Bleacher Report - Articles by John Cate

The Strasburg Rule: Why MLB Teams Should Be Allowed To Trade Draft Picks

John Cate — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:06:38 -0400

There are a lot of things wrong with the current structure of Major League Baseball. Every year, about this time, we read about teams in smaller markets having to trade off their best players to contenders (typically, large market teams like the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox), and setting themselves up for another rebuilding cycle, only to repeat the process again in a few years.

There is some competitive balance to the game. Since the end of the Yankee dynasty in 2001, no team has repeated as World Series champion. In fact, it seems like a new team wins every year. But we've also seen the break-up of some potentially great teams, like the World Champion Florida Marlins of 2001, or the strong Cleveland Indians teams of 2005-06, because of salary issues.

Lately, we've even been seeing teams trade young stars in their arbitration years, when they're still under club control for a couple more seasons. There's no incentive to keep them until free agency and take two draft picks as compensation. Sometimes you can't sign the draft picks, either.

This isn't a plea for a salary cap in Major League Baseball. In fact, I don't believe there should be one. If the Yankees want to pay $300 million to their lineup, instead of those mere $200 million payrolls they've been carrying, bully for them. There should be a stiffer luxury tax for doing so--but the teams that get the money should be forced to spend it on player salaries themselves.

But I digress. What I want to know is this—why is MLB the only major professional sports league that doesn't allow for the trading of draft picks?

I think allowing these kinds of trades would help promote competitive balance, not hurt it. Does it mean the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers would be able to make deals and land the top amateur talent? Sure. But they'd have to give up something in return, too. Something that might be much more of a sure thing than the high draft picks.

What is Stephen Strasburg worth?

Let's use Stephen Strasburg as an example.

Strasburg is, by consensus, the best pitching prospect to enter the draft in some time; some have gone so far as to say he is the best amateur pitcher ever. The Washington Nationals took Strasburg as their No. 1 draft pick in June. To date, they have not been able to sign him, and they will lose their rights to him if they fail to sign him by Aug. 15.

Strasburg, through his agent Scott Boras, has made extremely high salary demands, even asking for a $50 million signing bonus. Boras based this request on the posting fee paid by the Boston Red Sox in 2006 for the rights to negotiate with Japanese star pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka. He claims that Strasburg is comparable to Matsuzaka. I think that's an absurd statement on several counts, but that's not the point of this analysis.

The point is that Boras is demanding a price for Strasburg, based on his perceived super-prospect status, that the Nationals cannot meet without damage to their major-league salary structure. They are, in effect, being asked to pay a near-free agent salary to a pitcher who has never thrown a pitch in professional baseball. A pitcher who, in fact, wasn't particularly impressive in either the 2008 Olympics or the 2009 NCAA Regionals--his two highest levels of competition to date.

But we'll set that aside. Strasburg has a lot of talent and could end up being many things as a top collegian coming to the pros. He could be Ben McDonald, the Strasburg of 1989, who had a decent career but never could stay healthy. He could be Alex Fernandez, Jim Abbott or Andy Benes, high draft picks who had good, but not great, careers. He could be a disappointment, like Calvin Schiraldi, or he could tear up his arm before he ever gets a chance, like Lance Dickson did. Or he could become everything people say he can—we'll say the next Roger Clemens.

Clemens is the best-case scenario. Based on past draft history, that's unlikely, but let's say Strasburg's talent wins out and he develops like the young Rocket did. In any case, there's almost no doubt that Strasburg will appear in the major leagues sometime in 2010 if he signs; he might even make his debut in September of this year.

One player doesn't matter much

So, what does that mean? Strasburg might win 20 games for the Nationals in 2010, but does that make them contenders? No, of course not. They're on pace for 54 wins this season; Strasburg pitching at that level might boost them to about 61. Even if you even out their bad luck this year—they're underperforming their Pythag (projected won-lost record based on runs scored and allowed) by eight games--that's a 69-93 team. Maybe Elijah Dukes breaks out and one other prospect develops. That still only makes 75 wins--and everything that could go right, has gone right.

