Looking back on Kent State, college football's anti-champions

The state of Ohio produced the best and the worst teams in college football. It's increasingly hard to pretend they're playing the same sport.

How far is the difference between first and last place? Apparently, 130 miles.

Ohio State won college football’s national championship last week. Kent State, about two hours down I-71, sealed the sport’s anti-championship back in November. They completed the first 0-12 season in college football since 2019. They posted the worst stats in the sport¹ by a stunningly wide margin, and are on the short list of the worst teams in recent college football memory.

Ohio State was able to pay Chip Kelly $2 million to be their offensive coordinator this year, and Kelly was cited as a huge factor in their run to the championship. Kent State’s last head coach, Sean Lewis, brought the Golden Flashes to the MAC championship game, but left in 2022 for a pay raise because Colorado offered him $850,000 to be their OC. The Golden Flashes’ current head coach, Kenni Burns, was sued by a local bank this season over unpaid credit card debt. So that pretty much sums up the whole thing right there.

Prior to the title game, I wrote about how Ohio State should feel like they got a great deal in paying a mere $20 million for a roster good enough to dominate the national championship.

I can imagine a Kent State athletic administrator looking at that article as if it were written in Sanskrit. If I asked the school’s AD “why didn’t you simply raise $20 million in NIL funds” they would probably start angrily hurling paperweights and staplers at me before progressing to technology and then furniture.

And as strange as it is, watching Ohio State win the national title made me think about Kent State. The two schools are part of the same state university system, but they might as well be on different planets. The idea that they’re a part of the same competition is worth some rethinking.

Kent State was about as bad as a college football team can get.

I’m going to start out by just saying every good Kent State football thing I can before we get into the ugly stuff: Young Nick Saban! James Harrison! Julian Edelman! Josh Cribbs! Ooh, remember Dri Archer? We’re counting Antonio Gates even though he was on the basketball team!

Okay. Now a rundown of the 2024 Flashes. It’s bad.

• They went 0-12. That’s zero wins and 12 losses. According to advanced analytical data and algorithms, and that’s the worst possible record a team can have in a 12-game season.

• The Golden Flashes managed to finish dead last in scoring offense (13.9 points per game)² and dead last in scoring defense (44.1 points allowed per game.) They’re the first team to pull the Dead Last Double since Temple in 2005³—a team that was kicked out of the Big East for being too bad at football. Kent State’s point differential of -362 is the 13th-worst in college football history, which goes back a long, long time.

• Kent State went 1-11 in 2023, but managed to do the bare minimum by beating Central Connecticut, an FCS opponent. This year, they actually lost their annual game against an FCS opponent, falling 23-17 to St. Francis⁴, which went 2-5 in the Northeast conference, including shutout losses to Wagner and Robert Morris.

• Bill Connelly’s SP+ had Kent State last in the country, obviously. He projects Ohio State as 64-point favorites over Kent State, but that feels like an undercount considering Tennessee led Kent State 65-0 at halftime and Ohio State comfortably beat Tennessee. It’s shocking how much worse the Flashes were than the next-worst teams. Connelly’s ratings project the Flashes as 7-point underdogs against the team ranked 133rd out of 134, Southern Miss.

• For fun, Connelly also produces a 764-plus team ranking featuring every team in every division of college football. (Yes, this is what nerds do for fun.)

  Kent State ranked 227th. That’s lower than 79 FCS teams, making them below average among teams in college football’s second tier. They’re also ranked below 14 Division II teams. So they likely would have been good enough to make the 28-team DII playoffs, but probably wouldn’t have been in serious contention for the championship. They are slightly closer in the rankings to the best Division III team, ranked 267th, than the second-worst FBS team, ranked 185th.

• The Golden Flashes were the first 0-12 team since 2019⁵. The last team to go 0-12 was Kent State’s big rival, Akron, just about 10 miles away. If you’re wondering why both Northeast Ohio programs struggle so much, it’s because the Cleveland Browns are contagious.

• This is Kent State’s fifth winless season all-time… which means they’re almost caught up with Kansas State (7) and Northwestern (6.) Go Cats!

• You might think that the school would fire Burns after going 1-23 in his first two years and essentially dropping the team to Division II quality. Not only have they not fired Burns, the school actually gave him an extension after his initial 1-11 season. He actually had leverage despite the record, because nobody else would take this job. Consider the extension a form of hazard pay for wrecking his reputation by coaching a team this bad.

Being broke in college football has compounding effects.

It’s expensive to be poor. You take backbreaking jobs and eat whatever food you can afford, and that leaves you with aching joints and high cholesterol, and those require doctor visits, but your insurance doesn’t cover the care you need, and if you don’t have enough money to pay your bills you have to start paying interest, which means you’re paying extra money for not having money. Sometimes, the bank even charges you for not having any money in your account. Wait a second, I was supposed to be talking about college football.

Smaller schools will regularly take big paychecks to play road games at bigger schools. Kent State has pushed this strategy to the extreme. In 2024, they played three buy games to make ends meet, generating about $4 million, roughly 13 percent of the total athletic revenue of a program which pulls in about $30 million in total athletic revenue per year. They’ll do it again in 2025, playing back-to-back-to-back games at Texas Tech, Florida State, and Oklahoma.

