Twice this year we've seen the record broken for the biggest upset—measured against the spread—in college football history. And neither game was the Michigan-Appalachian State game.
The first was Louisville's home loss to Syracuse on September 22; the second, even bigger upset, was Stanford's 24-23 win at Southern Cal last night.
Before this year, here is an approximate list of the 10 biggest favorites, according to oddsmakers, who ended up losing (source: The Gold Sheet via The Street.com):
1985: Oregon State (plus 36) over Washington, 21-20, at Washington
1985: Texas-El Paso (plus 36) over Brigham Young, 23-16, at El Paso
1998: Temple (plus 35 1/2 ) over Virginia Tech, 28-24, at Virginia Tech
1972: Missouri (plus 35) over Notre Dame, 30-26, at Notre Dame
2000: Central Michigan (plus 34 1/2) over Western Michigan at Central
1974: Purdue (plus 34) over Notre Dame, 31-20, at Notre Dame
1982: Northwestern (plus 32) over Minnesota, 31-21, at Northwestern
1997: North Texas (plus 32) over Texas Tech, 30-27, at Texas Tech
1999: North Texas (plus 31 1/2) over Texas Tech, 21-14, at Texas Tech
1991: Cincinnati (plus 31) over Louisville, 30-7, at Louisville
This list only contains results back to the 1970s and the link is from 2000, so there might be upsets before then or from 2001-2006 that would make the list, but the top few results probably stand, at least for the modern era. Another source lists the 1942 Holy Cross upset of Boston College as a 29 point spread, and it's hard to imagine a line that would have been higher than that one in that era. So it's probably safe to say that the top few results are the biggest spread upsets in history…until this year.
Louisville was a 37.5 point favorite at game time, and Southern Cal was an amazing 39 point favorite. The former line I can understand as Syracuse showed no offensive ability in its first several games. The latter I felt was inflated and reflected the crass USC-worship that infected many sportswriters (as well as Stanford's head coach, Jim Harbaugh, who called this year's Trojans "the best college football team of all time") over the last few weeks.
Michigan and Appalachian State game didn't have an official line, but this guy says it was a 22 or 23 point (perhaps unofficial) line, which seems reasonable given that Appalachian State was the Div I-AA champion the last two years.
You can argue that the Appalachian State game was a more "significant" or "important" upset, I suppose, but that would be using different criteria, and then we'd have to open up the entire history of the game, with lack of documented lines and hindsight coming into play. In any case, these three games (plus the general action of the last couple of weeks) mean that 2007 deserves to go down as "the Year of the Upset" in college football history.
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