And then, in the 2010-11 off-season, the Nationals lose Adam Dunn to free agency. They couldn't pay him because they're paying their new superstar pitcher so much, and Dukes has killed the team in arbitration. Soon they'll have to consider trading him. That leaves them...I'll let you fill in the blanks.

A better solution

Forgive my rambling analysis. My original argument was that teams should be allowed to trade their draft picks. Again, we'll use Mr. Strasburg as an example. Let's say the Nationals decide they can't afford his demands, or maybe they're just fed up with Scott Boras. So calls go out to the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers. They can all pay Boras' demands and they're willing to trade prospects to gamble on Strasburg being the next Roger Clemens.

We'll say he goes to the Red Sox; I'll use them because I know the most about their organization. Theo Epstein acquires the rights to Strasburg in exchange for Clay Buchholz, Daniel Bard and Lars Andersen. The Red Sox meet Boras' demands and sign Strasburg.

Meanwhile, in 2010, Buchholz wins 13 games for the Nationals, getting better as the season goes on as he gets low-pressure MLB innings under his belt. Bard becomes the team's closer and notches 34 saves in 37 tries. With a stabilized bullpen, the Nats go from minus-8 in the Pythag to plus-3. Dukes and another young player break out. The Nationals win 71 games.

Dunn then leaves to go replace David Ortiz in Boston, finally fulfilling his destiny as the next great long-term DH. But the Nats replace him with Andersen, who's now ready for the majors. He won't hit 40 home runs, but he won't give 20-30 runs away on defense, either. The Nats use some of Dunn's $12 million salary that's off the books to pay Dukes' raise, and to strengthen the team in other areas.

The Nationals win 84 games in 2011, and things are still looking up. Meanwhile, Strasburg goes 19-8 and helps the Red Sox win the World Series, but the Nats have no reason to regret the deal at all. They now have a solid core of talent under club control until the mid-2010s, and have three or four seasons to try to climb to the top.

Giving the little guy more options

I've read before that prospects are the new "currency" of baseball. There's a lot of truth in that statement. Productive young players who aren't yet eligible for free agency are extremely valuable. Even teams like the Dodgers and Red Sox jealously covet their sure-fire prospects and won't deal them except for a huge payoff. The Dodgers kept Russell Martin, Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier rather than deal them for veterans, and that's a big reason they have the best record in baseball now--and all three of them are still pretty cheap.

But the draft system now works against the small-market clubs. The top prospects in the draft demand multi-million dollar bonuses. In effect, teams are paying free-agent type cash up front for players who may not amount to anything.

Stephen Strasburg is billed as a 'can't miss' prospect, but so was Todd Van Poppel. Van Poppel may have played 11 years in the major leagues, but about nine of those were only because baseball people refused to believe that scouts could be THAT wrong. If the Nationals pay Stephen Strasburg $30 million and he turns out to be the next Todd Van Poppel, that's $30 million they can't afford to lose, and they'll be hamstrung for years.

On top of all that, small-market teams often pass up the best draft prospects, because they know they can't afford them. The big boys snap up the big names later on in the draft, and pay whatever it takes. Why not make them give up something for the privilege of doing so?

Pete Rose Can Be Reinstated, but He Can Never Get Back Respect

John Cate — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:59:15 -0400

I was 12 years old on September 11, 1985, when a 44-year-old veteran first baseman named Pete Rose seemingly did what would forever be his greatest claim to fame.

Rose singled to center field off San Diego Padres’ pitcher Eric Show for his 4,192nd career hit, surpassing the legendary Ty Cobb’s traditional career total of 4,191. Like most of America, I was tuned into the game that night. Later in the game, Rose tripled for hit No. 4,193, and he scored both runs in the Reds’ 2-0 victory.

A rookie pitcher named Tom Browning pitched into the ninth inning for his 16th win of the year, en route to a 20-win season.

