Continuing with a series they’ve done for at least a couple years now, yesterday the Wall Street Journal published their annual College Football Grid of Shame. It’s behind a paywall, but one of my Facebook friends posted the image to his wall, so we’ve got the full image for you jamokes. Here’s a blown-up copy:

Wall Street Journal: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OL-AP010_SHAME_16U_20170831110047.jpg

In case you didn’t blow up the bottom-left corner to read the criteria, they were defined as:

Teams’ on-field rating is an average of the 2017 projected finish by two media outlets and two predictive models. Teams’ off-the-field rating is a somewhat subjective rating of elements including Academic Progress Rate, recent history of NCAA violations and probations, athletic department subsidies, player arrests, attendance at last season’s games, concussion lawsuits, and overall “ick” factor.

Thoughts:

1. These morons have clearly never been to wisconsin.
2. Northwestern being three units toward “Powerhouse” than Nebraska or Iowa is one of the funniest things I think I’ve read all off-season. Y’all are doing a great job not being embarrassments, though.
3. Speaking of embarrassments, good to see that at least some publications aren’t just forgiving Penn State their sins and moving on. That’s a pretty accurate assessment of the Nitty Kitties.
4. Doubly-speaking of embarrassments, rutger seems high on the Y-axis somehow. I don’t know why.
5. This was published before the Minnesota debacle last night, but...yeah, that’d work, I suppose. WSJ probably just hasn’t watched “Being PJ Fleck” yet. Maybe he’ll invite them to run out on the field with him at the next home game!
6. I dunno what about Illinois is admirable, but there you go. Being the business-minded publication that they are, though, not suprising to see the WSJ with some love for Purdue’s profit-minded leadership.
7. Fuck Notre Dame.