A new stat by the Sickos Committee, the Second Half Ineptitude Tracker (S.H.I.T.)

Hello Commish here, 

While watching a ton of college football this year, I started to notice a large amount of teams being unable to score in the second half for whatever reason. Their offense goes awry, the other team’s defense made some adjustments and now they can’t move the ball, etc. The vast majority of the time this spells doom for the team who cannot manage to score in the second half. However, there were a few instances this year that caught my eye. There were a few instances where some teams managed to hang on to a win without scoring any points in the second half. I got really curious and wanted to figure out how many times this happened and then figure out how many times teams won. 

I decided to try to find this information myself. I went to CFBData.com and Sports Reference.com to pull this information. Well, I didn’t have any luck because like normal in the Sickos Committee, we’re asking questions that either no one cares about or no one has searched for previously. Most of the time it’s something no one cares about. 

I decided to reach out to our friends at Game on Paper to see if they could pull this data. We were in luck! They were able to generate a formula for us. We now have the capability to pull this data based on the historical score logs since 2014 and we can use this going forward in the future!  (Keep in mind, we may be off by a game or so. The data set from ESPN could be reading wrong or is just plain wrong, so it may not be perfect but really its close enough. Also we double checked this year so we believe it is fully correct!)

Presenting a new stat by the Sickos Committee, the Second Half Ineptitude Tracker aka S.H.I.T. 

As a fan, do you ever have the feeling your favorite team played like crap in the second half but somehow they managed to get the win? Basically, you’re wondering how they managed to win the game without really doing anything in the second half. You have this feeling of being extremely lucky to get the win but maybe still having a little sad feeling in the pit of your stomach you just can’t shake. It was just a S.H.I.T. win. Well, now we have a measurement and stat for it!

I feel like this is an incredibly Sickos stat we need to start tracking. Basically, your offense goes completely cold in the second half, your defense and special teams can’t generate any sort of points either but somehow you still manage to hang on to win the game. You basically didn’t do S.H.I.T. in the second half but still got the win! 

For the rest of the season, we will be tracking these games to find the special games where a team leads at halftime by however many points, doesn’t score anything in the second half.

Here’s the data since 2014 and the games through Week 8 of 2023.

Since 2014, we were able to find out there were 1,193 games where FBS teams didn’t score anything in the second half.

In 152 of those games the team who didn’t score in the second half still managed to win. Sure, there are various reasons this could occur but still this is a good amount of games this occurred.  

Basically, 12.7% of the time, the team who remained stuck on their point total at halftime still managed to hold on to win somehow…

Here is the full breakdown of the wins in 2023 and the team record in these S.H.I.T. games. 

We really don’t care if you’re undefeated in these games, we really just want to know how many times your team manages to do pull off this feat. Also, its even better to us when you win these games.

Here’s the list of FBS teams with wins this year while managing to not score in the second half of games and how many times a team pulled off a win in this situation.

Special shout-out to New Mexico and Rice. They both led at halftime, didn’t score anything in the second half but wound up in Overtime and then they both won the game in OT. Incredible. (Also Nevada should be in here at 1-0 with their 6-0 win against San Diego State).

Here is the list of teams who have had a S.H.I.T. second half and their winning percentages in 2023.

Here is the list of all FBS teams with and without wins. Also, how frequently they have a second half without scoring regardless if they won the game or not. (Sorry for the weird cut off in the graph, I needed to keep it readable for you)

We will keep this updated throughout the rest of the year! Thank you for reading!

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