JOBU OF MAXIM SUCKS. THEREFORE, WE LIKE HIM.

9 Replies »

1. 1

   This guy is great.

   But, as someone who hails from the West Coast, I don’t recall the media kissing USC’s ass all season. I recall everyone talking about how they were barely hanging on in the weak Pac-10 and, then, everyone but Lee Corso picked OU to win in the Orange Bowl.

   If there was any over-doing it of USC adulation after the OB, it came because of the extra helping of scrambled egg that was on almost every analyst’s face.

   Comment by Heismanpundit — May 4, 2005 @ 1:09 pm

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   The West Coast Bias is in total effect with USC, but there’s another factor here, too: a whole lotta pundits still think Pete Carroll is a failed NFL coach, not a two-time champ of the NCAA.

   Comment by Anonymous — May 4, 2005 @ 1:15 pm

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   He’s a one time champ in my book. 1/2 in 03 and 1/2 in 04. Its not his fault though, its the system that will not let us know if LSU or Auburn could have beaten them. (I also think FSU didn’t win its first National Championship…. Notre Dame won that year in my book).

   Comment by Anonymous — May 4, 2005 @ 2:38 pm

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   Too bad we’ll never know for sure. But at least we’ve got the Poinsettia Bowl.

   Comment by Anonymous — May 4, 2005 @ 2:52 pm

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   It’s not hard to know whether USC would have beaten Auburn or LSU….all you have to do is look at the systems run by the schools involved.

   USC ran a wide-open pro-styled offense with balance and talent that was unlike anything either school had ever seen in the SEC. The result had they faced these two schools would have been much like the OU result.

   The SEC is primarily comprised of teams that run Pop Warner offenses, albeit with extraordinary amounts of talent. With possibly one or two exceptions, there is very little sophistication to SEC offenses. When you put up a defense like USC’s, which is used to facing sophisticated offenses, against a Pop Warner SEC offense, you get what happened in the 2003 opener, when USC won 23-0 in Leinart’s first start. When you put a sophisticated offense like USC’s up against a defense that is only used to facing unsophisticated offenses, you get what happened in the Orange Bowl against Oklahoma.

   If you want further proof of what happens when relatively sophisticated offenses go up against SEC teams, look no further than Auburn itself, which cobbled together a 10-year-old Pac-10 offense under Al Borges and, with the same talent as the year before, proceeded to blow through the SEC schedule. Unfortunately for Auburn, that offense was figured out in the Pac-10 years ago, so it would not have made much headway against USC in a matchup.

   So my point is, why play dumb that we wouldn’t know who would win in an LSU-USC or a USC-Auburn matchup? All you have to do is look at the teams and their style of play. It’s really very simple.

   Comment by Heismanpundit — May 4, 2005 @ 5:50 pm

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   Ahh, I see West Coast bias is a two way street, HP. Check this out-http://scfootball.blogspot.com/2005/03/pac-10-outperforms-sec-freemethomps.html- for a great comparison of the SEC and the Pac-10 out of conference. The numbers bear out that the Pac-10 is as strong or stronger a conference than the SEC. Personally, we think most conferences are alike: one or two goliaths, one or two good teams, and the rest are middling to bad. The Pac-10 is no different.
   My point in playing dumb theatrically to make one of our site’s favorite points, which is that we’ll never know, because boosting the economy of Tempe, Arizona is more important to the powers that be than a real championship.
   As for who would win, well, we’re not hot on predictions here. Our business is bad puns, penis jokes, and calling coaches fat. But if pressed, who would have won that game? I have a degree from Georgia Tech, so I like to rely on the numbers. In technical terms, this means: I have no clue, since I have no data to work with here. THAT’S WHY I FEEL ROBBED FOR NOT GETTING THE SHOT TO WATCH IT!
   (Shaking fist at heavens.)
   I’m an idealist: someday, all this will seem quaint as we watch a playoff. Until then, I’ll have to imagine what Ronnie Brown and Cadillac would have made against that USC D. My hunch? Not much. That game would have been tizzzight and decided by a field goal. But thanks to the system we have, that’s all I’ll ever have-hunches.