Pete Rose, the player, was headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame as soon as he would be eligible. And it looked like he would be around the game for decades to come. In that 1985 season, Pete Rose, the manager, directed a young team to 89 wins and a solid second-place finish in the NL West. They’d won seven more games than they should have, and Browning, a pitcher that Rose pushed for promotion from the minors, looked like he would become a fine big-league starter for years to come.

It didn’t happen that way.

Rose proved to have some serious flaws as a manager; he worked his key pitchers too hard, and couldn’t develop a power pitcher. Like his mentor, Sparky Anderson, he had too much of a proclivity for off-speed artists like Browning. Power pitchers like Jose Rijo and Norm Charlton floundered under Rose, and others, like Mario Soto and Danny Jackson, hurt their arms.

The lack of quality pitching meant that fine young players like Eric Davis, Paul O'Neill, Barry Larkin, Rob Dibble and Browning never got out of second place under Rose. So, Rose wasn’t a great manager. Well, neither was Ty Cobb. He was still a fantastic player with a wonderful legacy.

And then we found out about the gambling.

Pete Rose, who personified so much of what made baseball a great game, had dishonored it with actions that brought the sport into disrepute. Rose, with an obvious gambling problem, dragged baseball through the mud for months during 1989. Finally realizing this was a battle he couldn’t win, he negotiated a lifetime ban (with the possibility of parole) that he thought would end in a few years.

A few days later, Bart Giamatti, the Commissioner that Rose was fighting, died of a heart attack. A lot of people blamed Rose for his death, believing that the stress of fighting the baseball icon pushed him over the edge. Many of those people are still in positions of power in baseball today.

The rules are clear on this subject.

If you bet on baseball, you’re suspended for a year. If you bet on your own team, you’re banned for life. In Rose’s case, I can see a case for lifting the banishment, and a case for not doing so. Both have plenty of merit.

I commented on Rose’s ban in another article on here a few weeks ago. This week, word leaked that Commissioner Bud Selig was considering finally letting Rose out of the baseball slammer. What follows is a summation of what I said two weeks ago, just in case it sounds familiar to some of you.

I don't believe Rose ever bet on the Reds to lose; if he had, I would say he shouldn't be allowed within 100 miles of Cooperstown or a major-league ballpark (I would also say that any bookie who took a bet from the Reds' manager on the Reds to lose needs a lobotomy, but I digress). I believe Rose when he said he expected to win every game he managed; he was that competitive.

The problem is that when you have a bet on a team to win, and you can actively influence the game's outcome, as Rose could, you're going to do whatever you can to win. How many times did Pete Rose overwork a pitcher, trying to make sure that he didn't lose his bet for that day? Rose did mishandle his pitching staff—I am old enough to remember this—and the Reds' pitchers used to come up with a lot of sore arms. While overworking your pitchers is a reason to fire a manager, it’s no reason to kick him out of baseball. But risking a pitcher's arm while managing to protect your bets, as I am convinced Rose did, is another story.

The impression I got in 1989 was that Giamatti wanted Rose to 'fess up to the betting and admit to a gambling problem, at which point he would seek help for his problem and be suspended for a few years. Instead, Rose made it a nasty court battle, lost it, and ended up with a worse deal than he could have gotten.

Pete Rose is where he is because of his own actions. If he'd admitted to the betting on baseball 10 or 15 years ago, maybe by now enough people would have forgiven and forgotten. Instead, he lied for 15 years.

I figure he's served 20 years of his life sentence, and he’s not the only person in this generation who has disgraced the game of baseball. Taking into account the cokeheads of the 1980s, the ‘roidoids of the past 15 years, and the assorted jerks du jour like Albert Belle and Darryl Strawberry, Rose is just another face in the gallery of rogues. In my book, he can come out of what he called a “prison without bars” and just be another disgraced former hero.

Rose is now 68 years old and I can't imagine anyone would ever let him manage again. He might not even live too much longer. I can’t see him doing any more damage, which is more than I can say for some of the steroid users who haven't been caught yet.

It’s time to let Pete Rose enter the Hall of Fame, let the Reds officially retire his number 14, and bring the soap opera to an end.

