It is said that hitting a baseball is the toughest thing to do in sports.
In terms of a very specific action on a playing field (or surface) within the context of competition, that’s probably true.
In a larger context, however, what kind of achievement is more difficult to pull off than anything else? For solo athletes, the Grand Slam of either golf or tennis is the holy grail — we saw how much Serena Williams labored under the pressure of the Grand Slam quest when she neared the finish line at the U.S. Open in New York this past September, one not-so-very-long month ago. We also saw how utterly amazing it was that Jordan Spieth came as close as he did in golf… and he didn’t even win the third leg of the Grand Slam.
What about team sports, though? Winning 70 NBA games in a season is quite difficult. Only one team, the 1996 Chicago Bulls, has ever hit the big seven-oh.
In the NFL, only one team has ever gone 17-0 in a season in the Super Bowl era, the 1972 Miami Dolphins. No team has ever gone 19-0 since the regular season expanded from 14 to 16 games in 1978, though the 2007 New England Patriots came within a quarter (and a David Tyree catch following an improbable Eli Manning scramble) of doing the deed.
Winning not just 100, but 110, games in a baseball season must be incredibly hard. Since the World Series began in 1903, only six teams have hit or exceeded that mark. If you can reach that plateau, you’ve attained greatness on a rare scale.
Yet, something has to be said about these win totals and, in particular, going undefeated in the NFL: A win total occurs within a context of league standings. The 1996 Chicago Bulls had the best record in the league by eight games. Late in the season, they fought for that 70-game mark because they wanted it, not because they needed it. Those Bulls are great in part because they fulfilled their desire to be remembered as one of the most special teams of all time, but in terms of achieving their most immediate objective — winning a title, which is furthered by gaining home-court advantage throughout the playoffs — Chicago had sealed that prize well before the end of the season.
In baseball, most of the teams which won 110 or more games were able to win the pennant (or their division) by a considerable amount of games. Once they got to 104 or 106 wins or thereabouts, they had already clinched the World Series or playoff berth they sought throughout the regular season.
Even in the NFL, while an unbeaten season is obviously a great thing to be known for, it’s usually the case that a team doesn’t need to be 16-0 to win home-field advantage throughout the conference playoffs. A 13-3 mark often gets it done, a 14-2 record will almost always suffice, and a 15-1 record has never failed to win a top seed in a conference over the past 37 years.
The point should be evident: In the NBA, MLB and NFL, reaching “X number of wins” or “Record Y” doesn’t mean everything. Once you eclipse the other teams in the standings to clinch a berth, a seed, or a division (or any combination of the above), you’ve done your job. Extra pursuits of a win-based milestone are just that: extra. They cease to be essential to the attempt to win a championship.
In college football, it’s different.
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Think about it: In college football, you can go unbeaten through the regular season, your conference championship game, and your bowl game… and not win the national title. Moreover, you can wind up not even PLAYING for the national championship. Hello, 2004 Auburn. Hello, 2010 TCU.
College football’s lack of a structured and sensible postseason system — in terms of both selection and slotting — has meant that if you didn’t get either the votes or the computer numbers and a couple teams with better reputations or resumes also went unbeaten, your own unbeaten record wouldn’t have meant as much.
The point is plain: Especially in contrast to the NFL, college football’s unbeaten records aren’t achieved in the presence of a cushion. Unlike professional team sports, college football doesn’t have an automatic record-based playoff seeding system. We saw this last season when Florida State produced the unbeaten regular season but was seeded third behind one-loss teams from Alabama (No. 1) and Oregon (No. 2). If you go 13-0 in a college football regular season, you might not have crashed the party under the Bowl Championship Series system; you’re much more likely to get into the College Football Playoff. Yet, there are few (if any) guarantees: If four other teams go unbeaten, you could still be left out. There is a pressure attached to 13-0 in college football which makes it — in a very real way — a far more daunting achievement than the other sports milestones mentioned above.
