Today's Tidbit... Atlantic Gas Stations and Dunkel's Football Ratings

Atlantic Gas stations sponsored East Coast football broadcasts in the early days of commercial radio and television. For years, they also published preseason booklets listing the games in which Atlantic Gas ran radio and television ads, and there were a lot of them, including many small colleges and a few high schools. Atlantic gave away the handy booklets at all their retail locations.

Covers of four Atlantic Gas football booklets. (Personal collection)

In 1930, Atlantic formed a relationship with Dick Dunkel, a Madison Avenue market forecaster who, in 1929, turned his mathematical eye toward predicting the winners of football and basketball games. His rankings were featured on top football radio shows until he started his own syndicated radio show that lasted several decades. Hundreds of newspapers across the country published the Dunkel ratings on Thursday or Friday, typically in a format listing a local grocery store, building supply firm, or other pillar of the community as the sponsor. Some advertisers also ran weekly contests with customers submitting predictions to win prizes.

Until the early 1970s, the Dunkel team performed all its calculations by hand, and since they rated 625 or more colleges some years, they had a heap of figurin' to do. Dunkel’s rating formula was the sum of a team's score differential and its strength of schedule, the latter being the secret part of the calculation. Better teams had higher point scores, and whether people interpreted the ratings correctly or not, many viewed the differences in the two team’s ratings as the expected difference in scores when they played. Over the years, the higher-rated team won about 80% of the games.