It’s been a fun year to watch SEC football, but all good things must come to an end. Again for context, I’m showing the final per game net yardage numbers in parenthesis.
- Auburn (+80.60). What was that about defense wins championships? Helluva ride, Tigers.
- Alabama (+164.60). BUT THEY WASN’T MOTIVATED IN THE BOWL GAME, PAWWWWL.
- Missouri (+72.80). It’s a shame this team will be remembered for getting shredded defensively in the SECCG, because Mizzou turned in a solid 12-win season.
- South Carolina (+102.30). Congratulations on the greatest 11-win season in conference history not involving a SECCG or BCS bowl game, ‘Cocks.
- LSU (+112.60). LSU was better than a three-loss team… or at least should have been better than a three-loss team.
- Texas A&M (+62.60). So how ordinary is this team without Johnny Football?
- Vanderbilt (+11.70). Good coaching plus plenty of cupcakes is how you fashion nine wins out of a team that barely gained more than it gave up over the course of the season.
- Georgia (+108.70). In so many ways, the anti-Vanderbilt.
- Mississippi State (+85.10). If the Bulldogs played in Conference USA, they’d be labelled BCS busters. Unfortunately, they reside in the SEC West.
- Ole Miss (+102.80). In the end, a team that’s still figuring out how to win consistently.
- Tennessee (-65.10). Boy, this year’s recruiting class better be something special.
- Florida (+2.40). Get ready for a lot of “if Auburn could turn it around” talk in the offseason.
- Arkansas (-56.20). I’ve run out of whatever the opposite of superlatives is to describe this team.
- Kentucky (-85.50). Finished last in the conference the old-fashioned way – they earned it.
Get The Picture 
I would have liked to have seen Vandy try to get bowl-eligible with our schedule this year. Hats off to Franklin and his team, but that’s one of the worst 9-win teams in recent history. Here’s to another 48-3 style beatdown when they come to Athens next fall.
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It’s telling that we got more credit in the final polls for beating Houston than Nebraska did for beating Georgia.
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…with your schedule? Are we not in the same division? We lost both our games agains the West, so playing LSU and Auburn instead of A&M and Ole Miss alters nothing, and if we lose to Clemson and even Georgia Tech, we’d still be bowl eligible.
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Yeah… I’m not sure what he was thinking but I agree with you
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True, but under those circumstances, Vanderbilt might not have gotten an invite at 6-6.
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If they played against and lost to Clemson and Ga Tech they’d be 7-5.
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I thought they finished the regular season 8-4.
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Yeah, you’re right. Someone said 9 wins and I assumed that meant the regular season. Mea culpa
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They went 4-4 in conference, so assuming the scenario above, we’d replace Wake Forest with GT and Austin Peay with Clemson, leaving alone UAB and UMass. 2 more wins and 2 more losses would be 6-6.
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Ok – 6-6 instead of 8-4 – my bad
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I think we should shut the hell up about Vandy’s shortcomings until we manage to beat them again.
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Did I say anything in my post about Vandy’s shortcomings? I said congrats on a good year, but I didn’t think they were a very good 9-win team because the stats say it. The stats would have them around where Florida is. Their out of conference schedule had Austin Peay, at UMass, UAB, and Wake Forest. They beat us, but your comment that “we should shut the hell up about Vandy’s shortcomings until we manage to beat them again” implies that they own us like UF circa 1995.
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Vandy, like some other SEC teams was the beneficiary of a bunch of poor football playing and coaching.
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Not a snark, but I really am surprised that UF ended up in the black in net yardage, as bad as their offense was.
Their D, when healthy, was pretty special this year, they could have been up there with Mich St and FSU as far as the top defenses in the country. I’m glad they’re losing a good bit of their top D players.
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That UF defense was ferocious before they had the injury issues.
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I have a good buddy of mine that is a big Gator fan. Early in the year we kept talking about how if you combined our offense and their defense, you’d have one of the best college football teams of all time.
In hindsight, it just would have been a team that set unbreakable records in injuries!
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I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at that comment but right on both counts. I would have loved to see our offense at full strength against their defense at full strength (as long as the good guys came out in front in the end).
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Actually defense did….aw fuck it….next year in Jerusalem. 🙂
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Agree with your poll. Good work. Dawgs…what a puzzle. Watching FSU’s D line play in 2nd half kept bringing me back to Dawgs and TG. Past few years watching high school spread offenses I noticed what AU’s coaches do re line play. Key to stopping it and slowing it down in the D line play. they hgave to underatdn the blocks.
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Brings me to this about coach Wilson. Thought his coaching this past year was much better than Rodney Gardner, and again last night in the 4th we saw a Gardner coached line. I’m convinced Jimbo talked to CMR and NS about AU. FSU’s play in 2nd half mirrored Dawgs in 2nd half. Down 18-20 points and come back. Your D has to keep you there.
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You are right, Carolina is #4—in the nation, that is. Congratulations on being the best damn 5-loss team in the country. Get used to it.
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Who did you lose to again?
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+1. Liv by in Greenville SC you get tired of hearing that type of crap. They lose their big players this year so hopefully they regress to their mean.
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Their mean of beating us three years in a row?
Let’s not get cocky guys (swidt?), it’s gonna be a close game next year.
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I would have liked to have seen your record if you lost Mike Davis and his back-up and three wide receivers for extended periods of time and then lost Connor Shaw the week before you played Clemson. Congratulations on the best season in Gamecock history!
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Say, you going with the SC State Champ rings this year, or best team not to make the SECCG (again) version?
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Senator, there is no shortage of “the opposite of superlatives” if you will just read all the comments about Mark Richt this post-season. 😉
To mirror the PP, I’m curious how folks would rank HC’s in the SEC. The way tempatures have been running around the Dawgosphere, I really wonder if CMR would rank higher than…10th?
