Listening to handicapping professionals, and even the guys on ESPN’s “College GameDay,” you hear the term “revenge game” thrown around a lot, as if playing a team you lost to the previous season — or even earlier in the current season — is an automatic motivator.
Revenge will certainly be in focus this week as Alabama takes on Texas A&M. While the revenge angle might be somewhat valuable, and coaches surely play it up when given the chance, I can tell you in my 20+ years handicapping college football, there’s very little I’ve found in terms of reliable angles involving revenge. That said, the last time I did a deep dive on the topic was about three years ago, and as always, things can and do change. With conference play starting in earnest last week, I figured this was a good time to go back through the database and study revenge.
I wanted to study only recent losses, as I think the motivation for avenging a defeat dissipates over time. Therefore, the only games I’m counting as “revenge games” in this report are when a team lost to an opponent in the previous season, or in some instances earlier that season (think conference championship games or College Football Playoff games). Anything beyond that means nothing in this study.
With that in mind, I prepared my database to look at all of the FBS revenge games over the last six-plus seasons (since the start of the 2016 season). I figured this would give us a large enough sample size, even for teams that lose only a game or two per season. My database sample size ended up being 2,894 games.