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Athletics and Structure: On Organizational Determinants of College Football Performance

Whereas college football activity is ordinarily perceived atomistically as an encounter between teams, this paper is an exploration in explaining athletic per formance on the basis of relative university-level and past performance character istics of home and visitor teams. The university-level characteristics are under graduate enrollment, university prestige, and focus on athletics. The ratios of organizational characteristics and aggregated score differences for the previous five years (1973—1977) for home and visitor football teams are used to account for differences in scores in the 1978 season of the Southeastern Conference. There are two goals of the paper. The first is explanatory. The organizational and per formance variables accounted for 58 percent of the variation in the scores of the season. The results of any game are thus largely predetermined by organizational and past performance conditions of the game. The second part of the paper considers the implications of the prediction equation derived in the first part of the paper. The first use of the prediction equation is to derive a prognosis of the season's performance. An average of 75—80 percent of the games were predict ed accurately. However, a more important use of the prediction equation is in the assessment of performance. It is proposed that a more just assessment of performance is made if the predisposing conditions are taken into consideration in determining winners through the examination of the residuals (i.e., the dif ferences between the actual and expected score differences). The paper concludes with the proposal that handicapping appears justified in college football.