THE MORNING CONSTITUTIONAL TALKS ABOUT FEELINGS

One of the primary underpinnings of Bill C's preview of 2014 Texas Tech - reminder, you should read all of Bill's previews because he is an unstoppable machine producing knowledge and actual insight at rates the rest of us can barely fathom - is that 2013 Tech wasn't that different from 2012 Tech from a detached statistical perspective. Both teams started strong against relatively weak competition; both faded down the stretch when the schedule got harder. Both could get run on pretty handily. Both finished with a valuable bowl win to go 8-5 and wound up with an F/+ ranking in the mid-40s.

But, as Bill points out, it didn't feel like the same season, and I think he's hit on a key difference between college football and the NFL: the former is a lot more about feelings. Feelings exist in the NFL, of course, which you know if you watched the Super Bowl with a longtime Seahawks fan. But they're much, much more tied up in results. A turnaround season where you go 10-6 but lose your first playoff game isn't the same as, say, Duke coming out of nowhere to make the ACC Championship Game and give Texas A&M a major scare in a bowl. Duke and LSU won the same number of games last year; I somehow doubt the emotional experience was equal between the fanbases.

So that's really the simple response to Alligator Army's well-reasoned but mostly results-oriented analysis of Will Muschamp entering year four. Big Dumb Will Muschamp Football worked in 2012, and it didn't in 2013. Those two seasons couldn't be more different from a statistical perspective. But both vintages were decidedly not fun, and, well, yeah, that's kind of what we're here for. Weird, I know.