My Scout's Better Than You, Anonymous HeismanPundit

G-d bless him for persistence; HeismanPundit has returned to defend Chardonnay & Brie Football against yet another NFL scout who has said something mean about the Pac Ten:

I love how 'a scout' is the be all and end all of all opinions to a layman. I don't know if you have ever met any 'scouts', but not all of them are very knowledgeable of college football. Some are just guys who, frankly, are no different than your average joe. They are generally the worst-paid, lowest on the totem pole in an NFL organization. There are bad scouts and good scouts.

Scouts are impartial; they aren't pro-SEC like me or pro-Pac Ten like you. You haven't been using any impartial sources. Rather, you simply offer your own opinion and frankly, a scout who is paid to make accurate assessments of football talent is better qualified to make the sort of judgments that you and I are making than "anonymous blogger with no stated credentials." So, the fact that some scouts may know more about football than others doesn't change the fact that the scouts are still arguing against a zero, a blank canvas.

Clearly, the scout you quote from is a bad scout if he thinks that most of the SEC is five or six deep at cornerback . What does that mean? That teams in the Pac-10 don't have six corners on their rosters? Does that mean that Vandy, Miss. State, Kentucky, Ole Miss and SC are churning out corners all the time? That their third-stringers are NFL prospects? Don't think so. Why would it matter to an SEC quarterback if the team he is facing has a good third-string corner? It's not like the offense he is running requires a dime secondary package to defend him! As for the SEC corners, no one ever said the league lacks talent and since corner is the position most reliant on talent, then of course there are going to be a lot of corners coming out of that league. But you WILL note that there are very few good quarterbacks not named Manning coming out of that league in the last 10 years. Maybe it's because none of the offensive coordinators coached in the NFL. Which of course backs up my theory that SEC offenses lack the sophistication of Pac-10 offenses.

What the scout is saying is that SEC teams are deeper at corner than Pac Ten teams, which makes them more able to defend against sophisticated passing offenses (and thus acts as a deterrent from SEC teams viewing a passing offense as a panacea.) A team needs 3-4 good corners without injuries; by the end of the season when teams are depleted, then the 5th and 6th corners are relevant. That's certainly relevant when judging a quarterback like Jay Cutler, whose team did have a relatively pass-friendly offense, and it's also relevant when judging a quarterback like Leinart, who went up against crappy secondaries without the depth to handle USC's three- and four-wide looks. That said, as I mentioned in my post, Leinart also performed well against quality secondaries like those of Michigan in '03 and Oklahoma in '04, so that is in his favor. The absence of quality corners in the Pac Ten does tend to indicate that the gaudy offensive totals produced by Pac Ten offenses are the result of those offenses throwing against a series of trained monkeys instead of actual human beings with the ability to run, jump, and bat passes away with opposable thumbs. And if Pac Ten offenses are so much more sophisticated, then shouldn't Pac Ten corners be more prepared for the NFL by having more experience at sophisticated route recognition and zone coverage?

As for the point that SEC defenses have no need for a nickel or dime corner, HP might want to actually watch a game. Urban Meyer's offense, you know, that one that was supposed to come in and dominate the league? They're regularly in three- and four-wide. Tennessee's base formation is three-wide. One of Georgia's two base formations is shotgun and three- or four-wide. Vandy ran a passing offense this year because of Cutler. Al Borges regularly uses multiple receivers. So yes, HP, the days of Bear Bryant coming to the Coliseum to beat USC with the wishbone and then the rest of college football imitating him (although he was only imitating Emory Bellard's offense at Texas) are gone.

As for the lack of quarterbacks from the SEC, it's a shame that the conference hasn't produced anyone the caliber of Kyle Boller or Joey Harrington in recent years.

As for the defensive coordinators, this scout thinks that Pac-10 coordinators haven't coached in the NFL? The list currently includes Pete Carroll, Nick Allioti, Mark Banker, Tom Hayes and DeWayne Walker. That's half of the league's coordinators who have NFL experience. The SEC? They also have five defensive coordinators with NFL experience. Except the SEC has 12 teams and the Pac-10 has 10. So as a percentage, the SEC has fewer defensive coordinators with NFL experience, thus showing once again that the scout was a dumbass and your whole post a complete waste of time.

A waste of time on which HP spent 413 words to "refute." Many apologies for not tackling the important subjects, like a bunch of USC and LSU boosters with more money than sense putting up billboards to show who has a bigger dick.

Finally, you are maybe the worst Devil's Advocate ever of the Gang of Six. If you recall, that group includes only two teams from the pac-10. The rest are from the SEC, Big East, WAC and Independent ranks. Must be fun to keep refuting arguments I never made.

HP bitches that the "Gang of Six" only includes two Pac Ten teams, as if the theory isn't a variant of "West Coast offenses are more sophisticated than SEC offenses" and then in the same message makes the following statement: "Which of course backs up my theory that SEC offenses lack the sophistication of Pac-10 offenses." That's the piece I'm arguing against. To the extent that HP dissociates the "Gang of Six" from that sentiment, he might find some more takers for the theory (although it still suffers from the problem that it's nothing more than looking at the total offense stats and then proclaiming certain offenses to be intellectually superior because they throw to the tight ends.) Until then, his straw man argument is meritless. And considering that HP used the one argument that I came up with for him, I couldn't have been doing a bad job playing Devil's Advocate, could I?

I'm also waiting for HP to explain that Southern Newspapers are far inferior to those on the West Coast and that's why USC's admissions standards for football players aren't as negligible as this article makes them out to be. "Our schemes are so much smarter, even though our players...not so much."