I cried this morning with the sad news and eventually had to find something to do. Unfortunately for you, my fine fellow Vols, I found something.
Heat maps –
One of the things that many analysts point out is that often times many fans have difficulty separating past performance when assessing an opponent. For example, many of our fans in 2013 thought Auburn would be a cakewalk because they had been so abysmal in 2012. Auburn blasted us when they came to Neyland and in fact went all the way to the national championship game that year, losing to our current head coach in his role as DC for Florida State. There were other fans here who knew that Auburn had a lot of talent on their roster and that the new head coach, Malzahn, was only one year removed from the program he was returning to take over. He needed a QB and he found Nick Marshall and the rest is history. Unlike most new head coaches he already knew what he had on the roster coming in. He had recruited almost all of those guys.
Anyway, so what analysts try to do is look at each team and try to assess their opportunities for either improving or having a drop off. The critical factors often considered are recruiting, with new blood counting a bit extra, returning veterans and their prior productivity levels, coaching, mostly the head coach, and for some, whether or not the team has an established QB.
Alabama is an oddity in college football in that year in and year out they tend to have elite units on both sides of the ball and obviously they’ve been able to hold on to their head coach over the course of the last several years. They consistently recruit at the highest level and generally have the best overall roster talent at almost every position, and with depth, of just about anyone in the entire country.
The following tables compare the offensive, defensive, and combined units of the 14 SEC teams since A&M and Missouri joined the conference. Elite units/teams are highlighted in green, Good units/teams are highlighted in blue, Average units/teams are highlighted in yellow, Bad units/teams are highlighted in pink, and Abysmal units/teams are highlighted in red. I’m using the combined units to represent the team overall though obviously I’m leaving out special teams. I used a formula based on the performance range of the teams in a given year so it adjusts from year to year based on the highest and lowest performing team and then I just broke the range into 5 auto-adjusting categories as identified above. The point is every year is different and with many teams performance levels are fluid from year to year primarily based on the criteria favored by most analysts.
It’s possible for upsets to happen but they’re not that common. In 2018, according to these maps, we were an abysmal team but we upset Auburn on their field even though they were only a bad team. They were a double digit favorite in that game so favorites don’t always win. I didn’t think we got a lot of respect for that game because some pundits seem to think it was more about Auburn losing the game than us winning the game. The same sort of thing, in hindsight, could be applied to our early season losses last year to Georgia State and BYU. We were the favorites but we lost. They won but they didn’t beat us; we beat ourselves.
In 2012, relative to the rest of the conference, against SEC competition only, with Chaney and Bray, we had a good offense and even though we had our worst defense in over 100 years it was only bad compared to everyone else. We ended up with a bad team. In 2015 we had an elite offense and an average defense. We ended up as a good team. In 2016 we again had an elite offense but owing to injuries we ended up with an abysmal defense and so finished the season as a bad team, relatively speaking. In 2017 & 2018 we were abysmal on both sides of the ball and naturally ended up with abysmal football teams. Last year we were abysmal on offense but average on defense against SEC opponents so we improved to become a bad team. This year we don’t know what’s going to happen on offense yet but many are thinking we have a good shot at being elite on defense. I think HT staying healthy all season long may be the biggest key to our defense this year. Anyway, if we could just get to a not too bad offense we’d have a good shot of ending up as a good football team this year. jmo.
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, I hate it for our young Vol fans in here. For them, believe it or not, all our games were not always televised. We listened on the radio and lived the game through John Ward’s voice.