Purely as an extension of the number of games played or the length of time it takes to reach a given milestone (the endless NBA and MLB regular seasons or the longer NFL season), the pro sports involve more work.
Going 13-0 in college football, though, involves a lot more pressure and a much smaller margin for error.
This year, we’re seeing three teams immersed in a struggle which shows just how hard it really is to go 13-0… or even 6-0 or 5-0.
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We remember what the 2014 season looked like for Florida State. As the defending national champion, the Seminoles had already shown how great they could be. They weren’t exactly the same team, but they did have Jameis Winston and enough familiar faces to suggest that they could once again put the rest of college football at their feet. The idea sounded reasonable enough, but the reality of being a target in a sport played not by seasoned pros, but 20-year-olds, led to a constantly challenging season for the Seminoles.
They didn’t typically blow out their opponents; they fought past them, often by narrow margins. They had to call upon the winning DNA in their veins, and it was a testament to their competitive chops that the 2014 Seminoles did go 13-0 in the 2014 regular season. Nothing about that season was easy, and it was the very reality that Florida State DID in fact struggle nearly every week which made the attainment of 13-0 that much more phenomenal. FSU never really arrived at a point when everything clicked and remained in place, natural and comfortable. The hard slogs in the salt mines just kept coming, with the Noles sweating and toiling but regularly escaping one determined opponent after the other.
Hmmmm… this feels not only like Florida State’s 2015 season — still unblemished after a narrow win over Miami on Saturday night — but like the 2015 Ohio State Buckeyes’ season as well.
Look at Florida State last year. Pivot to the Buckeyes this year. The similarities are abundant and obvious.
It’s true that in Ohio State’s case, there’s no superstar player getting nearly the same amounts of scrutiny and negative press that Winston endured in 2014. (Cardale Jones probably comes the closest, but Winston existed in another league in terms of media attention.) Yet, that paradoxically magnifies the point: Why is Ohio State laboring to win games? Why are the Buckeyes tied or close to tied with the likes of Maryland and Indiana deep into the third quarter?
13-0 is hard and filled with pressure — that’s why.
Everyone keeps wondering when Ohio State will click, much as pundits waited for 2014 Florida State to round into the juggernaut it never quite became. Can the Buckeyes scratch and claw their way through the season, or will they need to morph into the College Football Playoff version — the team which hammered Alabama in the second half of the Sugar Bowl and then pulverized Oregon in the national championship game — in order to successfully defend their title?
We can’t wait to find out.
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Not to be completely lost or ignored in this discussion is Michigan State, which has been eroded by injuries to important players on both sides of the ball, especially in the secondary and (most of all) on the offensive line. Because of bad injury luck and deficient performance (it’s mostly about injuries but certainly linked to quality as well), Michigan State has been a close-game magnet for most of this season.
The Spartans might have been at least somewhat bored with Purdue on Oct. 3, but a close game a week later against Rutgers leaves MSU with no real place to hide. This is a flawed team, and Michigan is next. Michigan State has been so phenomenally good about winning close games, a surprising yet entirely necessary development for the program given its previous track record in close games before Mark Dantonio came along. Can this team continue to make close games its friend, or will so many weeks of walking on the high wire finally catch up with Sparta?
Ohio State and Florida State are wondering the same thing about themselves.
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Three teams. Three big-name programs. Three coaching staffs and rosters in pursuit of 13-0, which is best viewed as the most important challenge in American team sports.
The Buckeyes, Seminoles and Spartans have all survived up to this point. Having done that, will any of them be able to improve to the point that they won’t have to sweat in the latter stages of a game?
No one should expect Ohio State, Florida State, and Michigan State to breeze through the remaining portions of their seasons without incident or difficulty. What might matter most for these three teams is to win at least three or four games in blowout fashion, so that they can find time to take a breath and save more mental energy for the tests that will require their best.
Will everything finally click for OSU, FSU and MSU? Three state schools share the same basic state of being, but if they can’t attain a higher gear, they’ll have to rely on the survival instincts that have brought them to this point in the season without a defeat.