Randy Johnson is the Newest Member Of The 300 Club, But Not The Last

John Cate — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:05:45 -0400

On June 18, 1986, the California Angels’ Don Sutton became the last 300-game winner in the history of Major League Baseball when he threw a complete game three-hitter to beat the Texas Rangers, 5-1.

Or at least that’s what they said at the time…

Unfortunately, I don’t have the article anymore, but there was a piece that ran in Baseball Digest right about this time, in which the author claimed that Sutton would be the last pitcher to ever achieve this feat. Other articles appeared in print right after it happened, making similar statements.

Sutton was the last of five veteran pitchers, stars of the 1960s and 1970s, who reached 300 career victories in the mid-1980s. Others who did so were Gaylord Perry and Steve Carlton (1983), and Phil Niekro and Tom Seaver (1985).

In the article, the chances of several other pitchers in the 200-win range (at the time) were written off because they were all seen to be approaching retirement age.

For the most part, they were right. Tommy John and Bert Blyleven lasted longer than anyone could have imagined at the time, but stopped at 288 and 287 wins, respectively.

But they were wrong about one guy. A 39-year-old fireballer down in Houston, who had 241 wins going into ’86, managed to pitch eight more seasons and win 83 more games. In 1990, Nolan Ryan joined the 300-win club.

Again, articles were written that said Ryan was the “last of his kind.” The current generation of pitchers just didn’t have the dedication or motivation to stay in shape and train, because of today’s salaries.

We all knew that was true, right?

Time passed, and then Roger Clemens reached the 300-win mark in 2002. Maybe we can throw that one out, given what we know now, but how do you explain Greg Maddux two years later? Three years after Maddux reached 300 wins, his old Braves teammate Tom Glavine reached the magic number, too.

As soon as he did, it looked like every writer in America dusted off his or her Don Sutton and Nolan Ryan pieces, changed a few names here and there, and published them once again. Surely, Glavine had to be the last 300-game winner.

Now Randy Johnson just reached 300, and I've already seen a few articles on this very site either talking about how hard it is to win 300 games (no kidding!), so Johnson is surely going to be the last man to ever achieve the feat.

I wish like heck I had a time machine, so I could debunk these articles by showing people the ones on CC Sabathia's 300th career victory in 2020, or the ones on Roy Halladay and Roy Oswalt's 300th victories two years later, but I don't, so I'll just have to wait for the next "last 300-game winner ever" like everyone else, I guess.

The problem, of course, is people ignoring the perspective of history, and not realizing that certain changes in playing conditions do tend to even out. On top of that, there is the unavoidable fact that some players just surprise you.

I was writing a sports column for a newspaper on May 28, 2003, when I wrote off the 300-win hopes of a certain power pitcher who had just suffered a severe knee injury that required surgery. He was 39 years old and had 225 career wins at the time.

As you might have guessed, that pitcher's name was Randy Johnson.

The odds are strong that Johnson will be the last 300-game winner for a while. Jamie Moyer has 249 wins, but he's 46. Andy Pettite, 37, is next on the active list with 219 wins. Following him on the list are John Smoltz (210, 42), Tim Wakefield (184, 42) and Bartolo Colon (153, 36). And don't forget Pedro Martinez, with 214 wins at age 37, who is inactive right now but not retired.

There's something to note about this list, though. Glavine is 43, Johnson 45, Smoltz and Wakefield 42. Pitchers who just went off the winningest active pitchers list in the last two years include Maddux (42 at retirement), David Wells (44), Kenny Rogers (43), Mike Mussina (40) and Curt Schilling (41).

Of course, it's impossible to win 300 games now. Pitchers don't start enough games or pitch enough innings. But...

Thanks to modern training and the practice of limiting a starting pitcher’s workload, more and more pitchers are lasting deep into their 40s. It’s true that these practices limit a pitcher’s chance to win 20 or more games in a single season, but it helps them to last much, much longer.

