Bottom 10
Encyclopedia
College football
College football refers to American football played by teams of student athletes fielded by American universities, colleges, and military academies, or Canadian football played by teams of student athletes fielded by Canadian universities...
teams in the NCAA
National Collegiate Athletic Association
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a semi-voluntary association of 1,281 institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States...
Division I FBS. ESPN.con writer Mark Schlabach
Mark Schlabach
Mark Schlabach is an author and columnist for ESPN.com. Schlabach joined ESPN.com in July 2006 as a college football and college basketball columnist. He is notable during college football season for the weekly "Bottom 10" article....
writes the column each week and is the sole determiner of the teams which are listed.
One of the running gag
Running gag
A running gag, or running joke, is a literary device that takes the form of an amusing joke or a comical reference and appears repeatedly throughout a work of literature or other form of storytelling....
s of the Bottom 10 is the "highly coveted Number 5 spot". This spot is reserved for "the top BCS blunder of the week" – a normally strong football team which found itself on the wrong end of an upset the prior week; an example would be the September 7, 2011 Bottom 10, which featured Oregon State
Oregon State Beavers football
The Oregon State Beavers football team represents Oregon State University in NCAA Division I-A college football. The team first fielded an organized football team in 1893 and is currently a member of the Pacific-12 Conference. The head coach is Mike Riley, with Danny Langsdorf as the offensive...
at the #5 ranking after its upset loss to Sacramento State, a Division I FCS program that had previously never beaten an FBS team in its history.
Another notable running gag is that the rankings sometimes include, not teams, but other items associated with the team; the September 7 Bottom 10 (referenced above) included such items as "bad weather" (a reference to three games, including the South Florida upset of Notre Dame, being delayed or prematurely shortened by severe weather) and "TCU's defense" (a reference to TCU, ranked #14 in the AP poll, giving up 50 points in its loss to unranked Baylor).
The Bottom 10 in popular culture
The Bottom 10 rankings are occasionally referenced by other sporstwriters when writing editorials about teams that the writers consider to be poor performers. One example of this can be found in the Stanford Review: "StanfordStanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
has consistently maintained the #2 spot on the ESPN “Bottom 10” rankings, only losing, or winning depending on your perspective, to equally hapless Duke
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
."
Original idea
The Chicago TribuneChicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
credits the idea to Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
sportswriter Steve Harvey approximately 30 years before ESPN began using the term. ESPN now publishes the rankings "With apologies to Steve Harvey." In 2008, Harvey resumed his "Bottom 10" columns for college and NFL football in the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
.
Other Bottom Tens
Gaylon Kent also writes a Bottom Ten. It moves Monday and Tuesday at www.thebottomten.com. In addition to the Bottom Ten championship, Mr. Kent also awards the following prizes:The Tosititos Plaque: Issued to the team with the longest losing streak in a season that actually includes a win.
The Sgt. Bilko Trophy: Usually issued the Bottom Ten's service academy champion, though it was won by Notre Dame in 2007, after losses to both Air Force and Navy.
The Continental Cup: Given to the team with the longest all-division losing streak in the NAFTA sphere of influence.