We get our share of bad matchups during a given college football season. It doesn’t get much worse than this year’s 0-5 UConn team, at lowly 1-3 Vanderbilt.
The Commodores have been in the SEC basement for a while. The team is under a first-year head coach in Clark Lea, and they look every bit like a team rebuilding under a new system. At least they have a win though, rebounding from an embarrassing Week 1 loss to East Tennessee State by beating Colorado State 24-21. Last weekend, they fell 62-0 to Georgia, giving up 35 points in the first quarter.
And then there’s UConn. The Huskies played a Week Zero game, losing to Fresno State 45-0. The next week, they fell to FCS squad Holy Cross 38-28. Randy Edsall announced his end-of-year retirement after that game, and then was shown the door immediately. After losses of 49-0 and 52-21 to Purdue and Army, they did give a pretty decent Wyoming team a run, falling just 24-22. That’s legitimate improvement.
Vanderbilt isn’t a week-in, week-out draw like its SEC counterparts. That is certainly the case with one of college football’s worst teams coming to Nashville. Right now, if you’re in the area, the get-in price is well below $10 on the secondary market.
As Sports Illustrated‘s Richard Johnson points out, it actually costs more in fees to see the Commodores and Huskies than it does to buy tickets themselves.
That’s a stiff, stiff price for a game this bad. The game has caught the imagination of some parts of the college football world, but again, it’s for all the wrong reasons.
Those tuning into this game on ESPNU at 7:30 p.m. ET, over games like Penn State-Indiana, Clemson-Boston College, and Mississippi State/Texas A&M and Baylor/Oklahoma State in the 7 p.m. hour: we salute you.