SMQ: Are we really seeing more blowouts in bowl games in 2017?

Looking at the bowl results data

The first step to determining whether we have really seen more blowouts this season is to look at how bowl results have historically shaken out in college football. (You can also access the full dataset by following the link to this spreadsheet.)

First of all, we have seen a steady increase in the number of bowls over time, as we talked about last week in our look at the history of bowl games. That has effectively served to dilute the quality of teams that ultimately find themselves playing in bowl games, as a glut of teams hovering around .500 are now eligible for the postseason where previously the depressed supply of invitations meant only the strongest national contenders went to bowls.

But while the trendline for the average margin of victory points steadily upward over time, the reality is that fluctuations are a natural part of the game. Sometimes the opponents matched up against one another are simply mismatched.

Today  let’s look at three bowl seasons.

These are the two seasons that have historically finished with an average margin of victory across all games higher than the current pace of the 2017 bowl season. As you can see from this table, a season of historic moments is potentially witnessing one more statistical outlier to wrap the chaos up neatly.

The 2017 bowl season is seeing a historic rate of blowouts. Already we have witness more blowouts of 20 or more points than there were bowl games after the 1944 season, and after the Hawaii Bowl concludes on Christmas Eve we will have already seen twice as many bowl games as there were in 1952.

There have also already been more bowl games played than there were in the 1976-1977 postseason. Over a nearly equivalent number of games, 2017 has seen games end by a gap more than two and a half points higher than fans saw in the Bicentennial season. The drop between the top three on the list and the bottom three is presented more for the sake of showing why this has been an anomalous bowl season to date.

But with 27 more games on the schedule, there are plenty of opportunities to normalize. Let’s look a bit closer at these two historic seasons to see where the mismatches came and which games allowed the stats to normalize somewhat. Then we can finish by seeing how this year’s campaign might finish over the next few weeks.