The fine art of scheduling pushovers and sprinkling them with points
By Jack Keefe
In my young manhood all the way through middle age, I often bundled up on a Friday night and headed out for a high school football game. Even if it was freezing cold, even if my teams didn’t stand much chance of winning.
But these days my knee’s in a brace, my get-up-and-go is almost in reverse, and my heart is in other matters (like staying warm). So I just follow my beloved Purple Raiders of Bloomington (Illinois) High School by tuning in the Friday night sports instead of sitting under the Friday night lights. Friday night lights give off no heat.
A week ago Friday night my drowsiness was zapped severely when the sportscaster announced that undefeated Bloomington High had just steamrolled winless Urbana 84-0.
With 2:55 left on the game clock and the final score on the board, an Urbana player waits for the kickoff after Bloomington’s last scoring play. (from Facebook, photographer unknown)
Seriously? Eighty-four freakin’ points? How can that even happen in the twenty-first century, with running clocks when the margin is over forty points and third-stringers in the game?
Well, believe it. It was Urbana (now 0-5), after all. Urbana is one of those schools that place high emphasis on academics, and only slightly lower emphasis on athletics, but with inconsistent results. Since 2014, Urbana hasn’t had a winning football team, and has in fact won only five games.
At Bloomington (now 5-0), we can relate. Our own football success hasn’t been very consistent either for the past ten years, with only two winning seasons since 2014. This year is different.
Details of the game, posted by the Bloomington coach on maxprep.com, highlight the one-sided nature of the game.
- Total plays: Bloomington 18, Urbana 28
- First Downs: Bloomington 12, Urbana 1
- Possession time: Bloomington 10:34, Urbana 27:26. The running clock in the second half shortened the game by ten minutes. With only eighteen snaps on offense and ten minutes’ possession, Bloomington can hardly be accused of running up the score.
- Halftime score: Bloomington 49, Urbana 0
Bloomington scored nine touchdowns by running the ball, and none by passing. The other three were returns of a kickoff, an intercepted pass and a fumble.
That night, Peoria sportscaster Jim Matson said on WEEK-TV that 84-0 was a record score for Bloomington. But that was wrong. The highest score I could find was in 1914, when Bloomington defeated Pekin 108-0. Maybe that’s fodder for a future blog.
But back to this idea of cupcake opponents. Bloomington and Urbana are similar-sized schools in the Big 12 Conference. They’ve been playing each other for a century, although not every season. So this game wasn’t scheduled because one school perceived the other as an easy win. Winning seasons or not, these two schools, like the rest of the schools in any conference, are predictably stuck with each other.
If either school were looking for cupcakes, BHS may well be scheduling Holder High School and Urbana taking on Flatville Tech (both fictitious schools). The fact is, that sort of thing is rare in Central Illinois athletics, and usually occurs only when a sudden vacancy occurs on two schools’ schedules.
College football is another matter. Big Ten (now sporting eighteen schools) teams normally schedule teams from lesser programs as “tune-up” contests in advance of the tougher conference opponents they’ll meet later in the season. The lesser schools enjoy the fat paycheck from the gate receipts and exposure they get from playing a major conference school, often on television. The bigger schools enjoy the win.
But it can backfire. In 2007, Appalachian State stunned the Michigan Wolverines in Ann Arbor. A year later, Ohio State manhandled Youngstown State as expected, but lost its quarterback with a severe injury. He missed the next several games. There were other episodes but these examples give an idea.
Bad things can happen to one team or both. The most recent example in my mind was FCS-level Illinois State’s season opener at Iowa. Iowa won big, naturally, but the real loss for ISU wasn’t on the scoreboard. Illinois State lost three starters to injury in the game. At least two of those players are out for the season.
There’s little nourishment in a cupcake opponent.
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