FanNation - The Republic of Sport

This past season saw my OU Sooners accused of "running up the score" (hereafter, RUTS) commonly on hapless opponents.  I'll discuss the notion of RUTS in more generality below, but first I want to examine the case for OU violating the unwritten law of college football sportsmanship against RUTS. 

Unfortunately, no solid RUTS definition exists.  So I made one up.  Assume that a game where a team is leading by 21 or more points at the end of the 3rd quarter is pretty much a done deal.  Of course, some acknowledgment of the possibility of big comebacks must be conceded.  That aside, the measure of interest is how many 4th quarter points a team scores, on average, in games when leading by 21 points or more at the end of the 3rd quarter.  Since OU was labeled by many FN posters as the big violator of this sportmanship principle for the entire season, I chose to compare this measure for them against three other teams contending for the NC game:  UF, UTx, and UF.  I have the data and computations in an Excel spreadsheet if anyone is interested.  Calculations are for the regular season, including the conference championship games - bowl games aren't included.  Anyway, to summarize the calculations:

Team  Average 4th quarter points  Number of such games

OU                  5.78                                 9

UTx                 7.29                                 7

UF                  7.38                                  8

USC                7.88                                 8

By this measure, OU averaged the fewest 4th quarter points in such games of any of these contenders.  Claims were also made that USC and UTx were in fact too classy to be accused of RUTS, supposedly.  The evidence for that, at least in comparison to OU, is just not there. 

However, I'm obliged to concede that in the Big-12 championship game against Mizzou, OU led by 27 points at the end of the 3rd quarter and scored 21 points in the 4th quarter.  Note that Mizzou scored a TD early in the 4th, to reduce the lead to under 21 points and had a powerful offense, capable of scoring quickly in the 4th quarter (as they had against KU in their previous game).  Hence, at least one of the three TDs OU scored in the 4th quarter was justifiable - arguably, two of the three were.  I concede that the last TD easily could be interpreted as RUTS.  There are explanations for could be offered for that last TD, but it's not my goal to make excuses.  So if objective evidence of RUTS by OU can be found for the Big-12 Championship game, let's look at the 8 other games when they led by 21+ points at the end of the 3rd quarter:  Their average 4th quarter scoring in those 8 games drops to 3.88 points.  If OU committed the sin of RUTS in their last game of the season, this was evidently uncharacteristic for them prior to the Big-12 championship.

Moving on, I want to offer some general thoughts about RUTS.

Sportsmanship  Generally speaking, if there's convincing evidence of RUTS, it's not something I think is good for college football.  There's no good reason to humiliate the other team and doing so sends a bad message to student-athletes on both sides of the rout.

Risk of injury  When the first team stays late in a game that's already decided, the risk of injury to key players (on both sides of the ball) makes it a foolish thing for a coach to do.  If you think the "style points" accrued for a rout of a weak team will get you to the big game, do you want to play that game with one or more of your key players on the sidelines?  Pure self-interest argues against such a tactic. 

Experience for the backups  Yet another aspect of team self-interest is to get as much playing time for your backups as possible. If one of your key players gets knocked out of the big game, it makes sense for your backups to have had as many game snaps as possible in blowouts leading up to that point. One aspect of this is that your backups on offense need to practice the full offensive playbook, including passing.  And the same goes for your defense.  As it gets late in the game, however, assuming the game continues to be well in hand, going conservative on offense makes more sense.

RUTS is in the hands of the opposing defense  It's been argued - e.g., by Coach Mike Leach of TTU that RUTS is the responsibility of the opposing defense.  "If you don't want us to score on you, stop us!"  I see some logic in this, but I think sportsmanship is important in college football.  Should you throw a long pass into the endzone for a TD on the last play of the game, when leading by a big margin?  That sure looks like humiliating the other team.  But when you have the 2nd or 3rd string backups running the full offense early in the 4th quarter because you've run away with the game early, I don't see that as RUTS.

Defensive and special teams scores  It's unrealistic to ask a defensive back to take a knee after an interception or fumble recovery, unless it's very late in the game.  Same for KO and putn returns. Before you accuse a team of RUTS, check out how the scoring was done.