SMQ: Point-a-minute offense and the new normal in college football

Ten different teams scored at least 60 points on the gridiron in Week 2 action. When did uninhibited offense become the new normal in college football?

Over the course of Week 2, there were 10 teams that piled at least 60 points on the scoreboard. Nine other programs racked up at least 50 points against their opponents. That means that, in more than one-quarter of the 74 games that were played over the weekend, teams scored more points than the scoring leader has averaged over the course of the past five seasons.

We tend to think about the modern era of college football as the most offensive-minded point in the sport’s history. In general, scoring has ramped up over time as teams have evolved tactically and players have evolved physically. It also helps that many teams this weekend were still in their non-conference slates, playing teams that in many cases were simply overmatched in terms of talent and resources.

But it is not as though running up the score is a recent phenomenon in the sport. One can look back at the 222-0 drubbing that Georgia Tech dealt to Cumberland in 1916, as John Heisman’s Engineers paid their visitors back for a lopsided score between the schools’ baseball teams earlier that year, and see that high-powered offenses have always been an integral part of the game.

For sustained excellence in offense, the gold standard in college football remains the Michigan Wolverines teams at the turn of the 20th century. Long before spread concepts, run-pass options, or even vanilla aerial attacks became all the rage in the sport, Michigan was pioneering offense as the basis for winning football teams.

From 1901 to 1905, the Wolverines under Fielding Yost averaged more than 560 points per season. Those squads, which have gone down in history as Yost’s “Point-a-Minute” teams, set a standard that has been revered over the years but has often been unattainable.

The moniker stuck precisely because it was so rare to see a team score so frequently and so consistently. Yet what is interesting about those Michigan teams is that they were never the only team to top 60 points in a game in any of the five seasons where they gained fame as the “Point-a-Minute” crew.

• In 1901, both Wisconsin and Cornell also topped the 60-point mark in games during the season.
• Beloit, Alabama, Carlisle, Bucknell, Iowa, Notre Dame, Purdue, Illinois, and Knox all crossed that scoring threshold over the 1902 season.
• Penn State, Lehigh, Nebraska, Chicago, Minnesota, South Carolina, Princeton, Illinois, Lombard, Penn, Clemson, Colorado School of Mines, Wisconsin, Wesleyan, Indiana, and Dartmouth all reached 60 or more points at some point in 1903.
• Minnesota, Chicago, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Beloit, Navy, Carlisle, Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Wisconsin, Princeton, Drake, Ole Miss, Northwestern, Swarthmore, Williams, and Georgetown pulled off the feat in a 1904 game.
• Carlisle, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Lawrence, Vanderbilt, Virginia Tech, Brown, Colorado, Tennessee, Iowa State, Lafayette, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Utah, Iowa, Monmouth, Penn State, Syracuse, and Grinnell broke the 60-point barrier in 1905 games.

At the beginning of Michigan’s half-decade of “Point-a-Minute” glory, only two other teams in the country were able to join the Wolverines in eclipsing the 60-point mark in a single game. By the end of their run as the preeminent scoring force in college football, 19 programs were able to pull off a 60-point game at least once during the 1905 season.

What does any of this have to do with college football in the 21st century?

It is only human that we often tend to have a recency bias about trends in college football. What this demonstrates, however, is that trends are cyclical and success begets copycats. While it feels like there are more points lighting up scoreboards across the country than ever before, the reality is that high-scoring contests have always been a part of the sport.

If anything, we have seen single-game scoring records regress to the mean. While several 70-point games dotted the FBS landscape, 100-point games — a trend that was all too regular a century ago in the sport — have become a mere myth.

You have to go to the Division III level, where Rockford trounced Trinity Bible College 105-0 in 2003, to find the last 100-point game at any level of NCAA-sanctioned football. At the Division II level, the most recent instance of a team putting a century on their opponent came in 1989 when the Marauders of Central State University took down Lane College 101-0.

One must go even further back into the annals of college football history to find such an occurrence at the Division I level. Neil Lomax and Portland State dominated visiting Delaware State in a 105-0 blowout back in 1980, the last time it occurred in either Division I subdivision. Among teams currently at the FBS level it has been more than a half-century since Houston popped Tulsa 100-6 in their 1968 encounter.

A year after that Cougars rout of the Golden Hurricane, the last instance at the HBCU level took place when Knoxville fell to Fort Valley State 106-0 in their 1969 showdown.

So when did offense become the new normal in college football?

As this history shows, the early 20th century marked an explosion in scoring across the college football landscape. Given the history of how points have been distributed over time in the sport, that trend makes total sense.

When the first college football game took place between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, the game more closely resembled what we know today as soccer. All goals counted for one point each, and that remained the case until the first attempts to reform scoring transpired in 1883. Scoring in that season privileged kicking, as field goals counted for five points and post-touchdown conversions netted four points.

A year later, the touchdown became the predominant means of putting points on the board. By 1898, when the touchdown was increased to be worth five points, its establishment as the prime mode of scoring was complete.

It was this trend that allowed the “Point-a-Minute” teams at Michigan and their counterparts around the country to post huge scores on an increasingly regular basis. By 1912, when the touchdown was increased again to its current value of six points, there was no going back.

As defenses adjusted to this reemphasis on play in the field over booting the ball through the goalposts, scoring normalized over time. That is why we no longer see 100-point games taking place at all but the lowest levels of the sport, where disparities in talent and training can be magnified in a way they were decades earlier at the top of the sport. Dividing Division I into the FBS and the FCS in the late 1970s ensured a diminution of talent gaps that further normalized scoring.

So the answer, in the end, must be that for all the platitudes about defense winning championships, offense has always been the norm for the top teams in college football. The ability to post huge margins of victory on one’s opponents has always been a critical weapon in the toolkit of football’s most memorable teams.