One of our photographers, Patrick Barron, has been trying to make fetch happen in our Slack for a little while now, except in this case "fetch" is actually a useful way of measure how grisly a blowout is. (Also we've discovered that SBN's Jason Kirk had the same idea a couple weeks before Patrick, so he's now Rutger Leibnitz.)

I mentioned it in the game column but here's a more complete introduction to…

The Rutger

A rutger is when you have fewer yards in some aspect of the game than your opponent has points. For example, the 2018 Michigan-Michigan State game saw Michigan (21 points) hand MSU (15 rushing yards) a rushing rugter, at least by NCAA stats.

A Total Rutger, where you have fewer yards than the opposition has points, is a rare event. Total rutger events in the past decade of college football, with FBS matchups bolded:

Michigan-Rutgers 2016, TCU-Kansas 2017, and Louisville-FIU 2013 were all Double Total Rutger events, which sit in a subclass of the rutger: the Rutgers. Nobody has achieved the Triple Rutger in recent CFB history.

Congratulations to Mississippi State, which is the only team to both rutger and be rutger'd, and the only team to get rutger'd in a rivalry game. FCS-level Savannah State is the most generous rutger provider in all the land.

Rushing rutgers, aided by NCAA sack accounting, are stunningly common: about 600 rushing rutgers over the past decade. There have been approximately 200 passing rutgers. With about 8000 games in the data set, any particular game has about a 10% chance to be a single-phase rutger.

[After THE JUMP: beyoooond the ruuuuuutger]

Beyond The Rutger

The Hoke. There is a level of statistical ineptitude even beyond The Rutger wherein you have more negative yards than the opponent has points, a special accomplishment indeed since the bar keeps getting raised the worse you are. This is only realistically possible in a single-phase rutger, and even then it's only because the NCAA counts sack yardage as rushing yardage. This is nonsense, of course, but that does not stop people from referencing historically grisly box scores that sport this nonsense. This is right and just and emphatically happened to Brady Hoke against Michigan State:

It is thus dubbed The Hoke. Hoke has the second-worst hoke of the last decade and is the only coach to manage it twice in a single season. The only other coach to show up twice is Mike Leach, who is doing it on purpose. 

The bolded games are, incredibly, wins for the team that suffered a hoke.

The Autorutger. Occurs when you have fewer yards than you have points and will never ever happen. The closest approach to a total autorutger was Missouri's 42-13 win over Florida in 2014. Mizzou gained just 119 yards and achieved a remarkable 0.35 autorutger. The next closest autorutger also involves Florida, but this time they're on the good end after a 44-11 win over South Carolina in 2012 in which they gained just 183 yards. Will Muschamp, man.

Individual phase autorutgers are common enough that they don't warrant too much attention, but the Div By Zero Autorutger is a special case. This occurs when a team has zero passing yards and still wins. It's a list populated by the usual suspects and Louisiana Lafayette, somehow.

This concludes your introduction to the rutger.