Playing those games wrecked their season. Two of their opponents, Tennessee and Penn State, went to the College Football Playoff and beat Kent State by a combined score of 127 to zero. In the 71-0 loss to Tennessee, Burns made headlines for declining the option to shorten the game—a foolhardy decision to instill pride in his team by telling them to never quit. They could’ve used the break. A week after that, Kent State lost 56-0 to Penn State, losing their starting quarterback and their backup QB to season-ending injuries before halftime. We can’t 100 percent say that playing back-to-back road games against two of the strongest teams in the country caused those injuries, but it surely didn’t help, and it doomed the rest of their season. Most college football teams would struggle to recover from losing two quarterbacks in a span of minutes, and Kent State was already worse than most teams.

Kent State got paid, but was the physical and mental toll of their brutal schedule worth it? What message does it send when a school sells 25 percent of their schedule? What sort of chance does a team have in the rest of the season after sending their players to get beaten up week after week by teams from a different weight class? Why would fans or players care about a team willing to accept losses for cash?

There are more examples of short-term cash hurting in the long run. Kent State plays in the MAC, the conference which became national darlings for playing games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights in November. The idea is the conference gets better deals because they provide TV networks with live college football to air on nights when they wouldn’t have any other games. The downside is they have to play on Tuesday nights in November in Ohio, when it’s 22 degrees and cold and you have to go to work the next day. They traded fans in the stands for TV money. And it’s not like the TV money is great—Northern Illinois just got a better deal by leaving the MAC to go to the Mountain West.

Here’s a picture of the crowd at the 2023 matchup between Akron-Kent State. (And yes, this is a subtle flex reminding you that I got to fly in the Goodyear Blimp last year. One of the blimp pilots was a Kent State alum—they have a strong commercial aviation program!)

The MAC’s TV payouts are bigger because they play on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But how much money are they losing from playing a month of games in front of nobody?

It feels Sisyphean. Kent State takes these measures to generate money because they need money to compete. But they can’t compete because they don’t have enough money, and their attempts to generate money can actually hurt their team, metaphorically and literally, which makes it harder to generate money, which makes it harder to compete. It’s a Kent-22.

It might be time to ask: what are we trying to accomplish here?

I watched Kent State’s final game this year out of morbid curiosity. In the second half of a 43-7 loss to Buffalo, QB Tommy Ulatowski—who honestly filled in admirably after the two aforementioned QB injuries made him Kent State’s starter—suffered one of those really bad-looking head injuries where his head bounced off the cold turf. Watching Kent State’s fourth-string QB play out the string on a winless season in a frigid, empty stadium after their third-string QB suffered a brutal injury with potential lifelong effects, I kept wondering: Who was this for? What was the point?

I feel like there are two potential theories of why colleges sponsor football teams. One is generating money for the university. But Kent State surely isn’t doing that. The program doesn’t make enough money to be competitive, let alone fund the school, even after taking ridiculous steps to make more money.

The other reason colleges have football teams is for the intangible benefits—boosting school spirit, attracting students, keeping alumni invested, and enhancing a school’s reputation. And it’s hard to do that when you’re going 0-12 in empty stadiums. Kent State’s students leave the school with no positive memories of attending Kent State games because they were all cold, empty losses, and then years down the line, when you ask them to donate, they probably don’t want to. Kids don’t grow up going to the games because they’re all school nights instead of weekends, and when it’s time to apply to schools, they go someplace else. Outsiders who tune into Kent State games see a team struggling financially and an administration making bad decisions.

I think attempting to compete at the top level of the sport hurts programs like Kent State. I don’t know what you get out of it besides saying “we’re technically a part of the same subdivision as Ohio State.” They’d be better off identifying what they’re actually trying to achieve from having a team and figuring out how to do that instead of putting themselves in a hole trying to reach things they’ll never grasp. Last year, I wrote that schools like Kent State should consider creating their own playoff. I stand by that.

And besides, if their fans want to root for a top-tier team… well, Ohio State is only 130 miles away.

1. When I say “college football,” I’m talking about the top tier of the sport, the FBS. Kent State was better than Division III teams. But probably not by as much as you’d think.

2. Kent State did come very close to being second-to-last in scoring offense, but Houston nipped them at the finish line, finishing the season with 168 total points while Kent State had 167. It made sense in the context of the game, but I like to think Houston’s successful 2-point conversion on their final score of the season with eight minutes remaining in their game against BYU was made with the full knowledge that it would push them out of last here.

3. Some near Dead Last Double misses: 2014 SMU was 128th of 128 in offense and 127th in defense; 2011 New Mexico was 120th of 120 in offense and 119th in defense; 2008 Wazzu was 120th of 120 in offense and 119th in defense.

4. Kent State-SFU was a rare all-Flash matchup between the Golden Flashes and the Red Flash. I like to think athletic directors factor things like this into their scheduling.

5. There were a bunch of winless teams in 2020, but everybody was playing non-standard schedules that year, so it’s not an apt comparison.