In talking about Sandy Koufax in the “New Historical Baseball Abstract,” Bill James said this about the 1960’s Dodgers ace:

“Koufax…would have an entirely different career if he pitched today… In the modern world, the team would think 'We’ve got to protect Sandy at all costs.' He’d come out of the game after 6, 7 innings, they’d push his start back if his elbow swelled up, and he’d go on the DL when it really started to hurt. He’d wind up the year 16-5 rather than 26-7, but he’d pitch until he was 40, rather than being forced into retirement at 30.”

He’d also have won a lot more games than the 165 he’s shown with in the record books, just as Martinez, the Koufax of our generation, has been able to do.

I don’t know if baseball writers are just generally lacking in their knowledge of baseball history and the dynamics of modern pitching staffs, or if they just need some good copy and pen these articles once a decade. Either way, Randy Johnson's not about to become the last of his kind.

He's just the newest member of the club.

Strength of Schedule Matters in Baseball, Too

John Cate — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:34:31 -0400

It was during the 1990 Major League Baseball season that I gained a reputation among friends for my ability to predict the future. And all for what, at least to me, was just plain and simple logic.

A few days before the season got under way, I made a series of predictions as to how the season would turn out, including the final standings, league leaders in various categories, and who would win the major awards.

I did pretty well. I had three of the four divisional winners correct, missing only on the New York Mets, who would have won the NL East if they hadn't underperformed by eight wins relative to their Pythagorean W-L that season.

It didn't matter, because I correctly had the Cincinnati Reds, freed from Pete Rose's chronic mismanagement of his pitching staff, winning the pennant.

I predicted Rickey Henderson's MVP award, that Barry Bonds would have a breakout season, and that Cecil Fielder would, in his return from Japan, live up to the power potential he'd had for years.

All pretty good. But what everyone scoffed at was my predicted winner of the AL Cy Young Award: a 33-year-old righthander named Bob Welch, who entered the season with a career mark of 149-103, but had never won more than 17 games in a season.

Welch, who was set to open 1990 as the Oakland A's No. 3 starter, was best known for two things: that he struck out Reggie Jackson in a famous World Series confrontation as a rookie, and for overcoming a serious bout with alcoholism.

Why Welch? It seemed so obvious to me. He was a good pitcher, good enough to be the No. 1 starter on a lot of teams, pitching for the best team in baseball.

He would spend 1990 as a front-line pitcher facing other teams' third starters, who would not be as good as he was, with teams behind them not as good as Welch's. I figured he was going to pile up victories.

He ended up with as many wins as any pitcher in the last 40 years. And he won the Cy Young Award, simply because the voters couldn't get past that 27-6 record and realize that Welch was only the third-best pitcher on his own team that season.

My prediction should have not come to pass, but it did because no one took quality of opposition into account.

I thought about Welch and his 1990 season again last night, when the subject of Cleveland Indians pitcher Cliff Lee came up in an article and discussion about bad trades.

Lee was part of a "rent-a-player" deal for Bartolo Colon in 2002, years before he was an effective major league pitcher. Last year, Cliff Lee went 22-3 and won the AL Cy Young Award.

Lee also had more than his share of "Bob Welch luck," though. Pitching in a weak division, where 89 wins won the title, Lee dominated weak AL Central competition all season, and only faced the top teams in the AL East four times.

By contrast, runner-up Roy Halladay of Toronto pitched against the Red Sox, Rays and Yankees a whopping 16 times and also faced (and dominated) the hard-hitting Texas Rangers twice.

Lee got 6.13 runs per game support from his offense, Halladay, facing much tougher opposition, got just 4.72. Despite this, his numbers were nearly as good as Lee's.

This type of statistical overinflation is more common now, due to the unbalanced schedules. It even happens with entire teams.

Take last year's Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. The team with the most bloated name in baseball also had the game's most bloated record. Everyone probably knows by now that the Angels overperformed relative to their Pythagorean prediction by a whopping 12 games...going 100-62 when they should have been 88-74.

I'm willing to give Mike Scioscia, a heck of a manager, some of the credit for that. Scioscia, as Earl Weaver once did with his Orioles teams, has gotten the Angels to outperform their pythag almost every season he's been there.

