Cameron Newton's NFL Prospects: Are We Sure He Is Even That Good?

There is no denying that former Auburn quarterback Cameron Newton turned in a fantastic 2010 college football season, one well deserving of a Heisman Trophy. In his 14 games this season, Newton completed 66.1 percent of his passes, gained an extraordinary 10.2 yards per pass attempt, and threw 30 touchdown passes (10.7 touchdown percentage) to only seven interceptions (2.5 interception percentage). For good measure, Newton also had 264 rush attempts for 1,473 rush yards and a 5.6 yards per rush average that is made more impressive when one remembers that sacks in college count against a quarterback's rush totals.

Newton's fine quarterback play was the main reason why Auburn's offense was so incredibly dominant this season and ended up winning the BCS title. However, one great season in college football is never good enough for anyone to definitively say a quarterback will be a good pro because it fails to eliminate question marks about a player's true talent.

Having one excellent season as a college quarterback is no great feat as plenty of quarterbacks before Newton have done it and most have gone on to either fade into football obscurity or football mediocrity.

Alabama quarterback Greg McElroy in 2009, his first season as Alabama's primary quarterback, which is attempting the most passes or throwing the most passing yards for his team, completed 60.2 percent of his passes, gained 7.7 yards per pass attempt, and threw 17 touchdowns (5.2 touchdown percentage) to four interceptions (1.2 interception percentage). Alabama won a BCS title with McElroy as a quarterback, but his first season as a starter was nothing extraordinary.

Just this past season, however, McElroy improved dramatically, completing 70.9 percent of his passes, gaining 9.5 yards per pass attempt, and throwing 20 touchdowns (6.4 touchdown percentage) to five interceptions (1.6 interception percentage). McElroy's season was every bit as great as Newton's, and yet no one is talking about him as a top quarterback prospect because there is no certainty about which season is more representative of his ability. McElroy is just one quarterback who put together a great season.

Southern Methodist sophomore quarterback Kyle Padron exploded on the college football scene last season as a freshman. Over the last seven games of 2009, Padron completed 67.2 percent of his passes, gained 9.6 yards per pass attempt, and threw 10 touchdowns (5.0 touchdown percentage) to 4 interceptions (2.0 interception percentage).

In the season that just ended, Padron's numbers fell off precipitously, and he completed only 59.4 percent of his passes, gained just 7.5 yards per pass attempt, and threw 31 touchdowns (6.1 touchdown percentage) to 14 interceptions (2.8 interception percentage). Think how foolish it would have been if after Padron's freshman campaign, which was every bit as good as Newton's 2010 season, we would have anointed him as a top quarterback prospect. Padron's one excellent season now does not seem indicative of his true talent.

Current Carolina Panthers quarterback and former Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen also had one excellent college football season. In his junior year, which turned out to be his last collegiate season, Clausen completed 68.0 percent of his passes, gained 8.8 yards per pass attempt, and threw 28 touchdowns (6.6 touchdown percentage) to four interceptions (.9 interception percentage).

Clausen's extremely efficient junior season came out of nowhere based on the fact he was a below average to average passer in his other two seasons at Notre Dame. His freshman season, in games as Notre Dame's primary quarterback, Clausen completed 58.0 percent of his passes, gained a pathetic 5.3 yards per pass attempt, and threw seven touchdown passes (5.5 touchdown percentage) to four interceptions (3.1 interception percentage).

Clausen's sophomore effort was little better as he completed 60.9 percent of his passes, gained 7.2 yards per pass attempt, and threw 25 touchdowns (5.7 touchdown percentage) to 17 interceptions (3.9 interception percentage).

Before Clausen's excellent junior season, he had spent more time being a mediocre quarterback, but that still did not keep him from being great for one magical season.

Despite Clausen's impressive junior season at Notre Dame, based on his play this season for the Panthers, when it looked most of the times as if he had never played quarterback before in his life, it is obvious Clausen has more mediocrity in him than excellence.

Former Oakland Raiders quarterback and former LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell, who many consider as the biggest draft bust in NFL history although he never should have been selected so highly in the first place, also had one great season as a college football quarterback. His junior season was one in which he completed 67.8 percent of his passes, gained 9.2 yards per pass attempt, and threw 28 touchdowns (8.2 touchdown percentage) to eight interceptions (2.3 interception percentage). Again, that season is comparable to Newton's 2010 year.

Russell, however, was not nearly so good in his other two seasons as LSU's primary quarterback. In his freshman season, Russell was pretty awful, as he completed a lousy 50.3 percent of his passes, gained 7.5 yards per pass attempt, and threw nine touchdowns (7.0 touchdown percentage) to two interceptions (1.6 interception percentage).

Russell's sophomore season was better than his freshman one, but still not one that even whispered that here is a future star NFL quarterback. In 2005, Russell completed only 60.5 percent of his passes, gained 7.9 yards per pass attempt, and threw 15 touchdowns (4.8 touchdown percentage) to nine interceptions (2.9 interception percentage).

Once again, Russell's college career proves that even a quarterback who is average at best in his other seasons can put it all together for one great season.

Current Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and former University of Houston quarterback Kevin Kolb is another quarterback whose ordinary seasons did not prevent him from having one great year.

Kolb spent the first three seasons of his collegiate career displaying middling accuracy. As a freshman, Kolb completed 60.9 percent of his passes, gained 8.7 yards per pass attempt, and threw 25 touchdowns (7.0 touchdown percentage) to six interceptions (1.7 interception percentage). For his sophomore year, Kolb's completion percentage dropped to 56.1 percent, he gained 7.8 yards per pass attempt, and threw 11 touchdowns (3.1 touchdown percentage) to six interceptions (1.7 interception percentage). As a junior, Kolb completed 60.5 percent of his passes, gained 7.8 yards per pass attempt, and threw 19 touchdowns (4.5 touchdown percentage) to 15 interceptions (3.6 interception percentage).

While none of Kolb's first three college seasons were anything other than average, he still managed to have one great college football season.

If those examples are not enough to convince you of how unimportant having just one great college football season is in determining how good of a quarterback a player really is, ask Mark Sanchez and the New York Jets if they would not both be better off had Sanchez spent another year at USC honing his quarterback craft.

In Sanchez's one year as a starting quarterback in college, he had an extremely effective season, completing 65.8 percent of his passes, gaining 8.8 yards per attempt, and throwing 34 touchdowns (9.3 touchdown percentage) to 10 interceptions (2.7 interception percentage).

Since that year, in his two seasons as the New York Jets starting quarterback, Sanchez has not come within a marathon's worth of miles of matching any of those college statistics for an extended period of time, and has actually been one of the worst passing quarterbacks in the NFL.

If you look at the college careers of the current elite crop of quarterbacks, be it Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, Philip Rivers, or Drew Brees, you will find quarterbacks who started at least two years in college and put together consistently excellent seasons with no great difference between any two seasons. What you will not find is just one great season with no other seasons of equal production to back it up.

