The Southeastern Conference is facing a number of important questions as it prepares for the 2013 football season and beyond: * How can the SEC protect the league’s oldest football rivalries and, in doing so, save what’s helped make the league so special — tradition? * How can the SEC welcome in two new schools without completely destroying its current scheduling structure? * Can the league accomplish its goals without eventually going to a nine-game conference slate? The league’s coaches and athletic directors want no part of a nine-game schedule.  Despite the fact that the league kicked things into hyperdrive [...]

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Sixteen games or 18?  What about 19?  Divisions or no divisions?  What about brand new divisions? These are some of the topics being kicked around by the SEC’s transition committee regarding the league’s basketball schedules for 2013-14 and beyond.  The chair of the committee — former MSU AD Larry Templeton — and others around the league have already confirmed that next year’s transitional slate will feature 18 games without divisions.  But what about the long-range plan? In our view, an 18-game slate is the best model for the league moving forward as well. Below, you’ll see an example of what [...]

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Next Wednesday, one group of SEC fans will celebrate a signing day “championship.”  That same evening, a larger group of SEC-backers will claim that recruiting rankings aren’t accurate. Both groups will be right.  Sort of. In order to get a grip on just how accurate recruiting rankings are when it comes to predicting success in the rough and tumble SEC, we went back through 10 years of signing day grades and rankings.  Then we compared those rankings to the actual on-field results from 2006 through 2011. We found — as we have before — that recruiting rankings do provide a [...]

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Down in SEC country, a few of us like to make the occasional Yankee joke right before we remind the folks up north that Southern football is King with a capital K.  Up in Big Ten country — where this writer happened to live for three happy years — those folks like to toss a few “hillbilly” barbs our way often followed by some mention of the term “oversigning.” In reality, the SEC-Big Ten rivalry — at least in bowl games — has been pretty even.  (We’ll pause for Big Ten fans to rejoice.)  In 28 games against one another [...]

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Earlier this morning we posted the first in a series of year-end stat analysis pieces.  Our look at Quick Strike Offenses can be found here.  Now we go in the opposite direction.  Below are our rankings for a stat we call Quick Sand Defense.  This category measures how well SEC teams slowed down their opponents.  The breakdown is simple — touchdowns allowed compared to the total number of defensive snaps run. As was the case with our Quick Strike Offense numbers, this category is about more than just defense as poor special teams and offensive play can put a defense [...]

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With the 2011 regular season in the rear view — how hard is that to believe — we wanted to look back at some of our favorite stats to see who did what and who did it best this fall.  Here we’ll look at a stat we call Quick Strike Offense. While Quick Strike Offense has the word “offense” right there in the title — because it has to do with scoring — it’s actually a measure of a whole team’s ability to score.  Good special teams units and strong defenses aid an offense in its pursuit of points.  So [...]

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When the SEC split into divisions in 1992, one of the reasons Auburn was placed in the West rather than in the geographically-appropriate East was a desire to maintain competitive balance in the league.  So the conference split up the six schools that had traditionally had the best football fortunes — Alabama, Auburn and LSU went to the West… Florida, Georgia and Tennessee to the East. But for anyone who’s been barking that Missouri and Texas A&M won’t be able to compete consistently in the SEC — and that includes everyone from SEC fans to national media types — it [...]

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With Texas A&M and Missouri now officially ticketed for the SEC (hopefully for 2012), a familiar email is finding its way anew into the MrSEC.com inbox: “The SEC is no longer a regional league!” Sorry.  We’re not buying that.  For decades the SEC prospered as a 7-state league: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky. In 1992, the league expanded to include South Carolina and Arkansas.  Carolina made sense, but Arkansas was a school some 400 miles from its nearest SEC rival (Ole Miss).  If we’d had internet messageboards in ’92, you can bet folks would have yelped about [...]

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When it comes to Southeastern Conference football, you can toss just about every stat out the window save one — turnovers.  Sure there are nuggets to be found here and there and we’re a site that enjoys searching for them. But in terms of wins and losses, you’ll not find a more stat that means more than turnovers. We have gone back through the 2007 season to examine the correlation between turnovers and winning and losing in SEC conference games.  The result could not be more clear. Turn the ball over and you will likely lose. For comparison’s sake lets [...]

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When the SEC finally welcomes in a 14th member — and like everyone else we fully expect that 14th school to be Missouri — the league will face the incredibly important chore of realigning its divisions.  The breakdown of that alignment will impact schedules, fan travel, competitive balance, and more than two dozen rivalries that have been played 60 or more times each. Needless to say, the SEC had better get it right. The league’s goal will no doubt be to protect as many traditional rivalries as possible.  Also, you can count on the fact that the SEC will want [...]

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