Editor’s note: As the World Cup continues in the United States for the first time since 1994, The Athletic is looking back at college sports in the 1990s and how much has changed since then.
Iowa’s 1988 football season started with lofty expectations and a No. 9 ranking, but after playing to a draw for the third time that year, coach Hayden Fry had pretty much had it with fans and reporters questioning his end-game strategy.
“They paid their 16 bucks, and they can react any way they want to,” Fry told reporters after the Hawkeyes kicked a 40-yard field goal with 16 seconds left to tie Ohio State at 24 instead of trying to get in the end zone.
“We took a chance with the onside kick to win the game (with 16 seconds left). There wasn’t any question in my mind what to do. We were still trying to win the game. We were just trying to do it different than the people who don’t know much about football realize. A damn tie is better than a loss. Tell that to your friends. It wasn’t a damn loss, it was a tie.”
Friends, college football needs to bring back ties. These ambiguous and at times confusing results have gotten a bad rap. They are not a scourge to be eradicated — as they were by major college football in the mid-1990s — but an anomaly to be embraced. Their mere existence unlocks a whole new level of strategy and analysis while upping the potential for chaos.
Why wouldn’t we want this?
As college football goes through what feels like a light-speed transformation, with $13 million coaches, $4 million quarterbacks and a postseason tournament that could soon feature more teams than the NFL playoffs, many of us are longing for the way things used to be.
This is one remnant of the past that can be dusted off and actually fit well into the modern game. Even better than it did back in the day.
When the NCAA instituted overtime, the reasoning was sound. Human nature leads us to crave clearly defined resolutions in life. Especially in sports.
Ties were always problematic in college football. In 1990, Colorado and Georgia Tech “shared” the national title in part because both teams recorded a tie during the regular season. The Buffaloes’ 31-31 tie with Tennessee to start the season was, as it turns out, not even close to their strangest result that year.
But for decades, nobody did anything about it. Ties were just accepted. And thank goodness. The ensuing debate they spawned was a feature, not a bug, of the outcome. The possibility of a game ending in a tie also created some of college football’s most memorable results.
The 1966 Game of the Century between No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 2 Michigan State ended 10-10, and there are still those aghast that the late great Fighting Irish coach Ara Parseghian played it safe on the game’s final possession.
“The game ended in a tie,” Parseghian told ESPN 50 years later. “We didn’t play for a tie.”
On the flip side, Nebraska coach Tom Osborne is to this day lauded for going for two and the win against Miami in the 1984 Orange Bowl, even though the failed conversion cost the Cornhuskers a national championship and launched The U.
“I don’t necessarily view it as a negative in our program,” Osborne told Bleacher Report 30 years later. “You play to win.”
The modern major college football record for ties in a season is four, and the last of 13 teams to do it was the 1991 Central Michigan Chippewas. The last team to finish with three ties in a season came four years after Fry’s 1988 Iowa team turned a Big Ten double play and went 6-4-3: Michigan finished 9-0-3, No. 5 in the country, and won the Big Ten in 1992.
The last Football Bowl Subdivision tie took place in November 1995, when Illinois and Wisconsin finished 3-3. Those Badgers were the last team in major college football to have multiple ties in a season. They went 4-5-2.
So much Midwestern flavor in the history of ties feels appropriate. At its essence, a tie is a polite way to end a conflict. It’s agreeing to disagree.
Couldn’t we all use more of that these days?
Turn back the clock
The NCAA voted in OT in 1995, with teams alternating possessions starting from the opponent’s 25-yard line. Simply, people had grown tired of ties and the potential complications they could cause. Toledo beat Nevada 40-37 in the 1995 Las Vegas Bowl in the first major college football overtime game.
It’s been a good run, but it’s time to get rid of it in the regular season. After 60 minutes, the game is over.
As the World Cup has reminded us, a tie can sometimes feel like a win. Or a loss. See: Spain 0, Cabo Verde 0. College football’s history is packed with classic ties that left one team feeling better than the other.
Harvard “beat” Yale 29-29 in 1968 after the Bulldogs led by 16 with 42 seconds left in the fourth quarter.
Florida State certainly felt like a winner in 1994 when the Seminoles rallied with a 28-point fourth quarter to tie Florida 31-31 in what’s known as the “Choke at Doak”.
And that 1992 Michigan season produced the last tie between the Wolverines and rival Ohio State.