Not only does Newton only have one year of starting experience, but he was only asked to throw 20 passes per game, 280 pass attempts over 14 games, during that one year so he does not even have the experience of truly carrying an offense with his arm; those 280 pass attempts are the epitome of a sample size that is too small to gauge a college quarterback's pro prospects. No NFL team is going to have great success throwing only 20 times a game, which is all Newton is familiar with.

In addition, there were slight negative correlations between Newton's number of pass attempts and his completion percentage (-0.122) and also his number of pass attempts and his yards per pass attempt (-0.208) so there is some evidence that the more times Newton was asked to throw, the worse he got as a quarterback.

For all of his athletic ability, Newton is not special enough that he should not be examined less rigorously as a quarterback simply because he won a Heisman Trophy and a national championship in the same year or because he is 6'6 and has a very strong arm. Under such rigorous examination, the only thing that can surely be said about Newton is no one knows how good a quarterback he really is.

NFL franchises should never draft a quarterback, let alone using a high draft pick on one, based mostly on a player's potential; leave drafting mostly on potential to the NBA. Instead an NFL team should know exactly what kind of quarterback they will be getting. With Newton, that level of certainty is an impossibility, rendering him unworthy of a high draft pick.

Blaine Gabbert's NFL Prospects: What Kind Of Pro Quarterback Will He Be?

To borrow a scene from Anchorman, when former University of Missouri quarterback Blaine Gabbert declared he would forgo his senior season to enter the 2011 NFL draft, I thought he was kidding and that it was all a joke. I even wrote in my diary that Blaine Gabbert told a very funny joke today and I laughed about it later. However, as time passes and Gabbert remains committed to entering the draft, I am left with no other option but to take his intentions seriously and predict just what kind of NFL quarterback he projects as.

Gabbert's play in his two years as starting quarterback for the Missouri Tigers provides strong indicators that if an NFL team uses a high draft pick to select him, it will be both a waste of a high draft pick and a waste of a large amount of money, and if he is ever given the chance to start for an NFL franchise, he will play poorly.

Gabbert's 2009 sophomore season, his first year as a starter, was one in which he completed 58.9 percent of his passes, gained 8.1 yards per pass attempt and 8.2 adjusted yards per pass attempt, and posted a 5.4 touchdown percentage (24 touchdowns) and 2.0 interception percentage (nine interceptions).

A college quarterback in a pro-style offense who only completes 58.9 percent of his pass attempts is bad enough, but for a quarterback playing in a passer-friendly spread offense, that completion percentage can best be described as atrocious. Gabbert's completion percentage was also only good enough to rank 61st out of the 115 qualifying FBS quarterbacks, meaning he was below-average in accuracy.

Gabbert's only saving grace his sophomore season was his 8.1 yards per pass attempt, which ranked him 24th out of the 115 quarterbacks. Unfortunately for Gabbert, yards per pass attempt do not translate to the NFL game as well as completion percentage so the import of his impressive yards per attempt mark is lessened.

Following up his less than stellar first year as a starter, Gabbert actually regressed as a quarterback in 2010. Right away, NFL teams should question his decision-making ability. Any player who thinks the right time to play in the NFL, a far more difficult level of football than college, is after he has shown himself to be getting worse as a quarterback should not be trusted to lead a team.

In his second year as a starting quarterback, Gabbert did manage to improve his completion percentage to 63.4 percent (a 7.6 percent increase), but he did so artificially. A legitimate improvement in accuracy would have been an increase in a quarterback's completion percentage while maintaining or increasing his yards per pass attempt.

Gabbert's yards per pass attempt, however, fell in 2010 to 6.7 (17.8 percent decrease) and his yards per completion fell from 13.7 to 10.6 (22.6 percent decrease). The only reason Gabbert's completion percentage increased is because this season he was throwing shorter, easier to complete passes and even with those easier passes, his increase in completion percentage could not match the decrease he experienced in yards per pass attempt and yards per completion, meaning he had a worse passing season.

Additionally, Gabbert became less proficient at throwing touchdowns with his touchdown total dropping to 16 and his touchdown percentage dropping to 3.4 percent (37.0 percent decrease), a fact made worse by the fact his 1.9 interception percentage is almost identical to his 2009 mark.

Even if one were to judge Gabbert's career solely by itself, it is not the resume of a player any NFL team should wish to have on its roster, but Gabbert's play becomes decidedly more unacceptable when one takes into account the play of his predecessor, Chase Daniel.

Daniel and Gabbert both played in the same offense at the University of Missouri and if Gabbert were truly an NFL-caliber quarterback, it is not too much to expect he would have put together a better career than someone who was not even drafted.

Instead, it is Daniel who blows away Gabbert in quarterbacking proficiency. Daniel completed 68.5 percent of his passes as Missouri's primary quarterback, gained 7.9 yards per pass attempt and 8.1 adjusted yards per pass attempt, and posted a 6.5 touchdown percentage and a 2.5 interception percentage. All of those numbers, except for Daniel's interception percentage which he makes up for with a higher touchdown percentage, are superior to Gabbert's career 61.2 completion percentage, 7.4 yards per pass attempt, 7.4 adjusted yards per pass attempt, 4.3 touchdown percentage, and 2.0 interception percentage.

Daniel's advantages in completion percentage and touchdown percentage are actually statistically significant ones.

Daniel was a much better pro prospect for the 2009 NFL draft than Gabbert is for the upcoming 2011 NFL draft and the fact he was not regarded as such was a major oversight; the reasons why he was overlooked are the exact reasons why some foolish NFL team will draft Gabbert despite his middling college career statistics: height and arm strength.

Gabbert stands 6'5, four inches taller than Daniel, and supposedly has a stronger arm that is able to make all the NFL throws, which is what far too many think is all a quarterback needs to play in the NFL; although in Gabbert's case, he will not make those throws accurately. Almost every single NFL quarterback is tall and has elite-level arm strength and yet, there are still terrible quarterbacks. If height and arm strength were really so important, then quarterbacks of equal height and equal arm strength would have equal careers, but that is not how it is.

Accuracy, as measured by completion percentage, is what should be used to distinguish quarterbacks more than anything else and Gabbert does not possess enough of this attribute to warrant getting a chance to start for an NFL team, or even make an NFL roster.

Gabbert is destined for a very undistinguished, brief, and insignificant NFL career because college quarterbacks who in their better season were not even top 30 in production and were below-average in their other season do not perform well against the best football players in the world.

Auburn Tigers Will Win BCS Title And Here Is Why

Most would agree that the Auburn Tigers and the Oregon Ducks are the two best college football teams in the nation. Yet, besides just knowing these two teams are the best, it is also worthwhile to take a truly comprehensive look at just how dominant these teams have been in their games and which team has been more dominant than the other. By dominant, what I mean is how well each team performed against their opponents in comparison to how well their opponents played in every other game besides the ones where they were facing Oregon or Auburn; in simpler terms, it is gauging how poorly a team makes its opponents play.

