On a crazy college football Saturday that saw Michigan State pull out about the most improbable win since Stanford’s band came onto the field against Cal 33 years ago, the LSU Tigers beat previously undefeated Florida and claimed the top spot in the Anderson & Hester Rankings. In three weeks, the undefeated Tigers and star sophomore running back Leonard Fournette will travel to Tuscaloosa to play the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Twelfth-ranked Alabama lost earlier this year (at home) to Ole Miss, which lost on Saturday to now-#9 Memphis, which hasn’t yet lost to anyone. Such is the unpredictability of college football.
Closely following #1 LSU in the Anderson & Hester (A&H) Rankings are #2 Utah and #3 Michigan State. While these three teams haven’t exactly come out of nowhere—each has been either #1 or #2 in the season-ending A&H Rankings within the past eight years—none of them are even the marque team in their own half of their own conference. (Alabama in the SEC West, USC in the Pac-12 South, and Ohio State and Michigan in the Big Ten East, respectively, claim those distinctions.) But the Tigers, Utes, and Spartans—followed by the #4 Iowa Hawkeyes and #5 Clemson Tigers—have been the best teams so far when it comes to the object of the game: beating tough competition. Only time will tell whether they can keep up their early pace.
As for Michigan State, ESPN’s commentators have already begun discussing whether the Spartans should (in one commentator’s words) have “an asterisk” placed next to their incredible win over in-state rival Michigan—and whether the all-powerful College Football Playoff selection committee will choose to place one there. The answer, of course, is that winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. The Spartans beat the Wolverines in the Big House—end of story.
What the 13-member committee actually will do hinges on whether it wants to recognize the object of the game—winning—or substitute a different one—like playing impressively, even in defeat. Does it want to reward the teams that have earned the four playoff bids based on their success in winning on the field? Or does it want to hand out invitations like gamblers would—based on who they think would win hypothetical matchups going forward. Gamblers will surely put an asterisk next to the Spartans’ nearly miraculous win, which makes sense for their purposes. But the sport’s powers-that-be, who are supposed to be rewarding something nobler, shouldn’t even contemplate doing so.
Football isn’t a game in which teams need to be graded across 60 minutes based on style points. Save such subjective scoring for those unfortunate sports (gymnastics, diving, etc.) without finish lines or scoreboards. In football, if you didn’t win, you lost—and the Spartans won in dramatic, heroic, never-give-up fashion. That’s what college football is all about.
Anderson is co-creator of the Anderson & Hester Rankings, which were part of college football’s Bowl Championship Series throughout the BCS’s entire 16-year run (1998-2014).
