Texas A&M, Miami shatter record for lowest-scoring first half in College Football Playoff history
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Texas A&M and Miami got a huge College Football Playoff Saturday started at a rocking Kyle Field, and the noise in College Station was very much up to its usual level.
But the points? Well, the offenses didn’t quite bring it during the first half of the 3-game Playoff Saturday special. Texas A&M and Miami jogged off the field and into the halftime locker room locked in a 0-0 defensive slugfest, setting a record for the lowest-scoring first half in Playoff history. So, the Aggies and Hurricanes couldn’t accomplish scoring at all in the first 30 minutes, but they did accomplish that 1 infamous thing in setting the record for offensive futility in a Playoff game.
The previous record for the lowest-scoring first half came a decade ago, when Alabama and Michigan State combined to score 10 points in the first half of a 2015 Playoff game. That stat came from Radar360, but fast-forward 10 years and the first half at Kyle Field had the Crimson Tide and Spartans beat.
Making Saturday’s first 30 minutes seem like even more of an anomaly is the average number of points scored in the first half of all Playoff games since 2015 — a whopping 30.4.
The teams combined for 3 missed field goals in the 2nd quarter alone, with Miami missing 2 attempts and Texas A&M missing 1. Those were their opportunities to dent the scoreboard gone awry, and that was that.
It was a 0-0 stalemate heading into the final 30 minutes, and the college football world waited for someone, anyone, to score some points.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