On the offensive side of the ball, Oregon completed 62.1 percent of their passes, gained 7.9 yards per pass attempt and 8.7 adjusted yards per attempt, averaged 6.1 yards per rush, accumulated 12.7 yards per completion, had an 8.2 touchdown percentage and a 2.0 interception percentage, and were sacked on 1.9 percent of their pass attempts.

In every game besides the ones in which they played Oregon, Oregon's opponents allowed their opponents to complete 59.5 percent of their passes, gain 7.2 yards per pass attempt and 6.8 adjusted yards per pass attempt, average 4.4 yards per rush, accumulate 12.0 yards per completion, post a 5.1 touchdown percentage and 3.0 interception percentage, score 49.3 points per game, and they sacked opposing quarterbacks on 6.7 percent of their pass attempts.

That means that when facing Oregon, due to the Ducks' high-powered offensive attack, teams allowed a 4.4 percent higher completion percentage, 9.7 percent more yards per pass attempt, 27.9 percent more adjusted yards per pass attempt, 38.6 percent more yards per rush, 5.8 percent more yards per completion, a 60.8 percent higher touchdown percentage, and 84.0 percent more points per game. Oregon's opponents were also 33.3 percent less likely to intercept a pass from an Oregon quarterback and 77.6 percent less likely to sack an Oregon quarterback than they were to intercept and sack a quarterback in other games.

There are a couple of things that should immediately jump out at you after looking at these statistics. The first is how much the Oregon offense relies upon their vaunted rushing attack led by LaMichael James. They depend on their ground game's domination much more than they do upon quarterback Darren Thomas' ability to throw the ball efficiently.

The second noteworthy conclusion to draw is that Thomas is not the kind of quarterback who should strike great fear in the hearts of any defense. In terms of passing accuracy and value of his passes as measured by yards per pass attempt and yards per completion, Thomas is really not that much better than any other quarterback Oregon's opponents have faced. Actually, Thomas has only completed 60.7 percent of his passes, which is not indicative of an elite quarterbacking talent.

Where Thomas is dangerous as a passer is in his knack for throwing a high number of touchdown passes relative to his pass attempts and barely throwing any interceptions. He is also virtually impossible to sack.

If Auburn wants to shut down Oregon's offense, the Tigers should do all they can to make Thomas beat them with his arm. It is unlikely he would be able to do so.

As dominant as Oregon has been on offense this season, what Auburn has put together on offense makes Oregon's look almost pedestrian in comparison. During games against Auburn, Auburn's opponents allowed a 18.5 percent higher completion percentage (66.7 percent to 56.3 percent), 50.0 percent more yards per attempt (10.5 to 7.0), 85.7 percent more adjusted yards per pass attempt (11.7 to 6.3), 67.6 percent more yards per rush (6.2 to 3.7), a 141.3 percent higher touchdown percentage (11.1 percent to 4.6 percent), 37.8 percent lower interception percentage (2.3 percent to 3.7 percent), and 85.7 percent more points per game (42.7 to 23.0) than in games where they faced anyone else. Auburn quarterbacks, however, were 1.4 percent more likely to be sacked than other quarterbacks.

Not only has the Auburn offense been more dominant than Oregon's offense in every category except interception percentage, but it is also a harder one to stop because the Tigers can run and pass at almost the same dominant level. Unlike Oregon where there is a pretty sizable drop-off between their proficiency in running the ball and passing, Auburn experiences no such difficulties.

Try to bottle up Auburn's rushing game and Cam Newton and his receivers will just hurt you with big pass plays. Focus solely on stopping the big pass play and Auburn will just run the ball at will.

Despite the Herculean task stopping Auburn's offense is, Oregon's defense will be charged with just that task Monday night, and the defense should be able to keep Auburn from running and passing roughshod over it and completely embarrassing it. Although Oregon's offense is the one getting all the publicity, Oregon's defense has been equally dominant, if not more so.

Compared to how opposing offenses performed against Oregon as opposed to the other teams on their schedules, they experienced a 10.4 percent decrease in completion percentage (59.7 percent to 53.5 percent), 19.7 percent decrease in yards per pass attempt (7.1 to 5.4), 38.2 percent decrease in adjusted yards per pass attempt (6.8 to 4.2), 10.9 percent decrease in yards per completion (11.9 to 10.6), 21.4 percent decrease in yards per rush (4.2 to 3.3), 44.2 percent decrease in touchdown percentage (5.2 percent to 2.9 percent), 46.7 percent increase in interception percentage (3.0 percent to 4.4 percent), 4.5 percent decrease in sack percentage (6.7 percent to 6.4 percent), and 46.2 percent decrease in points scored per game (26.6 to 18.4).

As you can see, the Oregon defense is equally adept at stopping opponents' rushing and passing attacks as long as you do not expect them to sack the quarterback. However, even with their excellent defensive statistics, if they play in the same dominating fashion against Auburn, Auburn's offense is still potent enough to move the ball well enough to score points.

Auburn's defense, too, has seen its opponents struggle to move the ball against them although they have been not nearly so outstanding as the Oregon defense. Still, Auburn's opponents underwent a 12.7 percent decrease in yards per pass attempt (7.9 to 6.9), 9.2 percent decrease in adjusted yards per pass attempt (7.6 to 6.9), a 15.4 percent decrease in yards per reception (13.0 to 11.0), 16.9 percent decrease in touchdown percentage (5.9 percent to 4.9 percent), 12.1 percent increase in sack percentage (5.8 percent to 6.5 percent), and 20.7 percent decrease in points per game (30.9 to 24.5) compared to their statistics in all other games.

On the other hand, opposing quarterbacks have experienced a 2.8 increase in completion percentage (61.0 percent to 62.7 percent) and a 36.4 percent decrease in interception percentage (3.3 percent to 2.1 percent) relative to their performances in other games. If there is going to be an interception thrown in the game, it is much more likely to be thrown by Cam Newton than Darren Thomas.

Auburn's defense's greatest strength is in its ability to stop the run, which will come in handy since Oregon's offense's greatest strength is running the ball. Where Auburn is susceptible on defense is when the Tigers are called upon to defend the pass, which should surprise no one who has watched any of their games. Luckily for Auburn, where they are weaker is also where Oregon's offense is weaker.

The matchup between Auburn's defense and Oregon's offense will pit strength against strength and weakness against weakness and Auburn's defense is a lot more equipped to stop Oregon's offense than Oregon's defense is to stop Auburn's offense.

So far, Oregon and Auburn have been compared as if they both faced competition of equal ability, but that is not the case. With only two exceptions, Oregon's opponents' defenses were better at containing yards per completion (12.0 to 12.4) and Oregon's opponents' offenses were better at avoiding interceptions (3.0 interception percentage to 3.3 interception percentage), Auburn faced a better quality of opponent. Therefore, the two team's statistics have to be adjusted in order to determine how they compare to each other on an equal level.

