THE SEC: THE DEATH OF OFFENSE

The LA Daily News has a good article on the Pac Ten’s problems with playing defence…

Perhaps it’s just good SEC defense?

The average defense for over half of the SEC teams are in the top 25 nationally I believe.

Or perhaps that’s because of bad SEC offense…I wrote a non-compelling piece on this right Here

When I read Terence’s column yesterday, which is a rarity in itself, I normally can’t stomach anything he writes, I thought basically the same thing. He does point out one or two things that are basically true, offense is statistically speaking not pretty in the SEC this year and you could consider this a down year for the SEC.

But from there, his whole thing falls apart, which in my opinion is a forgone conclusion when a large part of your argument is based on information and opinion from Bill Curry, who I never forgave for referring to Ron Dayne as a ball peen hammer on a nooner of the deuce 8 years ago. Seriously, WTF? A ball peen hammer?

Honestly, how down of a year is it though? Low scoring football and good defense aren’t necessarily an indicator of losing football. If you grant UGA a provisional spot for the brutal and somewhat unwarranted beating they took after the UF loss, that gives the SEC 3 top 10 teams. Auburn and Florida give them 5 in the top 25. Perhaps the best 3 teams in the country lie outside of the SEC, but perhaps not, unless we see it happen, there’s no way to know what a Bama or Georgia or LSU would do to USC, UT, or VPI. But even if the best 3 teams did conclusively lie outside of the SEC this year, if 3 of the next 4 or 5 teams play within it, does that really mean you’re having a down year?

At the end of the day, it’s just a hard claim to make. Except for a few interconference rivalries and the bowl games, there’s no way to know whether the supposedly brutal SEC offenses would do against other conference’s defenses. Likewise, there’s no way to know how much Alabama or Florida or Georgia would choke out a PAC 10 offense.

And to call South Carolina, Arkansas, and Ole Miss brutal over the recent years is a little short sighted. It wasn’t but a couple years ago that USC put together a couple of 8 and 9 win seasons, and I think everyone would admit things are looking brigther with Spurrier there. Nutt, until this year, normally has Arkansas in the mix in the West, and I do believe Ole Miss was going to bowl games with Eli there, including a New Years day game and a 10 win season. Now out of the 3, South Carolina is the only won doing much positive this year, but I fully expect Arkansas to be on the way back up next year.

And in my mind, this whole mighty ACC thing is a load of crap. They haven’t done anything to prove that they’re much more than Virginia Tech and 11 other teams ranging from bad to above average. I’d say head to head it looks something like this:

VPI > Bama (ACC)

UGA (shock back) > FSU (SEC)

LSU = UM – I’d call this a draw, LSU’s turnover problems keep it from being a straight win

AU > BC – Way too much speed for BC (SEC)

UF > GT – Florida may not score much, but Tech has proved it can’t score against anyone lately (SEC)

USC > Wake/Maryland – USC gets better each week, do you really see Spurrier not find a way to beat Wake or Maryland (SEC)

Wake/Maryland > Vandy – Vandy has come back down enough that I’d conditionally give this one up (ACC)

UVA/UNC draw UT – everyone of these teams has hung some ass games out there this year

UVA/UNC > Ole Miss – (ACC)

Clemson > Kent – (ACC)

Arkansas draw NC State

Miss St > Duke – Anyone beats Duke (SEC)

End of the day, I’d say it looks roughly 5-4-3 for the SEC, in the year of the downtrodden SEC and the might ACC, that ain’t saying too much.

True enough on the assessment that measuring the conferences is a crapshoot. Funny, if there were some way to match the best teams from each conference up at the end of the season, some mysterious way…then we could make a guess about it. Until then we’re forced to work with thimblefuls of evidence.

“The reason the SEC keeps scores in the R. Kelly range (look! racism! right there!)”

that’s the funniest damn thing i’ve read in weeks. i love EDSBS.

The average defense for over half of the SEC teams are in the top 25 nationally I believe.

Well… no offense, but no doy, dude. This is a zero-sum game. Pac 10 defenses look bad statistically because Pac 10 offenses look great statistically and vice versa for the SEC. We only get 3 crossover games a year and most of those are dull blowouts against hopelessly overmatched teams that have all the statistical significance of a ham sandwich.

Thus all arguers are reduced to “The SEC offenses suck” / “Naw aw, the SEC defenses ROOL,” which is great when you’re the type of person who thinks screaming dumbly is fun, but the MSM has that angle covered, dontchaknow.

It’s a Commodore Nation, bitches.

Vanderbilt needs a new coach.

