Key Numbers for College Football Totals

I’ve gone over college football key numbers against the spread before, but I also wanted to take a look at key numbers for college football totals. The table below shows total scores for 21,630 college football games. The “Total” is simply the actual final combined score of the game. “#” represents the number of times each total has landed on that number and the “%” is the percent of the 21,630 that the number has hit.

The biggest thing that jumps out about this to me is that there is not a clear number that really hits more than the others. Anything with a 2.5% to 3% hit rate would be considered high in comparison to everything else, but there are nine numbers that fall into that category. 45 is just barely the most common number (think 24-21 and 28-17 final scores), and it hits at about the same rate as it does in the NFL, but, again, it’s that far ahead of the other numbers, where 37 is by far the most common in the NFL. The college football total numbers a less predictable than the NFL because the games on a whole are less predictable. More oddball plays happen in college football (like safeties and blocked/missed extra points), so it is simply not going to be as consistent.

I found a couple of interesting outliers when I was sifting through all of this data. For example, there is actually one game on the books that ended at 0-0, back in 1983. Here’s the Wikipedia entry about the game:

Played during a rainstorm and pitting two mediocre squads against each other, the game ended in a scoreless tie.

There is actually a tie for the highest scoring game in college football history (we are talking modern era here, not Georgia Tech 222, Cumberland 0). Strangely enough, both games happened in the same year, only about a month apart:

10/14/2007 – Boise State 69, Nevada 67 (136 total points)
11/10/2007 – Navy 74, North Texas 62 (136 total points)

Now here’s the full list of key numbers for totals…