It’s easy to rate how shameful a college football team is based on wins and losses alone, but what about the intangibles?
That’s exactly what The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen figured out in the newspaper’s fourth-annual “College Football Grid Of Shame.”
The horizontal axis of Cohen’s grid is simple enough. It separates the weaklings from the powerhouses based on pure statistics. But the vertical axis — which classifies teams on a scale of admirable to embarrassing — makes things interesting.
Cohen noted that there are some hard facts that go into that scale, saying he used “a weighted calculation of every team’s academic performance, NCAA violation and probationary records, attendance figures, off-season arrests (and) total funding it takes from the university or state and amount that student fees subsidize the athletic department.” Still, things like Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston’s transgressions should, and did, weigh more heavily on schools’ shamefulness quotients.
As far as how the powerhouses fared, Stanford, UCLA, Clemson and Wisconsin were the most admirable, while FSU, Alabama and Oklahoma were the most embarrassing.
Two New England schools made the cut and didn’t exactly get rave reviews. Boston College was an admirable weakling, and UMass was an embarrassing weakling. You can check out the rest in the photo below or through Cohen’s interactive grid here.