After the adjustment, the advantage Auburn already has on offense becomes even more pronounced. They increase their already superior dominance over Oregon's offense in completion percentage, yards per attempt, adjusted yards per attempt, yards per completion, yards per rush, touchdown percentage, interception percentage, and points. There are not enough compliments that can be heaped upon the Auburn offense to describe how incredible their production has been this season.

Oregon's offense is still much better at avoiding sacks, but that one advantage is nothing compared to Auburn's multiple ones.

Defensively after making the adjustments, it is Oregon who has proven themselves more adept than Auburn at stopping opponents. Oregon's defense has been a lot better than Auburn's defense in yards per pass attempt allowed, adjusted yards per pass attempt allowed, completion percentage allowed, touchdown percentage allowed, interception percentage, and points allowed.

It is not all bad news for Auburn's defense, though. The Tigers' defense is better than Oregon's defense in yards per completion allowed and sack percentage and equal to Oregon in stopping the run.

The advantage Oregon holds on defense, however, does not mean as much as the advantage that Auburn holds on offense because Oregon is just proving themselves to be better than the weaker part of Auburn's team. Auburn is even better by a vast margin than the stronger part of Oregon's team.

Plus the Oregon defense will not be playing against the Auburn defense; it will be facing the Auburn offense that has shown itself to be nonpareil this season as they have put up amazing numbers against what were otherwise stingy defenses. As dominant as Oregon's defense has shown itself to be even after the adjustments for quality of opponent, Auburn's offense is more unstoppable. It will be asking too much to expect Oregon's defense to contain Auburn as much as it will need to for the Ducks to emerge victorious.

On the other hand, it will not be asking too much for Auburn's defense to contain Oregon's offense since Oregon's offense is fairly one-dimensional and will not be able to effectively attack Auburn's defense where it is weakest; namely, against the pass.

When the Auburn Tigers square off against the Oregon Ducks Monday night, because of their extremely dominant offense, they will have the best unit on the field on either side of the ball and that should be enough for the Tigers to win the game.

Les Miles Has Virtually Matched Everything Nick Saban Did At LSU

The next time someone questions LSU Tigers head football coach Les Miles' coaching acumen, he should ask them what else they expect from him. Miles might not be the greatest college football head coach to ever walk the planet, but under his tenure, his LSU teams continue to be nationally prominent and perhaps most importantly, in multiple statistical categories, Miles' LSU teams (2005-present) have either surpassed, matched, or come very near to matching the performance of Nick Saban's LSU teams (2000-2004).

Nick Saban is generally agreed upon to be one of college football's best two or three head coaches and for good reason, since he has won two BCS championships. Therefore, it is no great leap to draw the conclusion that another head coach who was able to largely match what Nick Saban did with a school's football program must be a pretty good head coach in his own right.

Offensively, Miles' LSU quarterbacks have been statistically significantly better in completion percentage with their 58.9 completion percentage, bettering the 56.0 completion percentage Saban's LSU quarterbacks had; Saban's LSU quarterbacks have been statistically significantly better in yards per completion (13.8 to 12.6). Saban's LSU quarterbacks can also claim superiority in avoiding sacks with a 5.2 sack percentage; Miles' LSU quarterbacks have not been as proficient in avoiding sacks as their 6.5 sack percentage indicates.

Other than in those three categories, there are really no great differences between the two coaches' passing offenses. Despite having that extra 1.2 yards per completion in their pockets, Saban's LSU quarterbacks have only the slightest edge over Miles' LSU quarterbacks in yards per pass attempt (7.7 to 7.4). Also, the two different sets of quarterbacks have been identical in touchdown percentage, with Saban's LSU quarterbacks and Miles' LSU quarterbacks both posting a 5.9 touchdown percentage, and virtually identical in interception percentages as Saban's LSU quarterbacks have a 3.2 interception percentage to Miles' LSU quarterbacks' 3.1 interception percentage.

For all that is made of the recent struggles of Jordan Jefferson and Jarrett Lee, it is important to remember that Saban's LSU quarterbacks struggled just as mightily and never set the world on fire with efficient passing.

When it comes to rushing, Miles' offenses and their 4.4 yards per rush are only incrementally better than Saban's offenses and their 4.3 yards per rush.

As a complete team, Miles' LSU squads have scored 30.8 points per game, almost two points per game better than Saban's LSU squads' points per game average of 28.9.

Defensively, it is almost the same story with the two coaches' teams nearly matching each other step for step. The biggest difference is in favor of Miles' LSU teams. They have been statistically significantly better in sacking opposing quarterbacks; their 8.1 sack percentage on opposing quarterbacks is a big improvement over Saban's LSU defenses' 6.4 sack percentage.

In other categories, the two teams are remarkably similar. They are most closely identical in completion percentage, with Saban's LSU defenses allowing opposing quarterbacks to complete 50.0 percent of their passes compared to Miles' LSU defenses allowing opposing quarterbacks to complete 50.5 percent of their passes, and also yards allowed per pass attempt, with Saban's teams allowing 6.0 yards per pass attempt and Miles' teams allowing 5.9 yards per pass attempt. Miles' teams have a small edge in yards allowed per completion (11.6 to 12.1).

The two coaches' teams have also nearly duplicated each other in touchdown-to-interception ratio. Saban's defenses have allowed a 4.0 touchdown percentage and 3.9 interception percentage so they have come very close to intercepting as many pass attempts as they allowed to be turned into touchdowns (85 touchdowns to 82 interceptions). Miles' defenses have a 3.6 touchdown percentage and 3.6 interception percentage as they have intercepted as many passes as they have allowed to turn into touchdowns (86 touchdowns to 86 interceptions).

Saban's teams and Miles' teams are mirror images of each other when it comes to yards per rush allowed; each coach's teams have allowed 3.3 yards per rush.

In terms of points allowed, Sabans' LSU teams have allowed opponents to score 17.7 points per game, slightly better than the 18.3 points per game that Miles' LSU teams have allowed. Still, Miles' LSU teams have a small advantage in overall point differential since they have outscored opponents by 12.5 points per game; Saban's LSU teams outscored opponents by 11.2 points per game.

When it comes to only SEC games, the same differences in the same categories that occurred in their overall statistics exist, with the exception of yards per rush for the two coaches' offenses and overall point differential.

Miles' LSU quarterbacks still have their statistically significant advantage in completion percentage (58.0 percent to 55.2 percentage) and are still within spitting distance when it comes to yards per pass attempt (7.2 to 7.6). Saban's offenses continue to have a statistically significant advantage in yards per completion (13.9 to 12.3).

Both coaches' quarterbacks get sacked more in SEC games and Saban's quarterbacks continue to get sacked less (5.6 sack percentage to 6.9 sack percentage). Also, Saban's quarterbacks have a small advantage in touchdown percentage (5.6 touchdown percentage to 5.3 interception percentage) while Miles' quarterbacks have a small advantage in interception percentage (3.4 interception percentage to 3.6 interception percentage) so it basically evens out in the end.

