Missouri’s 2012 football campaign went about as poorly as a debut season in a new conference could go.

The Tigers’ offensive line was decimated by injury from the start of the season to the final whistle of the final game.  Dual-threat quarterback James Franklin was in and out of the lineup due to his own injuries and, in one case, his decision not to take a painkilling shot.  Franklin’s struggles helped prevent all-everything receiver prospect Dorial Green-Beckham from living up to the hype that surrounded him.

Mizzou’s first two SEC games — Georgia at home, South Carolina on the road — resulted in 21-point losses.  There was a home loss to Vanderbilt.  There were blowout losses to Alabama and Texas A&M.

About the only positives were victories over Kentucky and Tennessee, but those teams combined for just one league win last year and that was the Vols’ victory over the Wildcats.  So topping UT and UK was hardly worth celebrating.

With spring practice opening up in Columbia, Gary Pinkel finds himself in a different position… on a bit of a hot seat.  But as badly as 2012 went, the longtime Tiger coach says he wasn’t surprised by anything the SEC had to offer:

“The league was no different at all than what I expected.  It was no different.  They have a lot of really, really good teams and last year probably had as many as they’ve ever had.  But that wasn’t a surprise.  We knew that going in.  I don’t think that’s in any way affected us.  I still think it’s a great move for us.  I think it’s a great move for the University of Missouri,”

While the longtime coach maintains his confidence about his program’s place in the SEC, he doesn’t sound quite so sure of Franklin, his returning starter at quarterback:

Read the rest of this entry »

When you talk about The Greatest anything in sports, you’re setting yourself up for trouble.  Everyone has an opinion on who or what The Greatest is.  That’s because everyone uses different criteria to determine what The Greatest even means.

Example: Who’s the NFL’s best quarterback?  The guy with the most Super Bowl trophies?  The guy with the most MVP awards?  The guy with the most passing yards on the back of his trading card?

As for college football, we can use the Heisman Trophy as another example.  Some people believe “most outstanding player” means the best offensive player on the best team.  Some people believe it means the most valuable player on a team, regardless of highlights and hype.  Still others cast their votes based on hard and fast stats.

So when we ask who should go on an imaginary Mt. Rushmore of SEC football coaches, we know we’re opening the door and inviting debate to come on in and sit a spell.

Fair enough.

As usual, we wanted to inject a little data, a bit of math into our study of the SEC’s greatest all-time coaches.  We also wanted to weed the competition for those four slots — we said Mt. Rushmore after all — down to a manageable number.

Our first step was to figure out who should be left out.  We set our start date at 1935.  The SEC was founded in 1932 and ’35 made for a nice round number.  If a man didn’t coach the majority of his career after that year he was excluded from our exercise.  So if you’re wondering why someone like Vanderbilt’s Dan McGugin isn’t on the list, now you know.

Next, we decided to include only coaches who have toiled in the Southeastern Conference for at least a decade.  Regardless of a coach’s success, if he hasn’t spent at least 10 years in the SEC how much historical impact could he really have?  Florida’s Urban Meyer — despite two BCS titles in six years — failed to pass this portion of our test.

One-year wonders were out, too.  Only coaches with multiple SEC championships were considered deserving of placement on our monument.  That eliminated coaches like Auburn’s Shug Jordan.

We decided that a coach also had to have won at least one consensus — that’s consensus — national championship during his tenure as an SEC head coach.  That eliminated Tennessee’s Johnny Majors, for example.  Majors won a national title at Pittsburgh, but he didn’t win one in the SEC.  So he’s out.

Finally, we eliminated any coaches who had their success at a program no longer in the SEC.  There are three ex-SEC schools out there: Sewanee, Tulane, and Georgia Tech.  One of them had a coach who fit all of the above criteria.  But it felt a little silly to consider Bobby Dodd for a spot on the SEC’s Mt. Rushmore when it was Dodd who famously yanked Tech from the Southeastern Conference.  So coaches like Dodd are out.

Those criteria — post-1935 career, 10 seasons in the SEC, multiple SEC titles, one consensus national title, and employment at a current SEC institution — helped narrow our choices down to just seven men.

Read the rest of this entry »

Evin Demirel

College football is the only major American team sport in which a first-year player hasn’t won the sport’s most prestigious award. Freshmen have been chosen as national players of the year in college basketball, baseball and hockey. Rookies have won MVP awards in the NBA, MLB, NHL and NFL.

