Unlike college basketball, it’s often been said that college football is not a sport built for Cinderellas. While that statement has plenty of truth, our perspective skews that truth.
When discussing Cinderellas in college basketball, we cite teams that make surprising postseason runs, possibly knocking off a couple blue blood programs along the way. College football doesn’t have the postseason structure to support such a run, nor is the sport itself as open to outliers due to how the game is designed.
But there are Cinderellas in college football. The difference is that they’re found in the regular season.
A team expected to win only six games surprises everybody with a 10-win campaign, perhaps even reaching its conference championship game. Sometimes, it even wins that championship. But like nearly all Cinderella stories, the clock eventually strikes midnight.
Every season, we see a prior year’s Cinderella become this year’s disappointment. Then a new Cinderella pops up, and the process begins anew. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the cycle of life in college football.
Let’s figure out which Power Five programs experienced such success in 2021 that will be difficult to maintain in 2022.
Full disclosure: I had a few programs in mind when I first conceptualized this subject. Kentucky wasn’t one of them. I admire the program coach Mark Stoops has built in Lexington and do not think its recent success is a fluke. While that’s still the case, there were plenty of aspects to the 2022 season that will be hard to repeat.
Good teams find ways to win close games, and Kentucky has gone 16-8 in one-score games since 2017. But they exceeded even their own pace last year. After going 11-7 in such games from 2017-20, the Wildcats were 5-1 last year. That includes a 3-0 mark in the SEC with two of those wins against teams they’ll face on the road this year in Florida and Missouri. Their lone…
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