I was pretty bearish on Mario Cristobal’s Oregon team heading into 2019. Justin Herbert never really convinced me he was elite, the offense seemed overly focused on running the ball behind the offensive line, and the strategy of building Oregon around the offensive line always struck me as a dubious method. Every school is always … [Read more…]
Every year there’s always a lot of debate around various quarterback prospects. There’s a ton riding on these guys, if you pick the right one you may have set your franchise up for a decade and a favorite strategy these days is to take advantage of having a solid quarterback on a rookie deal to … [Read more…]
If you don’t know Quigley, a regular commenter on this site since the beginning, he’s an Oklahoma guy that I’ve been talking college football with since about 2012. I started breaking down some of the non-Texas Big 12 teams in games over at Barking Carnival that year and wrote a few pieces on the Sooners … [Read more…]
Today’s largely accepted wisdom is that you build a National Champion by recruiting the best players in the country, regardless of their location, and assembling your team out of the best of the best. Alabama started to employ that model as the Nick Saban program got going, Ohio State got there as well, and Clemson … [Read more…]
One of the more bizarre and interesting dimensions to the game of football is the way that it recreates the challenges of one of the worst wars in human history. World War I, or the “Great War,” was one of the most cataclysmic events in human history and a precursor to World War II which … [Read more…]
Once Deshaun Watson dethroned Alabama in 2016, I began to develop my theory that spread passing wins championships these days at the college level. I then began to look around at the 2017 rosters for teams that could mimic Clemson’s method and take down Alabama, settling on the Sam Darnold USC Trojans who were returning … [Read more…]
Over the last couple of years, particularly while researching and writing my book… …I developed a theory that the college football playoffs essentially come down to which teams have the best spread passing attacks. I reference this theory all the time here, at Football Outsiders, and at Inside Texas but I haven’t fleshed out the … [Read more…]
There’s no beating the South for college football. The Midwest takes the game very, very seriously and the Big 10 has started to catch up again with the SEC since hiring Urban Meyer and slowly integrating the spread offense across the rust belt and plains. Still, there’s a number of factors working against the B1G … [Read more…]
Over at Football Outsiders I’ve got the stats breakdowns and some thoughts on every bowl game (eventually, with the most recent post breaking down the playoff semi-finals. Over there you can read about how I’m picking an Alabama vs Notre Dame finale, which will probably disappointingly feature a 20 point spread for the Tide. This … [Read more…]
If you read my final preview of the national championship, you’ll notice that I got two factors spectacularly wrong while predicting a Georgia victory. The first was in assuming that it particularly mattered which LBs and Ss were playing behind the Bama DL and how much experience they had in the Saban system. They all … [Read more…]