Against SEC teams, Saban's running backs still averaged 4.3 yards per rush just like they did against all teams. Conversely, Miles' running backs have seen their overall yards per rush drop from 4.4 per carry to 4.0 per carry.

Defensively, Les Miles' LSU teams and Saban's LSU teams see their defensive performances continue to exhibit more similarities than differences. Miles' defenses maintain their statistically significant edge in sack percentage (8.9 sack percentage to 6.1 sack percentage), but in all other areas, the differences are minimal.

With Les Miles' LSU defenses' statistics listed first, here are how the two coaches' teams stack up against each other defensively in SEC play: completion percentage allowed (51.3 percent to 50.8 percent), yards per pass attempt allowed (6.4 to 6.4), yards per completion allowed (12.4 to 12.6), touchdown percentage allowed (4.4 percent to 4.5 percent), interception percentage allowed (3.9 percent to 3.9 percent), and yards per rush (3.5 to 3.6).

Nick Saban's teams do have a tiny lead in overall SEC point differential; they outscored their SEC foes by 6.7 points per game while Miles' teams have outscored their SEC opponents by 6.0 points per game. Still, that is no great discrepancy by any means.

With what Les Miles has done during his tenure at LSU, either matching, surpassing, or almost matching virtually everything Nick Saban's LSU teams did, he deserves a lot more credit for his coaching ability from all college football enthusiasts.

Clemson should have let Kyle Parker quit on the team

If Kyle Parker really did contemplate leaving the Clemson football team before their bowl game and concentrating solely on baseball this month, the Clemson coaching staff and players should have helped him pack his bags, thanked him for his sub-par quarterbacking play, and told him not to bother to return. Despite what Kyle Parker, Clemson football officials, sports media, and far too many football fans may believe, he has no future in football for the simple fact that he is a bad college quarterback.

Last year, the first thing anyone mentioned when discussing Kyle Parker was how he hit twenty home runs for the Clemson baseball team and then followed that up by throwing twenty touchdown passes for the Clemson football squad. Yes, that was an impressive feat for a dual-sport athlete, but it should not overshadow what else occurred during Parker's first year as Clemson's starting quarterback, namely his below-average passing ability.

In his freshman season, Parker only completed 55.6% of his passes and had 6.8 yards per pass attempt. There is never a circumstance where such paltry numbers are indicative of elite quarterbacking play and the 2009 season was no exception. Of the 115 FBS quarterbacks who attempted enough passes to qualify (average of 14 pass attempts per team game), Kyle Parker ranked 95th in completion percentage and 80th in yards per pass attempt, far below the median .593 completion percentage and 7.3 yards per attempt.

Parker was not just a below-average quarterback his freshman year; he was downright abysmal as a passer.

Perhaps you are thinking that Parker's freshman season was a year of growing pains as he adjusted to the college football game and that he would make a leap as a passer as a sophomore. Actually, the opposite is true since Parker has regressed as a passer in a couple of ways. While he did improve his completion percentage slightly, completing 57.1% of his passes, his yards per pass attempt dropped to 6.4, meaning there has been less value per pass attempt in his sophomore campaign.

Also, his twenty touchdowns in his freshman season were a thing of the past as Parker has only thrown twelve touchdown passes in twelve games. His decreasing ability to find the end zone through the air is reflected in a decline in his touchdown percentage, the percentage of touchdowns thrown when attempting a pass. Parker's freshman season saw him with a .054 touchdown percentage; as a sophomore, he has only managed a .037 touchdown percentage.

Since his interception percentage, the percentage of times intercepted when attempting a pass, has remained basically the same (freshman year: .033 interception percentage; sophomore year: .031 interception percentage), his drop in touchdown production is even more harmful to Clemson.

Furthermore, Parker has continued his mediocre play as a sophomore when he is compared to his peers. There are 114 FBS qualifying quarterbacks for the ongoing 2010 season, and Kyle Parker ranks 80th among them in completion percentage and 92nd in yards per pass attempt. The median marks in those categories are a .603 completion percentage and 7.2 yards per pass attempt.

One poor statistical season can be forgiven if it is then followed up by at least two excellent statistical ones, but with two abysmal quarterbacking seasons on his resume, there is simply no getting around the fact Kyle Parker is not cut out for a long-term career in football.

Lastly, Parker actually does have a bright professional future in baseball so there is actually no reason for him to continue to play football, a sport he has struggled at anyway. In his baseball career at Clemson, especially in his freshman and junior seasons, Parker has shown elite ability in both getting on-base and hitting for power, two skills that will ensure him success in his baseball future.

The best thing he could do for the Clemson football program is to quit wasting its time with his shoddy play, thereby allowing them to move in a new direction and give Tajh Boyd a chance to begin life as the starting quarterback. Mediocre quarterbacks like Parker are eminently replaceable so it is not as if Clemson will even feel his absence that greatly.

Examining Four Vastly Overhyped Quarterbacks

As Vladimir Lenin once said, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." This proof by assertion logical fallacy is running rampant across the college football landscape as at least four quarterbacks are receiving undue and undeserved hype as once again people are making the mistake of valuing physical tools over actual performance.

The quarterback who has been the recipient of the most undeserved praise is senior University of Washington quarterback Jake Locker. Based on absolutely nothing that he has actually done on the football field, which is the best way to truly evaluate the pro potential of a quarterback or any player really, Locker is projected as the top quarterback in the 2011 draft.

By now, I should be used to overrated quarterbacks going too high in the NFL draft (see Matthew Stafford, Matt Ryan, and Josh Freeman for starters), but any objective observer should be able to see why Locker is simply not good enough to succeed in the NFL, especially once you take into consideration the fact he has struggled so mightily in the inferior college game.

Locker possesses skills quarterbacks do not necessarily need (extreme athleticism and running) and does not possess the one skill quarterbacks absolutely need (accuracy). In Locker's best season, which took place last season, he only had a 58.2 completion percentage on 7.09 yards per pass attempt. Elite quarterbacks in college football simply do not complete less than 60 percent of their passes; usually, they are at 63 percent and higher. The fact Locker did not even come close to that mark speaks to his mediocrity as a passer. Since the NFL is a passing league, there is no way he should be highly regarded as a future NFL quarterback.

In the case of junior University of Arkansas quarterback Ryan Mallett, people are once again being fooled by size and arm strength. True, Ryan Mallett is both big (6'6, 238 pounds) with great arm strength, but he is also incredibly inaccurate and inconsistent as his 55.8 completion percentage demonstrates. When such a low completion percentage is mixed with a high yards per pass attempt average like Mallett's 9.00 mark, it means that while a quarterback is giving his team a good share of big plays he is just as often throwing incompletions and killing the team's offense.

