College Football

Orange College Football Teams Are Having A Moment

By Josh Planos

Oct. 25, 2022, at 4:02 PM

This college football season has been a little brighter than usual.

Two weeks ago, an orange crush of more than 100,000 fans converged on Neyland Stadium after the Tennessee Volunteers toppled the Alabama Crimson Tide on a last-second field goal. It was perhaps the most indelible image of the season yet — a status that lasted about an hour before it was one-upped by those same fans discarding the stadium goal post in the Tennessee River.

But Knoxville isn’t the only campus experiencing an orange surge. Nine weeks into the 2022 season, it’s shaping up to be a banner season for one of the brightest colors on the visible spectrum: orange. 

Two of the five ranked matchups this past weekend pitted an orange university against another orange university. Two teams in the top five of the AP Poll¹ claim orange as a primary color, as do three other programs in the top 25.² Orange represents two of the three highest-scoring offenses in the country and the nation’s stingiest defense. Two of the seven players with shorter than +4500 odds to win the Heisman Trophy, according to FanDuel, are also part of the orange renaissance. 

Furthermore, many of the biggest storylines in the sport seem inextricably linked to the color. Clemson has the second-best odds of any team to reach the playoff, according to our model.³ Tennessee is 7-0 for the first time since Tee Martin led the Vols to the 1998 national championship. Illinois sits atop the Big Ten West standings and is off to its best start since 1953. Syracuse, a team literally nicknamed after the color, had its best start since 1987 before losing a close one on the road at Clemson. Oklahoma State recently set a school record with its 13th consecutive home victory and has a 15 percent shot to represent the Big 12 in the playoff according to our model. Oregon State is receiving votes and is already bowl-eligible, a feat it’s only reached once since 2014. Bowling Green State has already matched its season-best win total since 2016. The UTSA Roadrunners have proven last season’s 12-win campaign wasn’t a fluke and currently lead Conference USA standings. Even Texas’ seeming inability to win one-score games under coach Steve Sarkisian can relish its series-best 49-point victory over archrival Oklahoma.⁴

Technically, the shades of orange involved here are called things like “Beaver Orange” and “UTEP Orange.” But put aside any firmly held beliefs on hue, tint and tone for the remainder of this piece. For the sake of this exercise, we categorized team colors into the following categories based on their primary color: black, blue, gold, green, orange, purple, red and silver — as outlined by an index compiled by the University of Wisconsin and, where necessary, by considering each university’s color codes.

Traditionally, literal bluebloods dominate the hardwood while red-clad teams govern the gridiron. Half of the 10 winningest college football teams of all time claim a red primary, and of the 153 all-time national champions identified by Sports-Reference.com, nearly half were won by “red teams.” 

That dominance hasn’t subsided since the College Football Playoff was introduced, either. Red teams account for 19 of the 32 all-time playoff berths and five of the eight national titles won during the Playoff Era.⁵

Clemson has done its best to represent the color orange well, with two national championships in the past six seasons. But it hasn’t been a dominant run for orange teams by any stretch — not until recently.

We can judge each primary color’s “performance” in the playoff era by averaging the Simple Rating System⁶ for each primary color’s standard-bearers. And using that method, we see that orange has leveled up in its success since 2014:

The 2021 season was a particular breakthrough campaign for orange-infused programs, with the average “orange team” checking in 3.71 points better than a typical Division I opponent, the second-highest average SRS of any color that season.⁷ Purple leads the pack in 2022⁸ in terms of average SRS, but it’s also been a dominant run by the orange. 

Our College Football Playoff forecast model gives 10 teams at least a 1 percent probability of winning the national championship. Three of those teams have an orange primary color. There’s the possibility of a playoff field that’s half-orange. So no, the brightness settings on your preferred device don’t need to be recalibrated. It’s just a season in the sun for college football’s brightest teams.

Check out our latest college football predictions.

CORRECTION (Oct. 25, 2022, 5:14 p.m.): A previous version of this story listed Peyton Manning as Tennessee's starting quarterback during its 1998 national championship season. The Vols' quarterback that season was Tee Martin.