College football fans revel in things going wrong. Fans like to complain about rankings, but that tune changes as soon as ranked teams start losing.
As each season takes on its own character, fans nationwide descend into a kind of bloodlust, hoping their own teams’ failures can be buried beneath the blunders and woes suffered by others. To finish a college football season undefeated is to emerge from a spiteful crab bucket that fiends for every 11-win contender to lose to Oregon State on a fumbled kneeldown at 1:30 a.m. Eastern.
Every season gets pretty weird, because every season involves thousands of adolescent athletes trying to manifest the whims of sleep-deprived coaches. There’s a thing that happens about halfway through each year, as fans begin to wonder whether the shape of the ongoing campaign will become as abominable as some of the sport’s strangest years ever. This is usually just recency bias, because most seasons end up performing at comparable levels of crazy.
But halfway through 2021, a season that’s undoubtedly on the weird side …
According to @ESPNStatsInfo, Alabama is the 40th ranked team to lose this year. Most through 6 weeks in the poll era, easing just ahead of ……………… pic.twitter.com/qiMMmzeGLl
— Bill Connelly (@ESPN_BillC) October 10, 2021
… let’s assess our situation. We’ll compare it to a few of the weirdest seasons ever, which all happen to be pretty recent, due to the sport’s true nationalization in the ’80s and ’90s.
(In this post, I’m partly drawing on research I added to 2007: The inside story of the greatest season in college football history and Naming one “consensus” college football champion per year, and I selected seasons largely due to Bill Connelly’s rankings in the 2007 collection.)
