-21, 22-24, 25-27, 28-30, 31-34, 35-38, 39-42, 43-45, 46-49, etc. If I establish that a team “wins” by, say 9 points, then a game with a margin of victory from 8-10 points can be used to get a final score and game description. This gives me greater flexibility in locating games I can use and results in more “football like” scores.
In choosing the games I will use I will try to use games involving teams similar to the ones in my tournament. That is, if one team is primarily a running team and the other primarily a passing team and the running team had an 8 point advantage when the five lines of comparative scores were averaged, I’ll look for a game where a running team defeated a passing team by 8-10 points. If a team was noted for a strong defense and “lost” by 3 points, a 13-10 game would make more sense than a 41-38 game.
I made no adjustment for home vs. away. I wouldn’t know what adjustment to make and I feel with both teams being good teams, that advantage would be minimal. I think home vs. road means more to mediocre teams.
Here is an example of how it works: the first game in my first tournament from 1973 is Tulane at Alabama. The Green Wave vs. the Crimson Tide. Both were primarily running teams but could pass the ball when they needed to. First let’s figure out who wins and by how much:
There was no post season game between them so we have to go to comparative scores. They didn’t play each other during the regular season, so there’s no direct confrontation.
They had three common opponents. Tulane beat Vanderbilt 24-3. Alabama beat them 44-0. That’s +23 for Alabama. (44-21). Alabama beat LSU 21-7. Tulane shut them out 14-0 a week later. (The Tigers had been 9-0 going into those games.) . That’s a wash. Alabama beat Kentucky 28-14 but the Green Wave crashed vs. the Wildcats 7-34. That’s +41 for Bama. That gives me three comparative score lines and Alabama is up +64.
Tulane beat Boston College 21-16. The Eagles Lost to Miami 10-15. The Tide Blew out the Canes 43-13. That’s +30 for Bama. The Wave clobbered VMI 42-0. The Keydets beat to Virginia Tech, (they used to be rivals), 22-21, making Tulane better than the Hokies by 43 points. But Tech got rolled by the Tide, 6-77, so Alabama wins this one, too, +28. There are several other lines I could construct at this level, (three degrees of separation - Tulane to Boston College to Miami to Alabama), but I decided to stop at five for the reasons noted above. Alabama gains +58 from these two lines of comparative scores.
That’s +122 for Alabama over five lines of comparative scores, an average of 24.4 per line. That puts the Tide in the 22-24 range for winning margin. I have box scores for all the major college bowl games that year but none had that range of victory margins. I don’t have the regular season box scores from that era but I do have the major college bowl game box scores-they are in the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia. There were no major college bowl games won by 22-24 points in the 1973 season. Nor were there any in the 1972 season. In 1971, Mississippi beat Georgia Tech in the Peach Bowl 41-18. And Penn State beat Texas 30-6 in the Cotton Bowl. I’ve done some research and I think both Mississippi and Georgia Tech passed the ball a little more often in 1971 than Alabama and Tulane did in 1973. I also think 30-6 sounds more like an Alabama -Tulane score of that era than 41-18. So I’ll use the details of Penn State’s victory over the Texas in the 1/1/72 Cotton Bowl to dramatize Alabama’s victory over Tulane in my 1973 national championship tournament, although I might switch some of the events around a bit if it makes it more interesting.
That Texas - Penn State game started out as a field goal battle with the Longhorns taking a 6-3 lead at halftime. Penn State blew them away in the second half, Lydell Mitchell going over from the one and then John Hufnagel throwing a 65 yard touchdown pass to John Skarzynski to really break it open. The Lions got two more field goals and then Hufnagel went over from the 4 for the final score. State outgained Texas 376-242 and outrushed them 239-159. Texas lost three fumbles and Penn State had one interception.
Alabama used two quarterbacks in 1973: Gary Rutledge and Richard Todd. Rutledge was more of a traditional wishbone quarterback. Todd played for the Jets in the NFL and was a superior passer. Therefore I’ll have him throw the 65 yard TD pass. Alabama’s leading receiver that year was Wayne Wheeler, who caught only 19 balls but for a 27.9 average, so he’ll catch it. Todd is described in Street & Smiths as “a horse of a running back” so I’ll let him score the last touchdown. Their leading rusher was Wilbur Jackson so he’ll score Mitchell’s TD. I don’t see Tulane going in at halftime at what was then called Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa with a 6-3 lead over Alabama. I also don’t think they’d have run for 159 yards on the Tide or held them to 239. The one stat I do like is that Mitchell ran for 146 yards and one score. So in my summary I’ll just say:
At Tuscaloosa: ALABAMA 30 TULANE 6
The game stated out as a battle of field goals with Tulane actually taking a 6-3 lead at one point. But then Alabama took over with a series of long drives. Two of them resulted in short touchdown runs by Wilbur Jackson and Richard Todd. Two produced field goals. But the play of the game was a beautiful 65 yard bomb from Todd to Wayne Wheeler which broke it open. Jackson rushed for 146 yards for the Crimson Tide.
The point is to give us a picture of a game that might have happened if a playoff had taken place. What I’ll do now in a separate post is to repeat the post for each individual year from last year to show how the teams were chosen and then do a summary like the one above for each game. I won’t go over how I figured it out, as I have done here. I just wanted to provide an example so you can see what this is based on.
