When Al Gore Invented the Internet, This Is What He Had In Mind

This is what happens when a college football blog is authored by someone who actually knows jackshit about Microsoft Excel and web programming instead of a lawyer who takes his twenty-minute morning break from opining on wording of discovery requests to opine on how the Hawks really aren't that bad. Behold, anything you ever wanted to know about third down offense and defense, indexed against the national average and rendered into colorful charts that even a two-year old can understand. My observations:


It's hard to fault Larry Coker for firing his running backs and offensive line coaches when Miami converted third down and one at roughly half the national average. My goodness, there's a lot of red on the Canes' chart. Watching the Miami-FSU game, I could not get past how Miami's dreadful offensive line cost them the game in an instance in which they were otherwise the better team. Apparently, little changed over the course of the season.


Check out the inability of the USC defense to get off the field on third down. I'd like to find a tape of May and Herbstreit waxing poetic about how USC could have broken through several Soviet armies into the Kessel and freed the trapped German 6th Army at Stalingrad, all while holding this chart and cackling ominously.


Steve Spurrier's return to the SEC? Eh, not so much like the first time around. It's a wonder that he got his team to five SEC wins and second in the division. This is either a good sign that he was able to win with a poor team or it's a bad sign that their 2005 performance was a mirage and it's unreasonable to expect them to make the leap from 5-3 to 6-2 or 7-1 in order to win the division.


Want to know why I wanted Michigan to hire John Tenuta? Here you go. A picture of Reggie Ball with the caption "Georgia Tech beat Auburn and Miami on the road with this guy under center" would accomplish the same task, but without the air of sophisticated statistical analysis.




Yeah, I'd say we had a pretty worthy national champion.





I couldn't have seen this one coming. Alabama's offense couldn't convert a third down and their defense refused to allow opponents to convert. Is that why Alabama games turned into punting exhibitions?