“This tie is one of our greatest wins ever,” Ohio State President Gordon Gee told the Associated Press as he watched Michigan run out the final minute from deep in its territory.
The result snapped a four-game losing streak in the series for Ohio State and marked the first time fifth-year Buckeyes coach John Cooper didn’t lose The Game. Cooper elected to kick the point after touchdown to deadlock the score with 4:24 remaining in the fourth quarter rather than trying to take the lead by going for 2.
The AP called the result “a face-saver and, possibly, a job-saver” for Cooper.
“Everyone says, ‘Gamble, coach,’” Cooper said after the game. “Then we lose, and all I hear is how many times we’ve lost to Michigan.” (That never did end. Cooper would finish 2-10-1 against the Wolverines.)
Let’s go back to forcing coaches to make these decisions. With today’s analytics-driven strategy innovations, fourth down is no longer an auto-kick. Going for two is no longer reserved for late-game comebacks.
There is already (wise) movement toward in-game decisions that try to avoid overtime, which by nature of its format invites more randomness and luck into the equation. The trend has only increased recently as OT rules have been modified so that after each team gets two possessions from the 25, the game turns into a 2-point conversion shootout.
The seven-OT, 146-point LSU-Texas A&M marathon in 2018 prompted decision-makers to regulate away never-ending games. Sure, they provide great drama, but they are also a potential health hazard for exhausted players.
As the college football season lengthens, at least for the teams that reach the now-12-team Playoff, and the pressure to schedule more competitive games increases, people in charge need to be sensitive to how much is being asked of still-developing players. No matter how much money they’re making.
About the Playoff: There is a real chance it could double in size to 24 in the next few years, lengthening the season for still more teams. And with an expanded Playoff, regular-season ties aren’t as problematic as they once were.
Imagine Ohio State and Texas playing to a tie in Week 2 this season. It could be a vexing piece of information for the CFP selection committee to consider, but ultimately it’s not a huge issue. We now have a postseason to sort things out.
By the way, what’s so wrong about a game between two evenly matched teams ending with a score that makes that crystal clear?
Last year, Miami beat Notre Dame 27-24 in a Labor Day weekend opener that ultimately decided a Playoff spot. Miami’s postgame win expectancy (a measurement of factors that generally determine the outcome of games, tabulated by ESPN’s Bill Connelly) was 51.2 percent. The teams played to a virtual draw. It happens all the time, so why not allow the final score to reflect it?
An overtime compromise
There probably aren’t enough tie enthusiasts like me clamoring for draws and willing to dump overtime.
“I like what we’ve got, because we’re all accustomed now to having a winner,” said Mack Brown, whose 35-year record as a head coach at Tulane, North Carolina and Texas includes a single tie. In 1990, the Tar Heels played Georgia Tech even, 13-13.
Among currently active college football coaches, only two have ties on their coaching records. Houston’s Willie Fritz finished 6-3-1 in his first season at Blinn Junior College in Brenham, Texas, in 1993. And West Virginia’s Rich Rodriguez coached a tie game in each of his first two seasons at Division II Glenville State. In fact, Rodriguez got his first tie before his first win at the struggling program in 1990.
“I always said there’s nothing like a winning locker room. It’s like ecstasy, right?” Rodriguez told The Athletic recently. “And there’s nothing worse than a losing locker room. I do remember with ties, like, how am I supposed to feel?”
Rodriguez liked this idea: Change college overtime rules to make them more similar to the NFL where the extra quarter is more like actual football, with a kickoff to start and punts available to change possession.
“These games are so important … do you really want to come down to a 2-point conversion to determine your season?” Rodriguez said. “One 2-point conversion is maybe a difference between making a playoff and not making a playoff, where if you played a whole quarter or you had the NFL thing, I think you’d have more of the better team actually won the game.”
Most games would still end with a winner or loser, but us sickos could also have a few ties.
And maybe, just maybe, we could get more exchanges like this from Fry’s Tuesday press conference following the Ohio State game.
“Hell, we were trying to win the game,” Fry told reporters. “And to write big articles, insinuating that I wasn’t, that just destroys me. If you think I’m lying to you, then why come down here for all the copy? Do you think I’m coaching to lose? We were trying to win. I’m not threatening you, but I’ll start doing my interviews on an individual basis over the phone, and I’ll return the calls to the guys that I think are going to cover it fair and square. The rest of you can go to you know where.”