But it didn't end there. A total of 36 of their 100 wins came against the hapless teams in their own division: the 100-loss Mariners, the fire-saling A's and the minor-league pitching staff of the Rangers.

The Angels played 57 of their 162 games against these opponents. Granted, they did perform well against a few good teams: 8-1 against the Red Sox and 3-0 against the World Champion Phillies, for example, but they should have, considering how much they got to rest up for the good teams.

Despite this, a lot of people predicted that the Angels would win the AL pennant, going strictly on their overall record, and not taking into account how it was achieved. You know what happened.

Given the same luxury as the Angels had all season, to set their rotation and focus entirely on a single opponent, the Red Sox easily beat them in the Division Series.

There are other examples. The Kansas City Royals of the late 1970s were that era's answer to the 2008 Angels: a good team running up big win totals in a bad division.

As hitters go, you had the example of the Colorado Rockies of the 1990s, a team in a normally weak division that had the added statistical boost of a tremendous hitters' park.

To this day, a lot of fans remember Dante Bichette and Vinny Castilla as great players, when they really weren't.

If some mid-major college basketball team starts the season 17-1, we don't rank them No. 1 in the nation based on their record. If Boise State goes 12-0 in a college football season, we don't put them in the national championship game.

If somebody hits .435 in the Mexican League, major league teams don't rush to sign them, offering million-dollar contracts.

Because while we all know that mid-major hoops team is good, and Boise State is tough, and that Mexican slugger probably does swing a good bat, their raw stats are misleading because their competition isn't very strong.

So why does this get overlooked so often at the major league level?

Ouch! The Most Painful College Football Upset Losses of the Last 50 Years

John Cate — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:15:28 -0500

On any given day…

Sometimes college football fans, especially those of powerhouse teams, dismiss those words. Yes, your favorite team’s coach may talk up a "guarantee game" opponent like they’re dangerous, but we all know Central Florida isn’t Florida, and Western Michigan isn’t Michigan, and Louisiana-Monroe isn’t LSU…well, just don’t tell that last one to Nick Saban.

Upsets in games like that happen every year. But usually, there are extenuating circumstances. ULM beat Alabama last year, but the Crimson Tide was in a transition year and trying to rebuild their program from the ground up.

Wyoming beat Tennessee this year, but that was the worst Tennessee team in 20 years, a few days removed from its coach’s resignation.

Appalachian State beat Michigan a year ago, but Michigan was overrated, and Appalachian fielded one of the best 1-AA/FCS teams of all time.

You might say those are all just excuses, but they’re at least legitimate. Have you ever been a fan of a team that lost a game that was such a mismatch, you wouldn’t believe your team had lost if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes? A game that made you want to demand seppuku from the coach?

The next time your team loses a bowl game to some team you’ve never heard of, or chokes in a national championship game, just remember it could be worse. You could have been a fan of one of these seven teams…and for those of you who were, at least the sun still came up on Sunday morning:

1961: OK, I admit this happened a dozen years before I was born, but it clearly cost a team a national championship. On the morning of November 18, 1961, the Texas Longhorns were 8-0 and ranked No. 1 in the nation, winning by an average score of 33-7. That afternoon, they clashed with a weak TCU team, 2-4-1 and having scored just 63 points all season.

Final score: TCU 6, Texas 0. The Horns came back strong, routing Texas A&M and then whipping No. 5 Ole Miss in the Cotton Bowl to finish 10-1. But Darrell Royal had to wait two more years for his first national championship.

1981: Some people say Bear Bryant is the greatest college football coach of all time. But on September 12, 1981, Bear probably didn’t think so himself. No. 2 ‘Bama came in 1-0, having blown out a good LSU team 24-7 in its opener, and was gunning for its third national title in four years. On that day, a Georgia Tech team that didn’t win another game all year beat the Tide 24-21 in Birmingham.

