betting on football games

The 1985 Oregon State vs. Washington football game was a college football game between the Oregon State Beavers and the Washington Huskies that took place on October 19, 1985. The game featured the largest overcome point spread in college football history up to that time when the Huskies, after being favored by 38 points, lost the game 21-20 after the Beavers blocked a punt and recovered the ball in the end zone with 1:29 left to play in the fourth quarter. It is considered one of the greatest upsets in college football history.[1][2][3] On October 6, 2007, Stanford achieved the highest point spread upset in college football history when the 40 point underdog Cardinal defeated the No. 2 ranked USC Trojans, 24-23Prior to the game, the Beavers were coming off four straight losses including back to back blankings against USC and Washington State, where they allowed a total of 97 points. No team in Oregon State history had allowed that many points over back-to-back games. Prior to that, the Beavers lost to Division I-AA team Grambling State by a score of 23-6 and to Fresno State 33-24.[5] To make matters worse for Oregon State, starting quarterback Erik Wilhelm was out for the season, and Pac-10 Conference (Pac-10) leading receiver Reggie Bynum was also out due to injury.[1] Additionally, the Beavers had lost the last 10 games played against Washington.[6]
The Huskies, on the other hand, were coming off a four-game win streak and were leading the Pac-10.[1] After the betting odds came in to Las Vegas set at -38 for Washington, the Seattle media had a field day insulting the Beavers. One reporter went so far as to say that "Oregon State plays football pretty much the way Barney Fife played a deputy sheriff on Mayberry".[1] In a television interview, Huskies head coach Don James said he expected to give his reserve quarterback Chris Chandler a chance for some playing time.
Oregon State head coach Dave Kragthorpe used the media comments in his pregame speech to the Beavers in an effort to motivate them to prove critics wrong before they went out on the fieldWashington put the first points up on the board after a field goal put the Huskies up 3-0 in the first quarter. Oregon State backup quarterback Rich Gonzales, who had only taken 9 snaps prior to the game, responded by stunning the Huskies with a 43-yard touchdown pass to Darvin Malone on the following drive, giving the Beavers the lead. Washington responded with a 80-yard drive and a touchdown of their own, regaining the lead 10-7.[1]
On the next drive, Washington forced Oregon State into a 4th and 20 position on their own 28 yard line. A Husky rush forced the punter to attempt to run for the first down instead of punting the ball, being stopped 10 yards short, turning the ball over on downs to the Huskies on the Beavers' 38 yard line. Washington drove to the 8 yard line, but then threw an interception in the end zone to give possession back to the Beavers. Oregon State then capped off an 80-yard drive with a 20-yard scramble for a touchdown by Gonzales, regaining the lead for the Beavers 14-10 going into halftime.[1]
Washington again regained the lead in the third quarter, going up 17-14. With 1:32 left in the quarter, Washington had first and goal at the one yard line, twice trying to run the ball up the middle and failing to get the score, bringing up third down. On the following play, OSU linebacker Osia Lewis knocked out Washington running back Vance Weathersby with his tackle, causing a fumble that Oregon State recovered.[1]
With 7:59 remaining in the fourth quarter, Washington increased their lead to 6 points by making another field goal, putting the score at 14-20.
At 1:29 remaining in the game, Washington was forced to punt from right outside their own end zone. Oregon State's Andre Todd rushed the punter and managed to block the punt, sending the ball flying into Washington's end zone, nearly causing a safety. However, the bounce went Oregon State's way and ended up staying in the end zone, allowing the Beavers to recover it resulting in the touchdown. The extra point was good, giving the Beavers a 21-20 lead, which would prove to be enough for the win, resulting in the biggest overcome point spread in college football historyOregon State players celebrated, shouting "You can blame this one on your media" as they returned to the locker room.[1] The Seattle media ended up not showing up to ask questions for coach Kragthorpe after the game.[1]
Washington finished the Pac-10 season at 5-3. Eventual conference champion UCLA, whom Washington had previously defeated, went to the 1986 Rose Bowl with a conference record of 6-2. Washington would have won the tie-breaker and represented the Pac-10 in the Rose Bowl. Oregon State did not win any more games for the rest of the season and finished in 9th place in the Pac-10Football pools, often referred to as "the pools", are football betting pools based on predicting the outcome of top-level football (soccer) matches set to take place in the coming week.
Several different companies such as Littlewoods, Vernons, Zetters and Brittens have organised similar games, the most famous of which was historically known as Treble Chance. Competitors were given a list of football matches set to take place over the coming week, and attempted to pick a line of eight of them whose results would be worth most points by the scoring scheme, traditionally by crossing specific boxes on a printed coupon. A proportion of the players' combined entry fees was distributed among the competitors whose entries were worth the highest scores.
