College football is an interesting beast with regards to trends. Each season seems to have some clear ones, and they can vary wildly from year to year.

One of my favorite trends in the early part of the season is this common narrative: A ranked team goes on the road, faces a team it is supposed to handle, struggles to execute, and eventually pulls out an ugly yet hard-fought victory.

Sound familiar?

It’s the exact narrative Clemson fans bemoaned after Thursday’s 20-17 win at Louisville. The Tigers were favored by a handful but never quite put together the kind of satisfactory performance many expected.

The solace for fans is that they aren’t alone. Many fan bases across the country are wiping their respective brows after seeing ranked teams eek out close wins when they went on the road for the first time.

Even within this broader trend, some other noteworthy mini-trends began to become apparent. Several of them can perhaps help shed some light on Clemson’s situation and inform Thursday’s result within the broader context of college football.

Over the first three weeks, 22 ranked teams have played on the road. Those teams are 16-6 overall—seemingly not abnormal—and 10-12 against the spread—again, not particularly noteworthy—in their respective first road games of the year. Of those six losses, four were to ranked teams (Oregon at Michigan State, Auburn at LSU, Georgia Tech at Notre Dame, and BYU at UCLA) and two were to currently ranked teams (Stanford at Northwestern, Boise State at BYU).

Ranked teams going on the road against unranked teams have gone 13-2 over the first three weeks of the season. This is what we expect, right?

Well, it’s not quite that simple. In those 15 games, however, the ranked road team went 6-9 against the spread against an unranked foe, meaning 60 percent of those games were closer than experts predicted. That group does not include Ohio State at Virginia Tech and Florida State at Boston College, two cases where quarterback injuries almost certainly led to covers.

There’s more to this story. Ranked teams that went on the road as favorites in their first true road games of this season are only 6-11 against the spread, and again, those six games include the aforementioned two contests. Those teams were 14-3 overall, but the margins of victory were decidedly closer than expected.

(Side note: Ranked underdogs were 3-2 overall and 4-1 against the spread, while ranked teams facing other ranked teams on the road were 3-4 overall and 4-3 against the spread. That’s crazy, especially considering the stats we just discussed concerning what should be easier games.)

The point is that Clemson’s Thursday night win over Louisville has company. In fact, it would have been a rarer feat if the Tigers had looked as expected or better against the Cardinals, since Louisville qualifies as both a home unranked team and a home underdog.

This is not to excuse a subpar performance, although I tend to give credit to Louisville for much of that anyway. It’s simply to prove that it has been functionally difficult for favored or ranked teams of all shapes and sizes not necessarily to win, but to perform as expected this season when heading on the road.

Luckily for Clemson, the first road game only comes around once a year.

God Bless!

WQ