The Lions’ 69–0 drubbing at the hands of Harvard this past Saturday left me wondering whether this was the worst loss in history. After going to GoColumbiaLions.com, I realized that a) no it was not our worst loss of all time, and b) GoColumbiaLions.com is unusable for all but the most basic statistical question.
As a stat nerd, I set out to rectify this, and built this website where both season statistics and individual game statistics are presented in a sortable and easily readable way. Using this site, I’ve found a number of interesting facts about CU football that should put our current season in context:
Number of winning seasons in 67 years: 7
Despite being around for two-thirds of a century, the Lions’ have only gone above .500 about 10% of the time. That’s pretty rough, but it also means our current season is better than most people think. Columbia also has four zero win seasons, just three less than our collection of winning seasons.
And for those who think last year’s one win season was an anomaly, it was the 19th single win season in Lion’s history. In fact, we’ve had more single win seasons than any other kind of season (which makes you wonder why Norris Wilson was fired when this has historically happened about 28% of the time).
