Hyperbole and the Game of the Century

This is article #24 in a series covering the origins of football’s terminology. All are available under the Terminology tab above. My book, Hut! Hut! Hike! describes the emergence of more than 400 football terms.

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A "game of the century" is a huge matchup that football fans nationwide anticipate, watch, and look back upon at levels, unlike your run-of-the-mill big game. While few agree on the criteria for what constitutes a game of the century (GOTC), they have proven popular.

Wikipedia tells us that 18 games have achieved GOTC status in the last 88 seasons, or slightly more than once every five years rather than once per century. Here are their GOTCs:

• 1935 Notre Dame vs. Ohio State

• 1935 SMU vs. TCU

• 1945 Army vs. Navy

• 1946 Army vs. Notre Dame

• 1966 Notre Dame vs. Michigan State

• 1967 UCLA vs. USC

• 1969 Texas vs. Arkansas

• 1971 Nebraska vs. Oklahoma

• 1986 Miami (FL) vs. Penn State

• 1991 Miami (FL) vs. Florida State

• 1993 Florida State vs. Notre Dame

• 2005 Texas vs. USC

• 2006 Michigan vs. Ohio State

• 2009 Florida vs. Alabama

• 2011 LSU vs. Alabama

• 2019 LSU vs. Alabama

Looking at the bottom of the list, we are not a quarter of the way into the 21st century, and we've already had six GOTCs. On the other hand, Wiki's list does not include any games from the 19th Century -a poor century for GOTCs- and the drought continuing through 1934. Then, in 1935, we packed two centuries' worth of GOTCs into one year.

How do we explain this strange pattern of GOTCness? Were the folks watching old-time football so backward that they could engage in hyperbole? Were they unwilling to pull their games up by their bootstraps to earn GOTCness? An alternate explanation is recency bias on our part. Could we be unable to see pre-1935 games as GOTCs, or do we ignore games our ancestors considered GOTCs?