College Football's Grid of Shame
We Rate Every Team in Major-College Football by How Embarrassed Its Fans Should (but Likely Don't) Feel
By RACHEL BACHMAN
The 2012 college-football season has arrived at last. Starting Thursday, 124 teams from Massachusetts to Hawaii will battle for glory on the field, while trying to minimize the damage they cause off of it.
To rate their prospects for success in both respects, The Wall Street Journal presents its second-annual Grid of Shame.
The Grid is a subjective rating of every major-college team on two levels: how good the team should be this season, and how much shame it has brought its supporters. The shame scale takes into account a variety of factors, from NCAA rules-related scandals and player misbehavior to academic performance and financial state.
Controversy is a constant today in college football, and being a fan requires being able to overlook the sport's many ills.
Not everything that has happened over the past year was bad, depending on your point of view. College football's power brokers finally agreed on a four-team playoff which will begin after the 2014 season, quieting the mob that had formed against the reviled Bowl Championship Series. Texas Christian and West Virginia are happy. Those schools ditched the less-respected Mountain West and Big East conferences, respectively, and joined the Big 12. Missouri and Texas A&M did even better, leaving the Big 12 for the Southeastern Conference, winner of the past six national championships.
But that is hardly all. North Carolina is embroiled in a deepening academic-fraud scandal. Louisiana State, which reached the national-title game last season, recently dismissed star cornerback Tyrann Mathieu from the team for violating team rules. And, most visibly of all, Penn State went from paragon of purity to symbol of the worst the sport can bring: the metastasized stain of a former assistant coach's child abuse and the resulting four-year NCAA postseason ban.
In fact, a whopping four programs—Penn State, Central Florida, North Carolina and Ohio State—will sit out this postseason for transgressions ranging from academic fraud to recruiting irregularities.
As the season kicks off, several schools have improved their shame standing simply by not embarrassing themselves over the past year. In Saturday's biggest game, defending national-champion Alabama plays No. 8 Michigan, which just a year ago was riven by former coach Rich Rodriguez's 15-22 tenure. Southern California is ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press poll as it returns from a two-year postseason ban for the extra-benefits scandal involving former Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush.
To track which teams deserve toasting or roasting, see the Grid of Shame, along with profiles of 10 teams that moved significantly from last year. Feel free to dispute the results: Whether the fans of football schools are capable of feeling shame is part of the debate.
A version of this article appeared August 30, 2012, on page D9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: College Football's Grid of Shame.