Since it is far easier to remember a forty-yard touchdown pass than all of the incompletions before it, people tend to focus only on Mallett's good plays to the detriment of their evaluation of him as a player. If he were a truly elite player, his statistics would look more like Sam Bradford's who paired a 67.9 completion percentage with 9.19 yards per pass attempt. Mallett's inconsistency and inaccuracy should scare people off from anointing him as a great quarterback.

Stanford University quarterback Andrew Luck has a similar resume as Ryan Mallett, which does not speak well in his favor. Last season, Luck completed 56.3% of his passes and had 8.94 yards per pass attempt so he was also a big-play or incompletion type of quarterback. Although some people think that is good enough to put him on the top of an NFL draft board, I do not. Luck will need to improve greatly over the next two seasons in order to justify all the hype that is currently being heaped on his below-average quarterback shoulders.

As much as people might like to see junior Ohio State University quarterback Terrelle Pryor succeed, there is no indication it will ever happen. Last season, when Pryor was actually asked to throw a significant amount of passes per game (22.7 per game), he only had a completion percentage of 56.6 and 7.10 yards per pass attempt. Those are mediocre numbers, not ones that give any sort of indication he should be competing for a Heisman trophy.

Most of this hype is based on Pryor's Rose Bowl performance against Oregon where he completed 62.2% of his thirty-seven pass attempts and netted 7.19 yards per pass attempt on the way to 266 yards. The fact that so much is being made of what would be an ordinary game for a truly elite college quarterback really speaks to how disappointing a passer Pryor is. Just because a C student gets an A on a test does not magically turn that student into an A student. The same goes for mediocre quarterbacks who have good games; at the end of the day, they are still mediocre.

For Jake Locker the ship has sailed and it is too late now for him to enter the rarefied air of great college quarterbacks; he is the below average passer he will always be. For the rest, however, if they can make significant improvements in their passing numbers, then they might be actual viable draft prospects instead of just being overrated draft prospects.

Mark Ingram Is Superior to Trent Richardson

A popular sentiment those talking about Alabama's two stud running backs, Mark Ingram and Trent Richardson, have espoused whenever discussing the two players is that Richardson might be the better runner of the two despite Mark Ingram winning the Heisman Trophy. If Richardson is really the better running back, he certainly has a funny way of showing it since this past season he was clearly the inferior runner on the field.

As I have done recently in my two posts about the three first-round running backs of the 2010 NFL draft and Reggie Bush, I am using the standard success rate devised by Football Outsiders where successful runs are 40% of first down yardage, 60% of second down yardage, and 100% of third and fourth down yardages. Although, when a team goes for it on fourth down, I only ask that the runner gain 80% of third down yardage in order to classify it as a successful run.

Using this success rate alone, Ingram and Richardson were virtually identical in efficiency. Ingram was successful on 54.6% of his 271 runs while Richardson was successful on 54.5% of his 145 runs.

However, success rate for running backs has some of the same flaws that batting average has for baseball players. Just like batting average doesn't tell you the nature of a player's hits, success rate alone does not tell you the nature of a running back's runs.

That is why I also take into consideration how many extra yards per successful run and how many yards needed per unsuccessful runs a running back has. It is not extremely advanced, but it does the job.

It is in average extra yards per successful run and average yards needed per unsuccessful run where Ingram distances himself from Richardson. On Ingram's successful runs, he surpassed the minimum yardage by an average of 6.7 yards. Richardson's 5.0 extra yards per successful run looks pretty pedestrian by comparison. Richardson simply lacked Ingram's ability to break long runs on a consistent basis last year.

Ingram also did not fail by as much when he did fail. He came up short by an average of only 2.7 yards per unsuccessful run, which is a very good mark and much better than Richardson who came up short by an average of 3.6 yards per unsuccessful run. For a supposedly elite running back, Richardson comes up short by far too much.

Unless Richardson improves this upcoming college football season, Ingram will continue to be more productive and deserving of the nine extra carries he gets per game.

Revisiting Reggie Bush

After a widely acknowledged stellar college football career at the University of Southern California, Reggie Bush has largely struggled in the NFL as a running back for the New Orleans Saints. His struggles prompted me to take a look back at his college football statistics to see if there were hints that he would under-perform on the professional level. As with my look at the three first-round running backs chosen in the NFL draft, I used success rate to truly gauge how valuable his runs were.

Reggie Bush's three seasons each took on an identity of their own. In his freshman season, for the seventy-nine runs I had play-by-play data on, he had a success rate of 53.1%, averaged 6.4 extra yards per successful run, and came up short by an average of 4.6 yards per unsuccessful run; unfortunately, I could not find the play-by-play data for his 2003 game against Arizona where he rushed for 69 yards on 11 carries with a long run of 20 yards. His first year in college, he was a pretty consistent runner, but did not explode for too many long runs.

His sophomore season was almost the exact opposite. Bush had a success rate of 49.7%, averaged 8.2 extra yards per successful run, and came up short by an average of 5.1 yards per unsuccessful run on 143. While he was more explosive as a runner, he was a lot less consistent.

It should also be noted that in both seasons, when Bush did come up short in his unsuccessful runs, he came up short by a pretty sizable margin, indicating that Bush was not above being bottled up on a regular basis.

Then came Bush's junior year, which was one of the greatest seasons a college football running back will ever experience, no matter the player's eligibility. That season, Bush had a 60.5% success rate, averaged an extra 9.4 yards per successful run, and came up short by only 3.8 yards per unsuccessful run on 200 runs. To combine that level of consistency as a running back with the multiple long runs he had is simply amazing and should be celebrated as the gold standard for a running back season.

For his complete college career, Bush posted a success rate of 55.6%, 8.2 extra yards per successful run, and 4.5 needed yards per unsuccessful run on 422 runs. This would seem like the running back resume of a player who will be a productive runner in the NFL. Yet, this has not been the case for Bush.

Instead, Reggie Bush has been a major disappointment in the NFL. For all the talent and skill he possesses, he is not even the best running back on his team. The Saints have realized that and have limited his offensive load over the past two seasons.

There are a couple of reasons why a very good college running back like Bush has failed to live up to expectations. The first reason is obvious and it could be that running backs' college numbers may not translate to the NFL like a quarterback's. Of course, that remains to be seen as I gather more data on college running backs.

The second is that his junior season was such a great season and represented such a jump over his first two college football seasons, he will never be able to reach those heights again. He might display that type of ability every now and then, but expecting him to translate such a season directly to the NFL might have been asking too much.

His more ordinary freshman and sophomore seasons seem like the truer Reggie Bush because the difference between them is less significant. In those seasons, he had a success rate of 50.9%, averaged 7.0 yards extra per successful run, and came up short by 4.9 yards per unsuccessful runs. Those are decent statistics, but are not going to blow anyone away on a consistent basis, sort of like Reggie Bush in the NFL.

