Do you remember the wrestling “jobbers”? They were guys whose job was to make the headliners look good. Back in the day, the televised wrestling matches served no purpose other than to develop and market story lines for the live events. In the TV matches, no headliners clashed. The heroes du jour would defeat some poor jobbers in short order with “scientific” moves, and then the main villains would abuse other lackluster jobbers with trash talk and dirty tricks, while boiling over with braggadocio about how they would do the same to our heroes in the live events.
The same jobbers came out every week to get slaughtered. Among the notorious perpetual losers were such luminaries as The Duke of Dorchester, Iron Mike Sharpe, the Brooklyn Brawler, Barry Horowitz, and Leaping Lanny Poffo, who happened to be the son of one wrestling legend, Angelo Poffo, and the brother of another, The Macho Man. The first three I listed usually lost to heroes, while Poffo and Horowitz normally squared off against heels. Four of those guys were at least trying to be colorful, with the nicknames and all. Iron Mike Sharpe even billed himself as “Canada’s Greatest Athlete.” (Sorry, Gretzky!) As for the fifth guy, I don’t know what the deal was with Barry Horowitz. He could have been “Bart Howitzer” or “the Florida Flash,” but no-o-o-o-o. He just remained plain old Barry Horowitz. That’s not a moniker likely to strike fear into your heart, unless he’s auditing your tax returns.
Anyway, discarding my light racism and moving on to the real topic of this post, college football also has its jobbers, uninspiring programs that manage to make big bucks by traveling to the homecoming games of powerhouse teams, fully expecting to lose by 40 or more. You recognize some of the names: Bethune-Cookman, UAB, Austin Peay, Lindenwood, Arkansas Pine Bluff, Southern Utah, Albany, Akron, Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb, Western Kentucky, Western Michigan, Western Carolina … basically any team that starts with “Western.”
As a general matter of honor, there are two conventions that apply to jobber games: (1) the big teams usually only schedule these teams in the first three weeks of the season, before conference play begins; (2) the big teams shouldn’t run up the score any higher than 70, preferably even less. Sometimes the jobbers are so weak that the big teams go over 70 unintentionally, even when they play all of their reserves, because their fourth-stringers keep scoring. That happened last week, when Ole Miss squeaked by mighty Furman 76-0. Ole Miss tried to tamp it down. They called rushing plays for eight different guys and tossed passes to ten different receivers. By the end of the game they were calling plays for members of the marching band. I think the chubby tuba guy even rushed for a first down.
Unlike the wrestling jobbers, one of the patsy teams occasionally receives the smile of Lady Fortune and wins a game against a power team. There was one this year. Lowly NIU defeated #5 Notre Dame on the Irish home field in South Bend. That was the first win in history for a Mid-American Conference team against an AP top-five team, following 51 consecutive losses. If you saw that coming, you could have been a rich man. NIU was a 28.5-point underdog, and paid off 25-1 on a bet to win outright. The point spread was high enough that 2/3 of the bettors took NIU and the points, so the bookies took a heavy beating on those bets. It has not been reported how much action was on NIU to win outright, but probably not much, unless Nostradamus is still alive and follows American college football.
In a semi-important game:
#3 Texas easily defeated #10 Michigan, in a battle of the newly aligned super conferences, and they did that on Michigan’s home field. It was 31-6 before Michigan scored a meaningless late TD, but it wasn’t as one-sided as it sounds. Texas did outplay the Wolverines, but the score got so lopsided because of Michigan turnovers. That means the new SEC, which now has 16 teams (eight are nationally ranked), defeated the new Big Ten, which now has 18 teams (six are nationally ranked).
USC, which is now in the Big Ten, had already defeated LSU, so the two mega-conferences are now 1-1 in head-to-head games.
Both Michigan and the domers lost = glorious!
As Tom Hamilton might put it, Down goes “America’s team*!”
*As the odious Harbaugh called them last year.
Wait you’re burying the lede here: there’s a NON-odious Harbaugh?
I haven’t followed football in years, but as someone who grew up in Notre Dame worship territory, this makes me very pleased
I love college football, but I’m not really a partisan. I seem to latch onto new favorites each year. That said, I always love to see losses from certain teams whose heads are so big they don’t need helmets – like Notre Dame, Michigan and THE Ohio State University. The Axis of Evil. I never root for those guys.
Two of those three lost this week, so … cool.
Also, while I normally have no reason to hate Colorado, Deion Sanders is another guy with a rather large hat size, so I’ll root against them for a couple of years. They also lost this week, so … very cool.
Colorado almost lost last week to North Dakota Fucking State in the all-important Buffalo Bowl (match-up of Bison vs Buffaloes). Big smile from me when Colorado was down at halftime. Who even knew there were enough people in North Dakota for two colleges? They can’t even muster up two seats in the House.