After a trio of other teams had a near brush with this dubious achievement, the San Jose State Spartans have done it. They’ve become the first FBS team to lose to an FCS opponent in 2018, falling 44-38 at home to UC Davis on Thursday.
San Jose State becomes 2018’s first FBS-to-FCS loser, getting humbled by UC Davis
The SJSU defense got destroyed.
SJSU managed this loss with one of the uglier defensive performances anyone will ever see in college football. The Aggies brought a strong offense into this game — they finished 18th in FCS at 6.2 yards per play last year, even as they went 5-6 — but there’s no good way to explain giving up the numbers the Spartans’ defense did to a lower-division team: 589 total yards, including 446 passing by Jake Meier.
Previously in this still-young season, Rice almost lost to Prairie View A&M, Georgia State almost lost to Kennesaw State, and UL-Monroe almost lost to Southeastern Louisiana. But the FBS teams in all of those games managed late comebacks and won in the last minute — Rice on a field goal that was the subject of some hilariously bad camerawork, GSU on a fade to the corner of the end zone, and ULM with a touchdown and then a blocked field goal.
There’s often no everlasting embarrassment in being the year’s first FBS-to-FCS loser.
A small handful of FBS teams lose FCS games pretty much every year. This one wasn’t much of a surprise. When our staff drafted FCS-on-FBS upset picks before the season, this one was the fifth pick. SJSU was only a 2- to 2.5-point favorite at sportsbooks that took bets on the game.
Last year’s seal-breaker — the first FBS team to lose to an FCS foe — was Georgia State, which went on to a 7-5 year and a win in the Cure Bowl. So not all’s lost for the Spartans, in theory.
They’ve just spared everybody else from being the first to 85-scholarship program to jump into the pool of losing to 63-schollie teams this year. But if their defense is this bad, things aren’t going to get a lot better than they looked Thursday.
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