How Does He Still Have A Job: Part 2

When the University of Colorado hired Dan Hawkins to replace Gary Barnett as the college football head coach, they did so in order to polish the tarnished image Barnett had left behind. While at Boise State, Hawkins ran a clean program whereas the later years of Barnett's tenure were filled with scandals ranging from players being undercharged for on-campus meals to luring recruits to Boulder with sex and alcohol to allegations of player sexual assault. One would hope that the University of Colorado athletic director, Mike Bohn, also planned on Hawkins putting together a team that was not only scandal-free, but actually won games and competed in the Big 12.

Although Barnett took a lackadaisical approach to monitoring what happened off the field with his players, there is no denying that he put together teams that were among the top in the Big 12. Out of the seven years Barnett spent coaching the Buffaloes, four of those years saw the University of Colorado in first place of the Big 12 North. Admittedly, the Big 12 North is the weaker part of the Big 12, but a title is a title and what Barnett did is a far sight better than anything Hawkins has accomplished during his five years at the helm.

In fact, the Buffaloes have regressed with Hawkins heading up the college football program, most noticeably on the offensive side of the ball. Barnett's teams never set the world on fire offensively, but they did enough to at least post a winning percentage of .563 (49-38). Since Hawkins has taken over, his teams are scoring an average of 5.8 fewer points per game (21.6 to 27.4, completing passes at a lower clip (53.7% to 58.7%), and getting fewer yards per pass attempt (6.0 to 7.0). What is even more of an indictment to the poor coaching job Hawkins has done is there does not seem to be even a hint of improvement on the horizon. Due to the fact there has been little change on the defensive side of the ball between the two tenures, it should come as no surprise that Hawkins's teams have only won 32.7% of their games (16-33). Not being able to improve on a predecessor's teams, especially when the predecessor was fired, is a talent only unemployed coaches should have.

Besides the fact that Hawkins has avoided bringing more scandal to the University of Colorado, he has done nothing else to warrant his further employment. The only thing that his teams are good at is being mediocre, a distinction that usually ends with a coach being fired. Furthermore, there are dozens of coaches in the football world that can manage both to win and keep their teams off probation. Dan Hawkins is not one of them and why he is allowed to continue to put a mostly losing product on the field every week during college football season is an unsolved mystery beyond any tale ever narrated by Robert Stack.

How Does He Still Have A Job: Part 1

Just how or why Ron Zook continues to be employed as the head coach of the college football team for the University of Illinois is unfathomable. Other than a 2007 season that saw the Fighting Illini win nine of thirteen games and culminated in a Rose Bowl Appearance and a subsequent Rose Bowl blowout loss, nothing Ron Zook has done as the head coach helps explain why Illinois continues to have faith that he will do anything but field future teams that will win more than they lose. Yet, even after the 2008 season where the Fighting Illini went 5-7, the powers to be at Illinois decided it would be a right idea to give Zook a one-year contract extension that now takes the length of his contract to 2014. Of course, Zook rewarded their confidence with a record of 3-9 for the 2009 season.

Please humor me for a minute while I play a hypothetical game that requires the player to possess a modicum amount of common sense. Pretend for a moment that the University of Illinois had a football head coach before hiring Ron Zook. We shall name this mythical predecessor Ron Turner and say he coached from 1997-2004. Since he was fired, one would imagine that for his successor to continue to be allowed to have a job, the successor would need to outdo what Turner did. If the successor fielded teams that were no better than Ron Turner's, would you continue to let him coach your college's team?

Congratulations; if you said no, then you are qualified to work for the University of Illinois. Zook has been the head coach of the Fighting Illini for the past five seasons and since then, his teams have put up virtually the same stastistics as Ron Turner's eight squads. On offense, the only statistically significant difference between the two tenures is that Zook's teams are a more prolific running team; they have averaged 4.9 yards per carry to Turner's teams' 3.9 yards per carry. However, that extra 1.0 yard per carry has not translated to more points for the Zook-led Illini; their 23.7 points per game are barely better than Turner's teams' 23.2 points per game. The lack of added game is not surprising since an increase in passing yards per attempt is a much better advantage to have over an increase in running yards per carry. Unfortunately, Zook has failed to develop any sort of proficient passing game, just one of many strikes against him.

Defensively, Zook again failed to improve over a coach who only had a 35-57 (.380 winning percentage) record; Zook's overall record is 21-39 (.350 winning percentage). Actually, Zook's teams have been worse defending the pass, allowing a 60.2% completion percentage to opposing quarterbacks, statistically significantly worse than the Illinois teams of Ron Turner. Still, there is little difference in the amount of points opponents have scored per game. Zook's teams allowed 28.6 points per game to the 27.9 points per game of Turner's squads, completely erasing the minimal advantage Zook's teams had on the offensive side of the ball. The comparison gives further evidence to the fact Zook has failed to improve on Turner's tenure.

The struggles of Ron Zook should provide a cautionary tale to athletic directors across the nation. There are simply too many contract extensions given too early to head coaches, usually at the first sign of success without first making sure the coach is capable of duplicating his team's accomplishments. Zook received a three-year contract extension in the middle of the 2007 season at a time when his teams had gone 9-21 (.300 winning percentage). Therefore, it is little surprise his teams have continued to struggle to win games on a consistent basis. Athletic directors should be more frugal with their contract extensions instead of handing them out like candy on Halloween. Otherwise, they too might end up with a Ron Zook.

It is really hard for me to imagine what more Ron Zook has to do to be fired, but I will be interested in seeing if he can do so anytime soon. Until then, the fans of the Fighting Illini might want to find something more productive to do with their time during the college football season than to watch Ron Zook's teams lose on the field.

Note: The statistics for Ron Turner's team do not include the 1997 game against the Louisville Cardinals where the Fighting Illini lost 26-14; the box score was unavailable.

Behind The Wins

The University of Iowa's loss to Northwestern last Saturday that put their win-loss record at 9-1 was the best thing that could happen to college football this year. Before the loss, the Iowa Hawkeyes were the media's darling for this season, unworthily reaching #4 in the BCS rankings. There was even talk from various pundits that they were worthy of going to the national championship title game if they continued to go undefeated. These sentiments came despite the fact the Hawkeyes were obviously struggling week in and week out to defeat even mediocre opponents and even the Iowa head coach, Kirk Ferentz, admitted his team was deeply flawed.

How right he was. The truth is that not only are the 2009 edition of the Hawkeyes not dominant enough in their games to be mentioned among the truly elite of college football, this team is not even as good as the Hawkeyes from last year who went 6-4 in their first ten games. What difference there is between the two squads in their win-loss records is largely a result of luck. Last year, the Hawkeyes were 1-4 in their games decided by 7 points or fewer; this season, they have been 4-1 in those games. Due to their improvement in the ability to win close contests, one could not be blamed for thinking the Hawkeyes had improved overall as a team. However, they have not.

