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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In the South, we tend to take our history and traditions a bit more seriously than folks in other parts of the country.  When it comes to our football, that love of tradition is especially powerful. With the SEC expanding to 14 teams — possibly as soon as next July — the league’s divisional format will need to be tweaked.  It’s scheduling plan will need to be re-worked.  In doing so, some rivalries will be lost.  And that amounts to stomping on the aforementioned love of tradition.  That’s dangerous. The SEC’s last expansion should have taught us that as some [...]

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Today might just be the day that Missouri makes its desire to join the SEC official.  Or not.  It seems we’ve been down this road a few dozen times with different schools and different conferences over the past 18 or so months.  Just when it appears the tumblers will click into place, something unexpected happens. But assuming Mizzou really does tell the Big 12 that it’s out the door — if not this week, at some point — the SEC will have some serious decisions to make regarding the future layout of the league.  Adding schools creates new rivalries.  By [...]

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From the beginning of our 10-part series on SEC expansion candidates, we’ve tried to make it clear that:   * The generic lessons of our “formula” are more important than the specific results. * We chose a whopping 35 schools to examine solely because we wanted to prevent people from tossing out other schools that they believed should have been covered (to no avail). * The categories we discuss have been provided and vetted by multiple sources from the television, media rights, and the sports industries. * We don’t give a hoot who winds up on top of our list. [...]

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As we enter the homestretch of our numbers-specific look at SEC expansion, it might be a good time to look back at what we’ve done so far. For starters, you can read our original lengthy piece on SEC expansion from May of 2010 right here.  There are numbers involved, but our goal was to find which schools — out of the 18 we studied — would best fit the SEC’s profile for expansion.  Take a look at it and you’ll find that Texas A&M — viewed as a tag-along with Texas by most people — and Missouri — not considered [...]

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Media markets and budgets.  Facilities and population base.  Recruiting ground and geographic location.  All will have some bearing on the conference expansion/realignment process that continues to shake the college sports landscape.  But what about the fun stuff?  What about pure athletic success? In this installment of our simple, by-the-numbers look at 35 potential (though most are unlikely) SEC expansion possibilities, we take a gander at the programs that have had the most recent success.  First, we’ll show you how each school fared in the most recent Directors’ Cup rankings and then we’ll look at those schools that have had the [...]

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