And yet voters for college football’s Heisman Trophy have lagged behind. No freshmen has won the Heisman since freshmen started playing with upperclassmen, for good, in 1972. Since then, the three freshmen Heisman finalists – Herschel Walker, Michael Vick and Adrian Peterson – have all lost for various reasons. Some of that has been timing. As a freshman, Walker had one of his best games a day after ballots were due. The director of the club that hosted the award ceremony said Walker likely would have won the Heisman that year had his 205-yard, 3-TD performance against Georgia Tech been considered.

But the main reasons no freshman has yet won the Heisman are ignorance and bias. Unlike upperclassmen, freshmen don’t begin seasons as known commodities and that initial lack of familiarity among mostly sportswriter voters hurts their chances. As far as I know, no sports information department has launched an early-season Heisman campaign for a freshman, no matter how talented.

Pervasive technology has largely wiped away this knowledge barrier, though. A decade ago, Texas A&M likely would have waited for this upcoming offseason to launch a Heisman campaign for Manziel. Video would have been edited and DVDs would have been mailed out along with snazzy press packets extolling the fleet feet and field awareness of Johnny Football.

The Aggies may still go through the trouble of doing this, but nowadays the Heisman’s mostly sportswriter voters are more likely to pay attention to what’s coursing through their Tweetdeck feed than dropping into their mailbox.

Bias and muddled thinking persist, though.

By and large, voters expect freshmen to be even better as sophomores and juniors. Sure, this happens most of the time. But not always. Michael Vick, for instance, led the nation in passing efficiency as a freshman in 1999 while leading Virginia Tech to the national title game, but as a sophomore his numbers dipped. Wisconsin running back Ron Dayne had his best overall statistical season as a freshman in 1996, but five regular season losses squelched any Heisman talk.

That season would still help propel Dayne to an eventual Heisman as a senior, but he should have been awarded on the merit of a single season.

Some of the 928 voters may argue the Heisman Trophy – meant to recognize “the outstanding college football player whose performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity,” according to the Heisman Trust – should reflect sustained excellence over multiple years and not equate to an MVP award for a single fall. That a mere season’s worth of kicking ass with integrity isn’t enough to prove one’s chops. Voters want to be certain that a player isn’t “a one-year flash in the pan,” longtime Heisman voter Dave Campbell told the Dallas Morning News in 2004. “When you get right down to it, the voters are probably reluctant to vote for some freshman if you have some legitimate – and I underscore legitimate – juniors and seniors to consider.”

In 2010, Cam Newton destroyed any arguments that more than one season matters. The Auburn quarterback won the Heisman almost purely on the merit of single season’s worth of play. He was so good, it didn’t matter if he’d stolen a computer earlier in his college career, feigned ignorance that his father was pimping him out or that he was a crappy teammate.

Newton racked up 4,300 yards, and essentially secured the Heisman by squeaking out a  win against a top-ranked Alabama defense on the road.

Manziel now has that same signature, late-season win – against a defense that in the Arkansas blowout appeared to be one of the strongest in recent SEC history. Moreover, the freshman’s on track to surpass Newton’s numbers while dwarfing the stats of former frontrunner Collin Klein. Manziel has a couple hiccups on his resume – losses against Florida and LSU – but his overall impact is just as impressive as Newton’s. And, like Newton, he’s even had some fairly serious off-field issues. This past June, Manziel was jailed for getting involved in a fight and police said he produced a fake ID.

But, please, let’s not make too much of that whole “integrity” criterion. Because if we start looking too far down this rabbit hole, we may just end up toppling over. You see, the very coach after whom this award was named once insisted that a defunct football program be resurrected for a game just so he could beat the living daylight out of it to vindicate a previous loss. The result: Georgia Tech 222, Cumberland College 0.

If only on-field production is considered, then after the Alabama game Manziel deserved the Heisman. Still, he could very well lose it as other top contenders have the advantage of playing in more high-profile games before the Dec. 8 Heisman announcement. Kansas State’s Collin Klein or USC’s Marquis Lee could resurface to swipe the Heisman with boffo performances in wins against Texas or Notre Dame. That, coupled with an A&M loss to Missouri, would cost Manziel a place in history.

His class shouldn’t.

The typically Arko-centric author blogs about sports in the South at thesportsseer.com. Follow him on Twitter.

This column originally ran in Sync magazine.

Former Auburn running back Mike Dyer testified today that a gun used in an alleged robbery involving four other ex-Auburn players was his.  Former Tigers Antonio Goodwin — on trial now — Dakota Mosley, Shaun Kitchens and Mike McNeil were arrested in March of 2011.

