College Football -- Most Recent Scoreless Season?

[Zeldar]

If I'm reading the data at College Football Data Warehouse correctly and if this info is accurate:

    Season  School            WLT   PF    PA
     1923   Kansas City U KS  0-6    0   532
     1950   St. Paul's        0-8    0   411
     1922   Arkansas State    0-7    0   401
     1919   Baldwin-Wallace   0-8    0   360
     1941   Arkansas State    0-7    0   308
     1944   CC of New York    0-7    0   303
     1949   St. Paul's        0-7    0   289
     1923   St. Francis PA    0-6    0   281
     1917   Toledo            0-3    0   262
     1920   Marshall          0-8    0   249

     *65 Times a school failed to score a point during the season.

then there must be at least another 55 instances (seasons) where some college football team made it through an entire season without scoring the first point.

I have been unable to locate another reference source for scoreless seasons.

Any help?

[aktep]

You may have to plod through each season in CFBDW individually to find them. I imagine most of them will be late 1800s early 1900s, and have only 1 or 2 or 3 games.

[Zeldar]

Originally Posted by aktep

You may have to plod through each season in CFBDW individually to find them. I imagine most of them will be late 1800s early 1900s, and have only 1 or 2 or 3 games.

You could be right. I did use the season breakdowns of several of the teams in the list above to be sure I read the chart correctly. The 8-game seasons in that list, plus the latest year of 1950, make what you're suggesting quite likely. But that little teaser at the end of the list ("*65 Times a school failed to score a point during the season.") suggests that somebody ought to have a definitive listing somewhere, even if it didn't get posted online.

[Yorikke]

I'm trying without success to get point totals from Prairie View's 80-game losing streak in the 1990s.. I doubt if they went a season without scoring, but one never knows...

Joe

edit - looks like not - this is from ESPN.com "

"Their worst year might have been 1991 -- they scored only 48 points all season, while giving up an average of 56 a game."

Joe

[Zeldar]

Originally Posted by wheresgeorge04

I'm trying without success to get point totals from Prairie View's 80-game losing streak in the 1990s.. I doubt if they went a season without scoring, but one never knows...

Joe

edit - looks like not - this is from ESPN.com "

"Their worst year might have been 1991 -- they scored only 48 points all season, while giving up an average of 56 a game."

Joe

If you haven't already located the pages starting with this one then these can give you the scores you mentioned. I had asked my brother in email if he had any good guesses about scoreless seasons and he surmised it must have included Prairie View or Columbia (whose pages start here) but I have yet to go through all their pages (either school) looking for the scoreless years.

I keep holding out hope that some industrious individual has already invested that time for me so all I have to do is look and laugh.

However, if anybody has some educated guesses as to which schools must include the "65 Times a school failed to score a point during the season" I'd like to know about them. And I'm mainly curious about how recently such a season has happened. I'm sure some high school and prep school programs must be on the list, but I'm hoping that 65 is primarily college level, even though the way that's stated, there's no strong evidence to support my hope that it's college numbers.

[Zeldar]

I must have overlooked them before now, but pages like this one will help to locate the suspect years for the suspect teams. Now it'll just be a matter of doing the searching.

If anybody has an even quicker method or better data source, I'd love to know about it.

And again, if anybody wants to take a stab at the likeliest schools to have the distinction of going an entire season without scoring a single point, I'd like to hear it.

[Ferd Burfel]

I think it may be a poorly worded statement. The sum of the losses in that list is 67. I suspect that author of that list was trying to say: "Here's a list of College Football teams so hapless that not only did not win a single game, but also failed to score a single point in 65 [actually 67] attempts [games]."

[Zeldar]

Originally Posted by Ferd Burfel

I think it may be a poorly worded statement. The sum of the losses in that list is 67. I suspect that author of that list was trying to say: "Here's a list of College Football teams so hapless that not only did not win a single game, but also failed to score a single point in 65 [actually 67] attempts [games]."

I had the same thought and counted those games to see if that might be the case. But since my latest post I have decided to go through some of those Yearly Totals at College Football Data Warehouse to do some random checking on likely teams. I guess I have checked over 30 by now and have located 26 seasons for 17 teams where no score is listed. Granted, some of them are 1-game "seasons" and most of them are in the old days (1875-1941 is my current range) as was suggested above by aktep. But in addition to those 10 seasons listed in the OP, these greater-than-1-game seasons can also be counted:

Columbia 1879 0-3-2
Arkansas St 1923 0-6-1
Tulane 1899 0-6-1
Tulane 1906 0-4-1
Mississippi St 1895 0-2-0
Mississippi St 1896 0-4-0
Southern Cal 1896 0-3-0
MTSU 1911 0-2-0
Cincinnati 1917 0-6-0

Please note that I have limited my searching to the Division I-A section, as these are the only teams I'm really curious about. Adding other divisions, along with high and prep school records, would surely increase the numbers. But I'm mainly interested in the BCS group -- and just for trivia's sake.

[fiddlesticks]

I can add at least one other team. The 1889 Wisconsin Badgers went 0 for the season (of just two games) in the program's first year. They lost 27-0 and 4-0. They made up for the lousy start by beating their first opponent in 1890 106-0, which remains the team record for points and margin of victory.

[Zeldar]

Originally Posted by fiddlesticks

I can add at least one other team. The 1889 Wisconsin Badgers went 0 for the season (of just two games) in the program's first year. They lost 27-0 and 4-0. They made up for the lousy start by beating their first opponent in 1890 106-0, which remains the team record for points and margin of victory.

Quite impressive. Sounds about like the 1916 Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech football game.

[Zeldar]

Okay, I have been through the College Football Data Warehouse pages for the I-A teams looking for 0-points-for instances and have managed to count 86 "seasons" (including the 1-game years) where the team had no score.

The most recent such season is the 1941 Arkansas State 0-7-0 year.

Not counting the 1-game years, there are 42 seasons of scoreless play.

The team with the most such seasons is Kent State, with:

1921 0-2-1
1922 0-7-0
1924 0-4-0
1932 0-5-2

Any other scoreless trivia that you want to add, please feel welcome.