The largely untested theory of A Perfect Loss

The reality of success in college football is changing, as Matt Rhule is asked to remind us each week.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Oregon beat Ohio State 32-31 Saturday to plant its flag atop the Big Ten (for now), and my first thought coming out of the game was the Buckeyes will win the national title. They’d just experienced A Perfect Loss.

This is a theory that’s been bouncing around in my head for most of college football’s playoff era, the first time it became somewhat normal for a national champion to have one loss. The first four winners of the College Football Playoff had one loss, and the final tally for the four-team era was five one-loss champions, five undefeateds. Ten of 16 BCS champions (62.5%) were undefeated, which was nearly the same rate as the last 10 years (1988–97) of the polls-and-split-title era when 8-of-13 national champs (61.5%) were perfect, which was nearly the same rate as the 20 years before that.

It took the introduction of the CFP and the addition of one game to drop the undefeated rate 10 percentage points.

Now, as most college football broadcasts will point out at some point, things are different. One loss doesn’t put a season on life support. There has been a gradual, and ongoing, reduction in what it takes to be deemed the best in college football because instead of being 100% beauty pageant the sport is now only 95% that, down from the 98% of the previous decade.

That’s fine. It’s not the end of the American Dream or anything, but the expectation for excellence has been slower to change.

“A good year in college football moving forward is going to be like 8-4, 9-3,” Matt Rhule said Monday. “It just is what it is.”