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From 2nd to 10th in one season? Yeah, that sounds about right for our fanbase.
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I know I’m biased, but I still think Auburn is the 6th best team in the SEC.
If you’ve read “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant” (on which Damn Yankees is loosely based) you know that making a deal with the devil for your team to win it all comes with a catch. He may try to take it all away from you at the last minute. And that is exactly what happened to the War/Tigger/Plainsmen. I enjoyed their choke job thoroughly.
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I enjoyed the end of that game myself…I was about to argue with you about listing Auburn 6th, but when you look at that list above, any of those first six teams have the capability to play any of the others to a draw, so I can kind of get it…
But I still disagree…I thought Auburn showed last night that they earned their ranking – I thought they played with a lot of hustle and discipline. I still hate them like nobody this side of Florida, but it’s unfortunately not as easy with CGM at the helm…he kind of seems like a nice guy.
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When was the last time teams 1-8 in the SEC were so capable of beating one another? That’s a bunch of very talented, flawed-in-their-own-special-way teams that were not very far apart from one another in hindsight. The main difference being the number of breaks the teams at the top (save Alabama, who was clearly the best team on paper) got compared to the teams at the bottom.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say it has never happened given that we just expanded to 14. Certainly not any time in the 10-team era.
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Ha! I didn’t see your comment before my post above. The parity is crazy, though, isn’t it?
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Negaterlatives?
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The SEC haters wil describe the parity as a conference weakness rather than a strength. There are several teams in the conference that could have given FSU the same treatment, or worse, than did Auburn…Given a a few weeks to prepare is huge for leveling things up.
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Sorry, it is hard to take a “power” poll seriously that ranks Vandy ahead of Georgia. Now I get why the national polls rank them higher because it isn’t about “power” or who is the better team with them. Polls have always gone primarily on records and who might have had the higher score on a particular day. If that is what “power” means in this poll, then I misunderstood the intent. But if it is about which team is better and would win a 2 of three, or 4 of 7, or any other like series then Vandy ain’t the bet against UGA. If those two teams were scheduled to play a game, let’s say on a neutral field, and you had to bet your life on the winner (not trying to be dramatic but let’s be real here), which team would you pick? I don’t even think that is a close call for me and that is why I think that rating is political BS. Just a difference of opinions, maybe.
Vandy had a nice year, kudos to them for getting it done. We certainly fell below expectations for a variety of reasons, but fell short nonetheless. But UGA’s 2013 team would truck Vandy’s squad regularly.
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I don’t see how we can be ranked above Vandy when they beat us head-to-head and were clearly the more disciplined team on the field. We can talk all we want about who would have trucked whom, or injuries, or officials, but the simple fact of the matter is that we could very well have won that game and didn’t.
I think Florida should have been ranked ahead of UT for the same reason.
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Florida mid-season, yes. Florida end of season, not so much.
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Very reasonable.
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Yeah, that is very logical. Try arranging all the teams ahead of who the lost to and get back to me in 30 years and tell me when you expect to solve that puzzle. So we are above SC, LSU, but below Vandy who lost to SC, but beat TN who beat lost to SC….. Might not have been a serious comment so I will leave it alone. I will say that was the only game we played that was worse than the bowl game and it still took an SEC official completely blowing a call to give them the opportunity to win despite all our mistakes and other issues. You put your house, life, etc. on Vandy against UGA and then I will believe you are certifiable.
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Dude, you gotta show it on the field. Bottom line is that we didn’t.
And the key is in what you said: “it still took an SEC official completely blowing a call to give them the opportunity to win…” etc. Did it give them the win? No. We didn’t have to give up a TD there. And even the TD they got only closed the score to 27-21. Did the SEC official make us go 3 and out the next possession? Did the SEC official make us give up an ensuing 11-play, 60 yard drive for a field goal to close it to 27-24? Did the SEC official make us go 3 and out and have a bad snap on the punt on our next possession? Did the SEC official make us give up a TD instead of a tying field goal? Did the SEC official make us fumble on our next possession?
We could have won that game with bad SEC officials IF our offense had performed, or IF our defense didn’t do its bend-over-and-break act like it did the whole season, or IF our special teams were anything short of horrible. THAT IS COACHING. And poorly coached teams don’t get ranked above teams that beat them and are better coached.
Do any of you think that our coaching staff would have gotten Vandy to 9 wins? It might be time to start treating them with a little less disdain and recognize when someone’s doing a better job with their personnel than your coaches are doing with yours.
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You are talking about one game, one set/combination of plays and calls. I understand numbers, watched the game, read all the stories, thanks for the recap no one needed. Now the question is, based on what you saw during 2013, who is the better football team? And who would win a game(s) if they played. If they did, and someone forced you to place all your worldly assets on one side or the other, which side would you choose? You are certainly welcome to choose Vandy, but if you were to do so under those circumstances, I would say you might be among the dumbest CFB fans on the planet.
I don’t think you understood the nature of my protest on that ranking. I clearly get it, UGA lost the scoreboard in Nashville, that doesn’t mean Vandy is a better team. Surely you do get that, as well as the response to your other comment about them being ranked higher because they won (that was classic). You do understand we beat some people rated above us, right? So using that logic isn’t really sensible.
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I think I’d have flipped SC and Missouri. Missouri had the (slightly) better record, but lost head to head at home. SC also had the probably the best two OOC wins in the SEC this year over Clemson and UCF.
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Missouri didn’t lose to a sorry UT team, though.
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That’s fair. SC has a bad loss. But they have better wins, Including one over Mizzou. If everything else is equal (and judging by their relative proximity in your poll you think they are close) I’d pick the team that won head to head. But your mileage may vary.
I Can’t wait to see the playoff brain trust tackle these issues next year.
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