Dyer — Auburn’s leading rusher the last two years and the MVP of the 2011 BCS Championship Game — testified that he and Mosely, Goodwin, and Kitchens were drinking beer and smoking synthetic marijuana while watching an NBA game when “Dakota asked me if I want to hit a lick.” 

“Hit it a lick” means — apparently — “let’s go rob someone.”

Dyer said he wouldn’t do that.  Yet it was his gun that was eventually used in the robbery that also involved McNeil.

Dyer has since followed Gus Malzahn to Arkansas State.

Auburn fans enjoyed a fantastic season in 2010.  But from L’affair Newton to a much-hyped HBO investigation to an NCAA investigation to the dirt that’s going to come out from these guys’ trials… all the memories of that team might not be good ones for Tiger backers.

At MrSEC.com, we’re not big on awards.  Bias can play a role in who votes for whom.  Can an MVP be only a great team or can someone be MVP on a rotten squad?

For those reasons and more, we turn to statistics to help decide who’s the best at what they do.  And today, we look at the most productive offensive players in the SEC this season.

There were exactly 100 SEC basketball players who played at least 300 minutes this season.  We went through all of their stats — and we’ll do the same with defense tomorrow — to find which players were the most productive offensively.

Our formula?  We looked at the three big pluses a player could contribute to his team on offense: points scored, assists dished out, and offensive rebounds grabbed.  We took those stats and added them together.  Then we compared them to the number of minutes played by each SEC player in 2011-12.

Below are the SEC’s top 20 players in terms of offensive production by minute.  At the top of the list: Arkansas freshman BJ Young.  Mike Anderson couldn’t land him at Missouri, but he’s sure glad now that John Pelphrey coaxed him to Arkansas.

The St. Louis native averaged 15.3 points per game, 2.3 assists per game and 3.1 rebounds (total, not just offensive) per game or the Razorbacks in his first season.  Not a bad debut.  And compared to his minutes played, Young made an offensive contribution to his team .734 times per minute.  That was the best number in the SEC.  By far.

Here’s the full top 20 for offensive production:

(* Dundrecous Nelson was dismissed from the Ole Miss team in early-January.)

The stats have been double- and triple-checked, but it’s certainly possible that a digit has been flipped or flopped during transcription.  Them’s a lotta numbers for me to type.  If you see a typo, just let me know.

As stated above, we’ll dig into the defensive numbers tomorrow.  But congrats to BJ Young and all the players in our Top 20.  No one made more positive things happen on the offensive end of the floor than those guys.

In case you didn’t notice — and with an afternoon kickoff from Shreveport you probably didn’t — the SEC sorta/kinda got off to a 1-0 start for the bowl season yesterday.  Newest league member Missouri ran up 31 first-half points en route to a 41-24 victory over North Carolina, presumably the school’s last victory as a Big 12 member.

For those who missed it, you failed to catch an impressive performance from Tiger quarterback James Franklin.  He was 15 of 23 in the passing game for 132 yards and a touchdown and he also led Mizzou in rushing with 142 yards and two TDs on 18 carries.  When the SEC finally announces next year’s schedule and you find the Tigers on your favorite team’s schedule, know that Franklin is the guy that your defensive coordinator will be focused on next fall.

Head coach Gary Pinkel said after the game that he gave his sophomore quarterback a hug and a “congratulations.”  “Then I went back and asked, ‘What happens when you get really good?’ … He kind of gave me a look, but that’s a huge compliment.”

Franklin earned the MVP award in the game and the respect of UNC interim coach Everett Withers (who’s now headed to Ohio State to join Urban Meyer’s staff).  “(Franklin) is just such a dynamic guy running and throwing that you have to respect both.  I always count the quarterback as an extra running back in the spread and that’s exactly what he was.”

Traditionally, Pinkel has been a pass-first guy, so the better Franklin gets in the passing game, the more dangerous his coach’s offense will become.

Here endeth the advanced scouting report.  Welcome to the SEC, Mizzou.

You can hand the offensive and defensive MVP trophies to Alshon Jeffery and Courtney Upshaw.  You can count on Jadeveon Clowney to be the impact freshman of the year.  And you can pencil in a South Carolina-Alabama SEC Championship Game.

