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…]
If you told me a year or two ago that Kenneth Murray was on the verge of leaving Oklahoma early in order to be drafted by the second round I would have been surprised, to say the least. He’s always been a great athlete and a willing student of the game, but the Mike Stoops … [Read more…]
No matter what else has happened over the last decade, a constant themehas been Texas and Oklahoma’s superiority in the recruiting rankings, in that order. The Longhorns are the most resource-rich program in the B12 by a decent margin (although the Sooners are obviously competitive) and are located in one of the hottest towns in … [Read more…]
Every now and again I see Oklahoma write-ups for 2020 that have caveats for their offense like, “hey, we haven’t see Spencer Rattler yet…” or, “there’s not many scholarship wide receivers left on OU’s campus…” Smart prognostication for the 2020 Sooners should largely ignore all that. Last year we saw Lincoln Riley evolve the OU … [Read more…]
Yesterday I compiled some data from 247sports.com on the recruiting class rankings of the Big 12 over the last decade (2010-19). Btw, that website is remarkably easy to use and a tremendous resource for doing quick research on most anything you could want to examine. What I compiled was the average class ranking for every … [Read more…]
This has been about as impressive an offseason in Stillwater as I’ve ever seen, and I can readily recall another recent doozy. Heading into 2017 the Cowboys had Mason Rudolph and James Washington coming off big 2016s and both seemed likely to be NFL draft picks. Instead, they both returned along with a healthy Marcell … [Read more…]
You could argue that Baylor was the story of the 2010s in the Big 12. Oklahoma obviously dominated most of the decade, winning 6.5 Big 12 titles, making four playoff appearances, and putting up the following record against the rest of the league: A completely inability to deal with Oklahoma was truly the primary obstacle … [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…]
Perhaps the most important dimension to the National Championship game is how well Clemson can hold up against LSU’s precision strikes. A big part of the Big 12 game, at least in seasons when particular teams have good QB play, is the college game’s equivalent of the “precision strike.” That’s a military term for weapons … [Read more…]
The 2019 bowl season was a big L for the Big 12 conference. The nuanced understanding of the Big 12 is that it’s a league that has two programs with “blue blood” and nationally competitive resources, but then eight other programs that in a given year can play at a top 25 or even top … [Read more…]