There's no regular-season loss in the American sports landscape that hurts so much as a college football loss. But if a perfect season is truly expected, it has rarely been delivered.
View full sizeOhio State football head coach Jim Tressel knows how a loss can be devastating to a team with national title hopes, but it's not impossible for the Buckeyes to re-enter the picture.
Tressel's Penguins did make it through the 1994 season with only a tie keeping them from perfection at 14-0-1. But his three other Division I-AA national championships included at least two losses. And only twice did he reach the playoffs at that level of college football without a loss.
Losses then were just another part of a championship season. Now in his 10th season at Ohio State, Tressel knows any loss is more often the end of championship hopes. That's what the No. 10 Buckeyes (6-1, 2-1 Big Ten) are facing today against Purdue (4-2, 2-0) as they come off their first loss of the season to Wisconsin, a loss that changed what they thought they'd been aiming toward in the first half of the year.
"In general, the system that we're in now vs. the system where you have a 16-team playoff, it's maybe a little easier with the playoff scenario to buy into the, 'Hey, we've just got to get better every day,' which is what you hope you could buy into anyway," Tressel said. "But the [playoff] system kind of helps you a little bit from that standpoint. I don't know that this system helps you, but you still want to teach that concept."
Told the point of the question wasn't to argue the merits of the bowl system vs. a playoff, Tressel said sarcastically, "Obviously." But it's a reality that the current college system isn't the norm in sports, when a 14-2 season in the NFL means you're the best team in the league and a two-loss season for an elite college team usually means you came up short.
Sure, great college teams schedule more easy wins that pad their records. But when the entire season is a playoff, as it is so often said about college football these days, then it's clear that once you lose, your playoffs may be over. There's no regular-season loss in the American sports landscape that hurts so much as a college football loss.
"I think we embrace it," OSU senior receiver Dane Sanzenbacher said. "We know it going into the season. Everybody is playing by the same rules. They tell us this is what we've got to do, so it's not like it sneaks up on us. We kind of know going in, being part of this university and this tradition, that it's expected of us. And we welcome that coming in as freshmen. It's a program that likes to win, and they expect us to win, so it's something we welcome."
If a perfect season is truly expected, it has rarely been delivered. In 121 years of football, only five times have the Buckeyes made it through undefeated and untied:
•1916, 7-0
•1944, 9-0
•1954, 10-0
•1968, 10-0
•2002, 14-0
It's difficult to do. And it will get that much tougher next season when the Big Ten adds a title game and a 13-0 record may be needed to play for the BCS title.
An undefeated record is not absolutely necessary. In the 12-year history of the BCS championship game, 14 of the teams to play for the title have been undefeated, nine have had one loss and one, LSU in the 2007 season, had two losses. But a team never knows when being undefeated is a must and when it isn't, so the specter of the one devastating loss hangs over every top 25 team, which adds to the intensity and excitement of every major showdown.
Undefeated Auburn will feel it against undefeated LSU today. They are among the 10 undefeated teams remaining of the 120 in the highest level of college football. So the Buckeyes' title hopes aren't 100 percent dead in the water. But whether they stay afloat is completely random and has little to do with how they perform the rest of the season.
"You go in knowing that you pretty much have to be spotless if you want to play in the national championship," OSU linebacker Andrew Sweat said. "But a lot can happen."
So Tressel preaches his "just get better" message to a team with justifiably high expectations that knows it may already be too late. There have been times in the past when the Buckeyes had teams that looked to be as good as any team in the country by the end of the season, say in 2003 or 2005, but they were doomed by early losses. It happens across the country every season.
"I'm sure that was a fun thing for a lot of people to say -- like at the end of '05 -- man, by the end of the year, we could have beaten anyone," Tressel said. "Well, that wasn't the system. The system was you were supposed to beat everyone from the beginning of the year."
So the 2003 team remains one that Tressel is particularly proud of, because after a loss in the sixth game of the season at Wisconsin, Tressel thought his players did buy into the "just get better" message, regardless of the system. Coming off a loss at Wisconsin in its seventh game, it's a template for the 2010 team.
"That was a very satisfying thing," Tressel said. "But I don't know that at the end of that [last] game, I said, 'Boy, if there was a playoff, I'm sure we'd have won it.' Well, there wasn't a playoff. You know my philosophy: I never wish for what I can't have."