Which is exactly what we were trying to sidestep and move away from doing, Brian. There’s another factor driving offensive/defensive disparities, and it’s not a place sucking by virtue of its latitude and longtitude.

Right, I gotcha Orson… I’m not claiming you’re doing any of the useless screaming. I

Only God has coached longer than Jo Pa and I am not sure which will retire first. Bobby Bowden is not far behind. As such, any conference that can claim them will have a high average tenure number even if everyone else was first year. A lot of those years were prior to their entry into the Big Teneleven and the ACC.

In any event, Moore has accomplished what he set out to do. His article is a hot topic in southeastern football circles today and that’s all the AJC cares about. I believe it was P.T. Barnum who said that he did not care what people said (or wrote) about him as long as they spelled his name correctly. Moore, and the AJC, do not care what is said about what he writes, as long as we say something. Picture the AJC add salesman calling on an Atlanta auto dealer with the “numbers”.

Number me amongst the guilty….

er, that was a clever heart emoticon that got eaten by the existence of html. Anyway: I really like this article.

“Well… no offense, but no doy, dude.”

None taken…and that’s why I put that it’s perhaps because of the SEC offenses. It’s really hard to tell, because like you said, all the non-conference games usually are against second-tier talent.

It’s the inept offenses…

Stopping SEC offenses is just plain easier than stopping other BCS offenses. That’s why the defensive rankings are inflated, considering most of the games are conference games…

Here’s some examples ( in this decade, through 10/22/05: SEC defenses:

Georgia- 16.49 PPG in SEC, 17.00 ppg vs other BCS

Auburn- 18.07 vs SEC, 21.55 vs other BCS

LSU – 18.72 vs SEC, 24.22 vs other BCS

Florida – 19.65 vs SEC, 30.08 vs other BCS

Alabama – 19.00 vs SEC, 24.12 vs other BCS

Begs the question,tigercpa: why are they so stoppable?

Because of un HP approved schemes. Actually, part of the depression in scores in conference could be a result of familiarity. I’d be interested to see if SEC offenses score more or less PPG out of conference.

I think everyone is making too big a deal out of this. It’s a down year OFFENSIVELY this year for the SEC for different reasons. There were several good offenses last year (AU,UF,UGA,UT). But each of those schools are struggling for different reasons this year.

And by no means are PAC 10 offenses unstoppable when they face a good defense, When USC actually had a great D two years ago, they were able to put an effective choke hold on the rest of the conference. Which is why USC has been able to dominate, they finally had a coach come in and decided that it might be a good idea to play defense. He decided to recruit AA talent to play the defensive line and it paid off.

USC’s 2003 results

I think you will also notice that the only two games that year that USC scored under 30 points were against Auburn and Michigan.

I think familiarity is a key issue, as Stranko said, and one that I’ve touted for a while. It just seems that SEC offensive coordinators don’t ever try anything new—they tinker at the margins, but for the most part, they sit back and wait for the right combination of senior quarterback and offensive line to take them to the promised land.

As for USC’s defense, it’s been good since Carroll arrived in 2001 and was probably the best in the country last year (I know, Auburn had better total defense numbers, but remember the context of our argument here). But there have been other very good defenses in recent years in the Pac-10, like Oregon State’s, Washington State’s and California’s. You are much more likely to see Pac-10 teams in the top 10 of the defense stats than you are to see SEC offenses in the top 10 of the offensive stats.

Eh, don’t trot out the old stuff here—this is a slightly different argument here, and a notoriously stat-bereft one. The best question we’ve seen is the one CFR brought up when comparing Mike Riley and Urban Meyer: one went offense-heavy to compete, the other leaned on defense to compete. Why the difference? Style and division of skilled labor to one side of the ball over another, differing between coaching communities.

The coaching turnover rate is a correlation, and that alone. It’s not proof, but it’s more revealing than we though it would be. Familiarity is hard to develop when you’ve got an average coaching tenure around the four year mark, so what we once thought of as an important factor doesn’t have much to back it up here.

Can you tell we’re not straying far from the data here?

Vandy has beaten Wake Forest the only time they’ve met in the last four years and hasn’t faced Maryland in recent history.

In short, go fuck yourself.

You have to look at the years Bobby Bowden and JoePa have been at their respective schools. It greatly skews the avg. coaching tenure in the ACC and the Big-10 that they each have the two coaches who have been at their schools the longest.

True enough, but even when you take the two longest tenures out, they’re still significantly deeper in terms of experience and tenure, coaching-wise.

I meant crusty as old in mindset.

The tenure thing was not where I was headed…

So no, I wasn’t talking out of my ass.

Cheers.

It’s funny you posted this before a 49-42 game.