With points piling up, days of running it up running out

With all the sturm und drang over Texas losing its win over Oklahoma (and the lesson that it teaches about never scheduling an important game early), something more telling has been overlooked.

The death of running up the score.

Eastern Michigan scored 56 and barely held on for a hair-pulling win. (AP)

This time-honored tradition, begun when Georgia Tech beat Cumberland College 222-0 more than 90 years ago, but failing to cover either the spread or the over-under number, now seems to be finished as a concept based on the 2008 season. The rules of engagement have changed so that a team actually cannot ever score enough points, because the other team is scoring, too.

There were 28 games this season in which one team scored 60 or more points (there might have been more, but we just watched Raiders-Chiefs and our vision is still a little blurry over the idea of a 260-pound kicker being asked to run for a first down on a 4th-and-10), many of them involving either Oklahoma or Washington State.

But the kicker is not just that Oklahoma needed to hit 60 in each of its final four games to wipe out their loss to Texas in Week 7, but that so many other games this year were basically pinball at the bowling alley, and none more so than Eastern Michigan beating a vastly superior Central Michigan team 56-52 in regulation by completing 58 of 80 passes.

In fairness, it was Jeff Genyk's last game coaching EMU, so there was probably at least some element of oh-the-hell-with-it at play here. But the fact that nobody outside Ypsilanti seemed to notice is what is so striking, because under normal circumstances a game with 108 points, 1,171 yards and 118 pass attempts would catch someone's eye.

But not in the era of the spread offense, and now that Oklahoma has been rewarded for scoring like crazed wombats, the truth is that there is no place for "We've got enough, let's bring in the scout team" in college football any longer.

In the past three weeks alone, 18 games featured a team needing 40 points to win because the other team had at least 30. Oregon did this in each of its past two games, beating Arizona 55-45 and then archrival Oregon State 65-38 to steal the Rose Bowl from the stupefied Beavers.

This tells us that defensive coordinators are now either superfluous, bomb disposal experts or staff whipping boys until further notice. It surely tells us that public tastes have changed from those signs that have a D and then a picket fence, to a saloon door that swings in and out at whim. Twenty of the 120 Division 1A schools AVERAGED 35 points per game, and while we're not looking up how this compares to prior years because we don't want to, we know with utter certitude that's a ridiculously high figure because one of those 20 teams was Penn State.

Now we have no problem with this, because tastes and technologies change. Wayne Newton became Li'l Wayne, and no, that has nothing to do with anything, and actually we're sorry we brought it up.

But we just try to understand what we're looking at at any given time, and what we are looking at now is a college football landscape played under the old ABA rules, in which the first team to 140 wins -– most of the time.

It's telling that the most public firing of the year was Auburn canning offensive coordinator Tony Franklin in midseason, presumably because the Tigers were being outscored by Alabama by 178 points, or essentially the entire Mississippi State offensive output for the year. His eventual replacement will probably be the guy at Piedmont High School in Oakland, who has either created a new offense or modified an old one in which the only ineligible receiver on any given play is the center.

So how then, given all this, having seen both the rewards for and the punishment for failing to pile up points like canned food during a nuclear threat, can you possibly run up a score any longer? Never in the history of the sport have points come cheaper and been needed in bulk more.

So as we head for next season (hey, only 270 days, give or take, before the first game), keep in mind that if your team doesn't have six touchdowns, they're not trying and you should demand to know why. Never mind the goal-line stand or the blocked field goal or having the other team backed up against their end zone any more. Those are passé concepts, and ones that only get folks fired if not accompanied by a geeked-up caffeine freak offensive madman with the sleeping habits of a vampire bat drawing up tackle-eligible hook-and-ladders absentmindedly on the foreheads of his children.

Ask Bob Stoops if we're wrong. Or Mike Leach. Or best of all, ask Joe Paterno. Joe Paterno, for God's sake. What more proof do you people need?

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.