Alabama didn’t lose again in the regular season, and the loss probably cost it a shot at the national championship. Perhaps even worse, the Tech coach was Bill Curry. The upset stuck in the minds of some Alabama administrators so much that they hired Curry to coach the Tide in 1987. He won 26 games and an SEC title in three years, but was always a poor fit in Tuscaloosa.

Georgia Tech nearly made the list twice in this era. The year before, a Tech team nearly as bad (1-9-1) managed a 3-3 tie with Notre Dame when the Irish were ranked No. 1 in the country.

1984: If you ever want to see a South Carolina fan cringe, bring this one up. On November 17, 1984, the Gamecocks were 9-0 and, thanks to upsets earlier in the day, poised to become the No. 1-ranked team in the nation for the first time in school history. All they had to do was beat Navy, which was 3-5-1 and coming off a 29-0 loss to Syracuse.

The Middies stunned the nation with a 38-21 upset. South Carolina, which had already beaten Georgia, Notre Dame and Florida State that season and was seemingly on the verge of becoming a national power, never got there.

1985: Another side effect of Navy’s upset was that it helped Brigham Young win the 1984 national championship, one of the most controversial votes in college football history. The next fall, on October 26, 1985, the defending champs were 6-1 and ranked No. 7 in the nation, with their only loss coming by three points to eventual PAC-10 champ UCLA.

Quarterback Robbie Bosco was a leading candidate for the Heisman Trophy. But on that day, BYU lost 23-16 at Texas-El Paso, which was 0-6 coming in (coming off a 51-24 loss to Kent State) and would not win another game in 1985. Needless to say, Bosco didn’t win the Heisman, and BYU lost all credibility as a top-notch program for several years.

1992: No one seems to remember this one, or at least no one outside of Nebraska, where it still stings. The seventh-ranked Cornhuskers were 7-1 and headed to the Orange Bowl. Their only loss was in the second week of the regular season, when they fell 29-14 to defending national champion Washington in Seattle. A month later, on a roll, they routed No. 8 Colorado 52-7, and followed that up with a 49-7 plastering of Kansas.

Then came November 14, 1992, and a seemingly innocuous road trip to play a weak Iowa State team. How weak? Iowa State had lost by 17 points to Division 1-AA Northern Iowa earlier that season. The Cyclones won, 19-10—proof that Tom Osborne, like Bear Bryant, could have a really bad day at the office.

1996: The Rocky Top Flop. The Memphis Tigers of 1996 had one of the nation’s best pass defenses. The Tennessee Vols had one of the nation’s worst rushing attacks. When they clashed on November 9, 1996, the Vols were 6-1, ranked No. 6 and ticketed for a slot in the Bowl Coalition. Memphis was 3-6, with an offense so bad they couldn’t beat the likes of Louisiana-Lafayette.

But the Vols came out flatter than an empty pita, Memphis generated some points with a kickoff return for a touchdown, and even Peyton Manning couldn’t save the day. Memphis won 21-17 and Manning had to settle for his second straight trip to the Citrus Bowl.

Three years later, the Tigers almost did it again, but Tennessee won 17-16 on a last-gasp touchdown pass.

2007: No, it’s not the one you’re probably thinking of. Appalachian State beating Michigan was significant in a historical sense, but the Mountaineers were by no means a bad team. Put the ’07 Appalachian team in a lower-tier FBS conference and they would have won it.

No, the real stunner of the 2007 season came about six weeks later, on October 6, 2007. That evening, No. 2 USC was 4-0 and playing host to Pac-10 rival Stanford, losers of three of its first four games. The Cardinal’s lone victory was over San Jose State, and they had lost to three conference rivals by an average of 30 points.

But on this day, none of that mattered. The Trojans led by nine going to the fourth quarter, but Stanford scored 17 points down the stretch, driving for the winning score with just 49 seconds remaining. The Cardinal’s 24-23 win snapped a 35-game home winning streak for USC, which went on to finish 11-2 and ranked No. 3 in the country; the loss may well have cost the Trojans the national championship.

Meanwhile, Stanford won just two more games before the season ended, and wound up 4-8 for the year, the school’s sixth straight losing season.