   Comment by Anonymous — May 4, 2005 @ 11:00 pm

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   But , even if penis jokes and calling coaches fat is your forte (and you do a hell of a job), it doesn’t take an expert to figure out what would have happened in a USC-Auburn matchup.

   My point was that Auburn’s offense runs nothing that USC hasn’t seen, while USC’s offense runs things that Auburn has never seen. That combination, even where talent levels are similar, is a deadly one in college football and usually results in a blowout–see the USC-OU game.

   I told a friend of mine in the media that USC would beat OU, 35-7, to which he laughed. He asked me how many yards Peterson would have and I said ‘33 meaningful yards’. Again he laughed. Why did I think this? Because OU, like many other Big 12 teams and SEC teams, does not throw to their backs and tight ends with any regularity in the flow of its offense. When you are USC and get to play a team like OU that doesn’t throw to its backs and tight ends, that basically frees up the strong safety and outside linebacker (in this case Darnell Bing and Matt Grootegoed) to go balls-out against the run. Since USC was already adept at facing teams that DID use their backs and tight ends, it made the Trojans that much stronger (for the record, Peterson had 32 yards at halftime). Now, Auburn DID learn to use their backs out of the backfield this year, but as I said before, it was in a rudimentary way that, while it blew the minds of SEC teams unused to facing it, would have been cookies ‘n cream to USC.

   On the other side of the ball, a very basic, stripped down USC offense in Matt Leinart’s first start whipped Auburn in 2003, 23-0. A USC offense led by Leinart in the 26th game of his career was waaaaay better.

   In the end, we never ask what would happen if USC had played Utah or if USC had played a Boise State team that was undefeated until the end. We don’t ask because we seem to KNOW. In reality, I think both of those teams would have given USC a better game than Auburn.

   Comment by Heismanpundit — May 5, 2005 @ 1:24 pm

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   In the SEC, LSU, UF, Auburn, UGA, USC, and Miss. State all use backs out of the backfield in the passing game with regularity.
   As for popgun offenses-we’re not sure if we’re facing a chicken and egg debate here. Last year, the Pac-10 had four offenses and two defenses in the top 20. The SEC, by contrast, only had two offenses in the top 20, both in the teens, but four defenses total, including the number one-Auburn.
   Overall, coaches here-like the people-tend to be a lot more conservative. That’s why Spurrier went off like a bomb-no one had seen that Pac-10 style of innovation before, since everyone was trying to work in the Bear Bryant/Pat Dye mode.
   We think what might be the real outcome of this debate is this: the only team capable of beating USC last year was Cal, and that no one watches enough games outside of their region. Besides us, of course-we caught three USC games last year and at least two Cal and ASU games.

   Comment by Anonymous — May 5, 2005 @ 3:23 pm

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   Maybe we’ll have to agree to disagree.

   But, I watch as much CFB as anyone and the only school on that list that actually passes to their backs is Florida and (only since last year) Auburn.

   Just two examples: The back with the most catches at Georgia was Jeremy Thomas, who caught 8 balls. LSU’s backs COMBINED had 32 receptions, or two less than just Ronnie Brown had last year.

   But sometimes it’s not even the raw stats that tell the story. Sometimes it’s about how the backs receiving out of the backfield fit into the flow of a gameplan. The sophistication in the way backs are used in the SEC is just lacking. Does that mean that a back at a school can’t rack up numbers by executing the same screen pass over and over? Of course not. But that’s not what I am talking about. I’m talking about teams that use their backs as chess pieces all around the field, like how USC uses Bush and the way Auburn used Brown last year.

   Finally, the old Top 20 offense or defense debate is awful. Those are based on misleading stats. If you are Auburn and you have a good defense and are facing not only The Citadel (and two other shitty OOC schools) but also a bunch of other offenses that lack dynamism (though not necessarily yards) in the SEC, then your numbers are going to look good. I mean, if we deferred to stat rankings to determine a player or a team’s worth, then Jamario Thomas is better than Adrian Peterson. It is just not relevant.

   Comment by Heismanpundit — May 5, 2005 @ 9:39 pm

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