At least according to SI.com’s preseason SEC predictions.  You can see their full write-up here, but their divisional predictions are as follows:

Well, it looks like the “haters” won out, just as John Calipari had feared.  Tony Barbee — he of the 4-12 record at Auburn — did not win the SEC’s Coach of the Year award.  Instead, Florida’s Billy Donovan took that honor.

Last week, we stated that we would have given that award to Anthony Grant on the basis that going 12-4 with his roster trumps — by a smidge — Donovan going 13-3 with his roster.  Grant did more with less.  But you’ll hear no complaints from us about Donovan’s selection.  Our feelings were 51-49 in favor of Grant, but Donovan had a tremendous year, too.

His Gators have no pure star and there isn’t a string of one-and-doners in their line-up.  And Donovan’s squad proved to be the class of the league while playing in the more dangerous SEC East.

In terms of other honors, here goes:


SEC Player of the Year: Chandler Parsons, Florida

SEC Scholar-Athlete of the Year: Riley Benock, Mississippi State

SEC Freshman of the Year: Terrence Jones, Kentucky

SEC Sixth-Man of the Year: Brian Williams, Tennessee

SEC Defensive Player of the Year: Sam Muldrow, South Carolina


The selection of Parsons will be met with hoots and hollers because he’s not a big “numbers” guy.  Instead he’s a glue guy, a good-attitude guy.  Being that he was the MVP of the best team in the league, it’s no surprise he won the award.

The other controversial selection will be Terrence Jones over teammate Brandon Knight for Freshman of the Year honors.  Both were good, but one ran the point and the other didn’t.  We’d have given Knight the award, but you can’t argue with Jones’ production.


First Team All-SEC
JaMychal Green, F, Alabama
Chandler Parsons, F, Florida
Trey Thompkins, F, Georgia
Terrence Jones, F, Kentucky
Brandon Knight, G, Kentucky
Chris Warren, G, Ole Miss
Scotty Hopson, G, Tennessee
John Jenkins, G, Vanderbilt

Second Team All-SEC
Tony Mitchell, F, Alabama
Rotnei Clarke, G, Arkansas
Kenny Boynton, G, Florida
Erving Walker, G, Florida
Travis Leslie, G, Georgia
Dee Bost, G, Mississippi State
Tobias Harris, F, Tennessee
Festus Ezeli, C, Vanderbilt
Jeffery Taylor, F, Vanderbilt

SEC All-Freshman Team
Trevor Releford, G, Alabama
Patric Young, F/C, Florida
Terrence Jones, F, Kentucky
Brandon Knight, G, Kentucky
Doron Lamb, G, Kentucky
Ralston Turner, G, LSU
Bruce Ellington, G, South Carolina
Tobias Harris, F, Tennessee

SEC All-Defensive Team
Delvon Johnson, F, Arkansas
DeAndre Liggins, G, Kentucky
Reginald Buckner, F, Ole Miss
Sam Muldrow, F/C, South Carolina
Jeffery Taylor, F, Vanderbilt

Well, former Tennessee defensive line coach Chuck Smith just had his day in the sun… but it’s hard to imagine much positive light falling on him after his morning press conference.

According to radio host Jimmy Hyams of WNML-FM/AM in Knoxville, Smith covered a number of topics during his presser and afterwards… which we’ll summarize for you:


* Smith wanted Tennessee fans and media to know that he remains a “Vol for life” and did not quit on the UT program.

* He said that “family” isn’t important at UT and that he was driven away because he was “too big for the program.” 

* In an odd twist, he then compared himself to Lane Kiffin saying that once a person puts on the “T” logo, he’s a “Vol for life.”  Not sure that making a pro-Kiffin comment is the best way to go in the Volunteer State these days.

* He denied rumors that he and defensive coordinator Justin Wilcox ever came to blows…

* But when it came to praising his co-workers, he did have good things to say about UT’s offensive assistants and Derek Dooley.  His defensive mates were noticeably omitted.

* He also said that his defensive line was the “MVP” of the team over the Vols’ last four games.

* At one point, Smith said he would like to be a season-ticket holder at Tennessee… and then said he’d like to coach elsewhere in the SEC East.  Maybe it’s a love/hate thing. 


Smith might find it hard landing another job in the SEC East — or elsewhere — after the press conference that he called without UT’s knowledge.

His exit for Tennessee isn’t likely to serve as an entrance to anyplace else.

Bizarre.

UPDATE — Want to watch the odd press conference?  Click here.

Content provided by And The Valley Shook.

CFN: SEC Bloggers’ All-Conference Team