As the offseason has gone along, there have been some new changes to the roster makeup of the various teams across the league. The transfer market has extended deep into the summer for a lot of players, in part because of Covid, and then there’s always the normal attrition that can take place. I already … [Read more…]
It’s been interesting to see the Shanahan offense enjoy a resurgence in the NFL game. It’s never really gone away, receiving various tweaks and updates over the years, and the last two NFC champions in the NFL employed modern takes on the original Mike Shanahan offense. First the Sean McVay LA Rams and then the … [Read more…]
If you’ve read this blog regularly, you’ll notice that I have an uneven relationship with the service rankings of players and teams. In one post I’ll come strongly against the idea that the class rankings are predictive or should be taken particularly seriously, in the next I’ll use 247’s data even to the point of … [Read more…]
In the last post I went over the top 10 Big 12 defenses of the 2010s based on scoring defense within league play. That gave us the following list: I like the 2017 TCU Horned Frogs, 2010 Nebraska Cornhuskers, and 2017 Iowa State Cyclones from that list for their performance and/or innovative impact on the … [Read more…]
These three schools all share the common trait of being fairly distantly removed from the biggest metro areas of the Big 12. Those major metro areas and talent hubs are, in order by population: Obviously D.C./Baltimore and Pittsburgh are irrelevant for everyone in the B12 save for West Virginia but they very much matter for … [Read more…]
In year one against the Big 12 it seemed that Jim Knowles had a two-pronged plan for building an Oklahoma State defense that could counter the explosive spread offenses that you encounter in this league. The first prong was to adjust OSU’s defense from the 4-3 hybrid system they’d been basing out of to a … [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…]
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…]
Everyone should keep up over at Football Outsiders where I preview every week’s top six games and make picks against FEI’s projection model. This week I’ll have Bedlam and Farmageddon amongst the games that get previewed and picked. But I wanted to hit on a few different smaller topics around the league that I couldn’t … [Read more…]
I was preparing for my Kansas State preview over at Inside Texas (those drop on Thursdays and I believe this one will be free) today and went down a statistical rabbit hole that proved interesting. I was looking up how much of Kansas State’s pressure comes from their DL and the DL’s share of the … [Read more…]