COLUMN: James Madison exposes game’s dirty little secret
It didn’t take long for the facebook message statuses and twitter posts to light up following Virginia Tech’s 21-16 loss to James Madison last Saturday. Even before the final second ticked off in the game, fans and media members alike were shooting the “LOLZ @ VIRGINIA TECH” messages and proclaiming this upset among the greatest in college football history. Unheard of, they said, that the Atlantic Coast Conference favorite should lose to James Madison. We were wrong all along, they claimed, to assume that Virginia Tech was “for real.”
That the ACC laid a collective egg on Saturday – with its highest profile teams, Miami (FL) and Florida State going down to national powers Ohio State and Oklahoma, respectively – didn’t help the case for the Hokies, who went into week two as the No. 13 team in the nation. Neither did it help the case for Boise State, which garnered eight first place Associated Press votes in the week two Top 25 poll after beating the Hokies 33-30 the week before. That game, which had for months been talked up as a clash of legitimate national title contenders, appears to be “just another” good game now that the Hokies have been “exposed” by James Madison, which as a Football Championship Subdivision team (FCS) was never expected to knock off an FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) power like Virginia Tech.
But JMU’s win, while historic, shouldn’t have been completely unexpected. If anything was exposed in the Dukes’ win, it was the strength of the top FCS teams, not the lack of national staying power of a program like Virginia Tech.
Call it the “dirty little secret” of college football, if you will. At least that’s what JMU head coach Mickey Matthews was calling it after Saturday’s upset.
“The dirty little secret is the top six to eight teams at our level can play with anyone,” said the Dukes coach, who led JMU to a FCS National Championship in 2004.” I don’t know if we’re a Top 25 team on the FBS level, but I’m sure we’re better than Virginia Tech wanted us to be. They needed to play somebody they could dominate.”
Matthews isn’t just singing the praises of his own program. For anyone thinking that his team’s win came over a dead-in-the-water, overrated Virginia Tech team, I have news for you: you’re dead wrong. Sure, Virginia Tech may not be the national title contender we thought they’d be two weeks into the season, but that doesn’t mean the Hokie ship has sunk.
At least that wasn’t the case last season, when the then No. 22 Iowa Hawkeyes needed two consecutive blocked field goals to secure a 17-16 win over Northern Iowa – another “lesser” FCS team which nevertheless finds itself in the FCS playoffs on an annual basis. While panic struck out across the heartland after Iowa’s near disaster, the Hawkeyes recovered for the season, winning 10 of their last 12 games, including a 24-14 victory over Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl.
If the example of the 2009 Iowa team doesn’t prove Moore’s point to you, perhaps recent history of FCS upsets will. We all know about Michigan’s unthinkable 2007 upset at the hands of Appalachian State during the first week of the 2007 season, but consider some of the upsets we’ve seen already during the 2010 season. Virginia Tech wasn’t the only Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) team to fall to an FCS on Saturday. In addition to Jacksonville State upsetting Mississippi 49-48 and North Dakota State knocking off Kansas 6-3 in week one, Saturday saw Minnesota fall 41-38 to South Dakota and Liberty beating Ball State 27-23.
Why so many upsets?
I used to write a college football blog called “Pitch Right,” and in a post on it two years ago, I speculated that upsets like James Madison’s would become more commonplace in the coming years. Working solely off of a rudimentary, if not totally misplaced, conception of economics learned from my Advanced Placement class in high school, I hypothesized that an influx in high school football participation had provided a supply of FBS capable prospects that had outpaced the demand for their services at the FBS level. To put it another way, my theory of “Competitive parity in Division 1 football as it relates to inter-subdivision play” held that the FBS allotment of scholarships per team (85) was insufficient to given the amount of high school prospects currently in the market, and that when given the choice to walk-on to an FBS program or accept an FCS scholarship, more and more players were choosing the latter. This dynamic, I speculated, had been in the work for several years, and was why we were seeing (and continue to see) a ripple effect with an increase in upsets.
Not to go all Nostradamus on you, but according to Matthews, my prediction is ringing true.
So, are upsets like James Madison’s here to stay? For the time being, I think they are. With more and more FBS caliber players on FCS rosters thanks to the imbalance of supply (not to mention transfers) in the talent pool, the top teams at the “lower” level of Division I will continue to put the scare in FBS teams looking for an easy win. It’s a dynamic that makes each Saturday a new adventure for college football fans, and one which gives fans of small schools everywhere the chance to celebrate their teams accomplishments on the sport’s grandest stage.
Adam Nettina is a senior majoring in history, and member of the Football Writers Association of America. While not watching college football, Adam can be found in the Statesman office making paninis.He can also be reached at adam.nettina@aggiemail.usu.edu.