Getty Image / Donald Page
This College Football season has been a pretty wild ride thus far. We say that every season but recent events like the University of Tennessee Volunteers beating Alabama for the first time in decades and TAMU crumbling despite the highest of expectations have certainly made this year feel unique.
But one thing remains a constant: a team’s color can, in many instances, reveal a lot about that team’s potential for success. Let’s be clear, correlation is not causation, and just because a team has Red or Orange it does not mean they stand a chance at winning the College Football National Championship.
However, a quick perusal of the 2022 College Football National Championship odds show the three favorite teams to win it all right now wear the color red as their primary color: Ohio State, Georgia, and Alabama. Furthermore, they next two favorites both wear orange.
What Your College Football Team’s Colors Indicate About Its Success
A recent article from Josh Planos on FiveThirtyEight highlighted how this has been a banner year for Orange teams. Tennessee, Clemson, Oklahoma State, Syracuse, and Illinois are all ranked in the top 17 right now and all of them wear orange.
What I found particularly interesting about the 538 article is just how dominant certain College Football team’s colors have been throughout the years. Between 1899 and 2021, 71 of 122 national championships have been won by teams wearing the same color.
Here’s the breakdown by color:
Red: 71 National Championships
Orange: 26 National Championships
Blue: 25 National Championships
Gold: 16 National Championships
Purple: 7 National Championships
Black: 4 National Championships
Green: 3 National Championships
Silver: 1 National Championship
Shortening that data set a bit further to just the College Football Playoffs era, here’s how it looks:
Red: 19 College Football Playoffs Appearances
Orange: 6 College Football Playoffs Appearances
Gold: 2 College Football Playoffs Appearances
Green: 2 College Football Playoffs Appearances
Purple: 2 College Football Playoffs Appearances
Blue: 1 College Football Playoffs Appearance
Black: 0 College Football Playoffs Appearances
Does your favorite team wear red?
If the answer to that question is ‘yes’, you’re in a good spot. And while the mere fact that your favorite College Football team wears the color red as their primary uniform color has nothing to do with their success, it at least puts them in elite company.
And if your favorite College Football team wears a color like Green, Silver, Black, Purple, or Gold then you should at least be realistic about how unlikely it is your team wins a National Championship given the past 122 years of data.
As for the CFB teams wearing orange, it’s a great time for those programs. The article on FiveThirtyEight reveals that teams wearing orange have seen an Average Simple Rating System jump from -2 in 2014 up to +8 in 2022. Clemson has been pulling the Orange Team weight for about a decade and they’re finally getting some help.