Entries were traditionally entered by post or via members of the public acting as Agents or Collectors. Collectors walked a route door to door, delivering forms and cash to a central office, taking a percentage usually 12.5% of the money as a fee. Legally they were agents of the entrants, not the pools company. There have been a few cases whereby a rogue Agent has fraudulently withheld players' stake money, even though one entrant had actually chosen a set of jackpot-winning fixtures. These days, Internet applications are also accepted.
Business for Collectors was drummed up by "canvassing", where a team of company agents knocked on doors in an area of a town or housing estate.
Scoring schemes varied over the years. The current Treble Chance games use a scoring scheme which awards three points to score draws (matches where both team scored the same, strictly positive, number of goals), two points to no-score draws (matches where neither team scored a goal) and one point to both home wins (matches where the home team scored more goals than the away team) and away wins (matches where the away team scored more goals than the home team). The most famous historical scoring scheme differentiated between home wins and away wins, awarding one and a half points for games resulting in away wins. A scoring scheme used for only one year split score draws into two categories, awarding three points only for matches ending 1-1 and two and a half points for higher-scoring score draws.
The total score of each line would be calculated, up to a maximum of 24 points. The highest scoring line achieved by any player in that particular week's competition would be declared to be worth the top dividend, with a large proportion of the prize pool awarded to the players responsible for submitting the highest-scoring lines. Large football pools would award second and subsequent dividends, splitting smaller proportions of the prize pool among players who had submitted lines scoring nearly as many points; at its peak, the Littlewoods Treble Chance game would offer up to six dividends.
During the summer, when football leagues were not in operation in the United Kingdom, competitions were based on the results of football matches taking place in Australia. Matches which were postponed would often have their results adjudicated, for the sake of the football pools results, by a board known as the Pools Panel; The Times reports that the Pools Panel was formed in 1963 when a particularly cold winter scrapped football for three weeks running. Panel members included retired footballers with international experience and retired referees.
Before their popularity dwindled, pools results were published in most national newspapers a day or two after the Saturday on which the matches were played. Grids marking the points totals per game were sometimes published, against which your pools coupon could be aligned to read off the scores.
The BBC television programme Grandstand used to broadcast the winning match numbers and any Pools Panel verdicts as part of its "Final Score" segment in the late afternoon. Remarkably, only two people have so far announced the classified football results on the programme since its inception in 1958 - Len Martin until his death in 1995 and, since then, Tim Gudgin. Pools news was also given out on the BBC radio programme Sports Report until May 2007.
With scores being read out on radio and television it was also common to relay the message "claims by telegram" for days when a few draws occurred (with correspondingly few winners), through "claims by registered mail only" for days when more winners were expected, to "no claims" when there were likely to be so many claimants that the mail would have been overwhelmed.
Typically a fraction of a penny would be charged for each line entered, though players often had the option to play each line at a higher stake and so receive a higher share of the pool should their line prove a winner. Accordingly, players would usually submit many different lines in a single entry. Popular ways to do this were "full perm" entries, where 10 (or 11, or more) matches were selected and every possible combination of eight matches selected from the ten (etc.) was entered as a single line. As there are C(10,8) = 45 ways to select eight matches from ten, the cost of such an entry was 45 times the cost of entering a single line. Note that the term "perm" was used despite the relevant mathematical operation being combination rather than permutation, as the order in which the eight matches were selected was irrelevant. The pools companies, many daily newspapers, and the sporting press also issued "plans", which were subsets of full perms: these enable the punter to cover more matches for the same stake, with the proviso that even if 8 draws were in the selections, they might not all be in a single line of the plan (but well designed plans could give a guarantee something like 'if the plan hits 8 draws it must win at least a 3rd dividend').
The largest prizes would be awarded when only one line was entered scoring the maximum number of points; typically this would occur when only eight or nine matches ended in score draws, so only one player would have the line scoring the maximum. These biggest jackpot prizes could be several hundred thousand pounds, sometimes even more than a million. Prizes depended on the number of players and the cost per line, which varied over the years; one winner, Viv Nicholson, gained notoriety by declaring she was going to "spend, spend, spend" after winning £ 152,319 in 1961. The story of her subsequent divorces, remarriages, extravagance and eventual bankruptcy was eventually made into a musical named after the famous quote.
At the other extreme, payouts of less than a pound were quite common in lower dividends when many entries won. Most "punters" could expect to receive at least one low payout if they played for long enough.