The joy of college football upsets

This is why we watch

Purdue football players.
(Image credit: AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

There are any number of arguments for why college football is the greatest sport in history and probably the greatest thing ever to come out of America other than Louis Armstrong. But the best one, one that I think is basically unanswerable, is that in college football all the games actually matter.

In every other major sport, great teams losing is a mathematical inevitability that you don't have to be a statistician to understand. Does anyone care, or even remember, that on a random Sunday evening back in August, the historically bad Orioles beat the American League Champion Red Sox 10-3 in the second half a doubleheader? Boston won 108 games this year, about as many as Baltimore lost. The victory was meaningless.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.