When Alabama took Greg McElroy out of the game with considerable time left to play in the Capitol One Bowl against Michigan State, I was enraged. Granted, the outcome was apparent even before halftime, but in the middle of a clash of two competing powerhouses, we shouldn’t have taken out our red-hot quarterback in the midst of what could be the last football game of his career.
Not long afterward, we started removing our other starters, then even our other second string players, one by one. We were doing so, of course, to “display class” and to avoid “running up the score.” “Running up the score,” or seeing how many points a team can score off of a weaker opponent, has always been frowned upon in football. There is a time and a place to avoid this practice, however, and collegiate and professional athletics is not that time or that place.
Don’t get me wrong; there are certain times when it would be in the best interest of the winning team to avoid slaughtering its opponent. Youth sports are a perfect example. Little league baseball teams that win 22-1 are considered obnoxious and downright mean. The inconsistent reactions towards running up the score stems from a difference in purpose.
The entire purpose of amateur sports (youth in particular) is to build camaraderie and self-esteem. There is no profit to be made from ticket sales, no scouts to please and no monetary gains for winning. This is why we see such a smattering of different ability levels in pee-wee football and little league baseball. Most kids aren’t trying to market their abilities and most parents, at that age, simply want to see their kids have fun and develop a sense of both teamwork and individual self-worth.
When we understand these as the goals of youth sports, it’s easy to see why running up the score is an egregious breach of these goals. No child can build self-esteem when losing 52-0 in a football game, and it’s next to impossible to care about teamwork when any amount of it can’t dig a team out of an insurmountable deficit. Running up the score, in this case, works against the goals of that level of sports.
When we get to professional and collegiate sports, however, the goals are radically different. The single most important goal in professional and collegiate sports is to satisfy fans and ticketholders. There is an unspoken contract between the ticketholders and the players (and by extension, the coaches that control them) that dictates that ticketholders will pay a hefty sum to watch four quarters of football played to the best of both teams’ abilities.
By taking out starters early in the game, punting in score-able situations, and sometimes literally refusing to score, teams fail to uphold their end of the contract. The fans don’t ever receive a refund proportional to the amount of “real” football they missed. Self-esteem building and team building are not issues at this level of play.
A lopsided Michigan State loss is highly unlikely to damage a player’s self esteem, because to have even been offered a scholarship to start for a Division I football team, that player likely experienced constant success throughout all levels of their football career. NFL (or even collegiate) cornerbacks might get burned all game long, but they obviously realize that they are almost super-human physical specimens to 99 percent of the people they meet.
Even if self-esteem building was a goal of collegiate or professional football, shutting down and refusing to score is hardly a way of achieving it. It feels just as bad to know the other team considers the game to be over at halftime as it does for them to win by a greater margin through playing as if you deserve their best.
In most individual sports it’s commonplace to press to one’s fullest even after the contest is won. Dominant runners won’t jog the remainder of the race when they realize they’ve easily won. When their lead is large, they’ll press even harder in pursuit of records. It’s understood, accepted and even encouraged that one tests the limits of his or her dominance. Since when has a world record 400-meter race ever been considered classless?
If anything, there’s even more self-esteem involved in individual endeavors, so why can’t team sports, when played at a collegiate or professional level, encourage a similar level of dominance? I would love to see if we could win by 55 or 60 points.
There’s a time and a place for teams to give less than their best, but collegiate and professional sports is not it.
Ben Friedman is a sophomore majoring in social entrepreneurship. His column runs weekly on Fridays.