On offense, the two squads are largely identical except when it comes to running the ball. The Hawkeyes were considerably better last year running the ball, averaging 4.7 yards per carry in their first ten games, substantially better than the 3.4 yards per carry of this season. This should come as no surprise since the Hawkeyes lost their leading rusher of last year, Shonn Greene, to the NFL along with losing Jewel Hampton for the season due to injury. Passing-wise, the offensive numbers are largely identical. While the completion percentage favors the 2008 squad (58.8% to 53.9%) and the yards per catch favor the 2009 team (14.0 to 12.5), the yards per attempt favor neither (7.4 in 2008 to 7.5 in 2009), indicating that the Hawkeye quarterbacks are going downfield more often this year than last for lower-percentage, higher-reward completions. With such a downturn in their rushing offense, the 2009 Hawkeyes are averaging 4.5 fewer points a game than in 2008.

The Hawkeyes on defense across the two seasons have been more of the same. Against opponents' quarterbacks, the pass defense has been a little more stingy this season, allowing a completion percentage of 50.8% and 5.5 yards per pass attempt contrasted with opposing quarterbacks completing 54.1% of their passes for 5.8 yards per pass attempt in 2008. The 2009 Hawkeyes are also slightly better at creating turnovers; through ten games, the Hawkeyes have a turnover margin of +5. Last year, in the same time frame, the 2008 Hawkeyes had a turnover margin of +3. Yet, the advantages the 2009 Hawkeye defense holds over the 2008 version has not translated into lower scores for their opponents. The 2008 Hawkeyes held their opponents to 1.7 fewer points per game (14.2 to 15.9).

Lastly, there is the matter of point differential. More accurate than win-loss records, point differential really indicates how good a team is because the win-loss record does not differentiate between a one-point win or a twenty-five point blowout. The higher a team's point differential, the more dominant that team is and usually, the better that team will play in the future. Since that is the case, it is hard to fathom why the 2009 Hawkeyes are seen as such an improvement over the 2008 team when you factor in that in 2008, Iowa outscored their opponents by 144 points through ten games while this season the Hawkeyes have only outscored their foes by 82 points. Everything which can be considered, outside of a misleading win-loss record, points to the Hawkeyes being largely the same team this season that they were the last one.

All sport aficianados, pollsters especially, should recognize the fact that not all wins are created equal and behind the wins, there can often be another reality entirely as there is with the Iowa Hawkeyes. Armed with the entire repertoire of knowledge about the two teams, it should be obvious to all that Kirk Ferentz should not be praised for being one of the top coaches in college football. As I wrote two years ago, conclusions I have yet to be forced to adjust, Kirk Ferentz largely fields mediocre teams that have one lucky season every three or four years. The 2009 season just happens to be one of his lucky ones.

Meet Chris Petersen, Notre Dame's New Coach

After the end of the college football season, if Notre Dame is serious about returning to the college football elite, Charlie Weis will be fired. No matter how the rest of the season turns out for the Fighting Irish, it has become painfully obvious in the fifth season of Weis's tenure that he is a mediocre coach. His failures on the field are many while his successes, outside of outstanding recruiting, are nearly non-existent. Due to the fact Weis has failed on so many coaching fronts, Notre Dame will be looking for a new coach that is almost the exact opposite, and no coach exhibits those traits as strongly as Boise State's current head coach, Chris Petersen.

Unlike Weis, whose game planning advantages exist only in his head, Petersen's teams actually have a game planning advantage when they step on the field. Petersen has shown in games against nationally prominent teams such as Oklahoma and Oregon that when provided the opportunity, his teams can defeat anyone they face, no matter the perceived talent disparity. Those are two more signature wins than Weis will ever have.

In addition, Petersen has shown the ability to develop the talent he recruits instead of forcing his talented recruits to win despite his best efforts. Even though Boise State does not acquire all the five-star and four-star recruits a school like Notre Dame does, one would never know it from looking at the production on the field.

The career of Chris Petersen should also inspire confidence in all of Notre Dame's fans. Petersen is credited with having one of the most innovative offensive minds in college football and he has exhibited this during his nine years at Boise State (five as the offensive coordinator, four as the head coach), keeping Boise State near the top in every offensive category. However, before one thinks that Petersen is only an offensive genius and has no other coaching skills in his offensive repertoire, a look at how Boise State has fared since Dan Hawkins left for Colorado and Petersen took over the head coaching helm is necessary.

Boise State may have reached national prominence under Dan Hawkins, but it is Petersen who has sustained Boise State's elite level of play. It goes without saying that Boise State's offense has maintained their production between Hawkins's tenure and Petersen's since Petersen was the offensive coordinator under Hawkins and is still imprinting himself on the offense today. What is surprising is that it is the defense that has significantly improved under Petersen in terms of yards per pass attempt, decreasing from 6.3 yards per pass attempt in Hawkins's sixty-four games as head coach to 5.9 yards per pass attempt with Petersen as the head coach in forty-six games. Since yards per pass attempt is most closely correlated to points scored in football, this is the biggest improvement a team defense can make. Not only can Petersen coach an excellent offense, but he can oversee an entire football program and improve it in all areas.

Why Chris Petersen would go to Notre Dame is simple; Notre Dame can offer opportunities Boise State cannot. Right now, Petersen is being paid $850,000 yearly to amass a .913 winning percentage, making him one of the more vastly underpaid coaches in college football. To put that into perspective, Notre Dame is paying Charlie Weis more than $4 million for a .596 winning percentage. Also, Notre Dame will give Petersen a chance to win a national championship, something the poll voters will never let happen for a Boise State team no matter how good the team is.

Combining a market-value salary with the chance to win a national championship should provide Petersen with all the incentives he needs to move to Notre Dame. It is up to Notre Dame to make the smart move and try to hire him. Then Notre Dame can sit back and watch the wins pile up and the prestige return for such a historically rich college football program.

Cooling Off On John Beck

Two years ago, during the 2006 college football season and before the 2007 NFL draft, I was the driver of the John Beck bandwagon. I told anyone who would listen to me that John Beck was an excellent NFL prospect and that teams should be looking to draft him ahead of more famous quarterbacks like Brady Quinn. Now, two years later, I have to admit that I may have been too hasty with my effusive praise for John Beck and that I have begun to cool on him as an NFL player. This is not to say that he was not a very good college quarterback, but the fact is with the way his successor, Max Hall, has played is keeping John Beck from being a special college quarterback.

The years I will be using to compare John Beck and Max Hall to each other are the last two years of Beck's college career and then Hall's two years as a starting quarterback. I only chose the last two years of Beck's career because 2005 was the year Bronco Mendenhall took over the reins as head coach and brought over Robert Anae from Texas Tech to be the offensive coordinator. It was in that season that Anae's system turned Beck from a quarterback whose completion percentage was hovering between 52%-55% to a 64.5% passer.

Hall did not have as great a year in his first year as starting quarterback under Anae as Beck did, only completing 60.1% and 7.8 yards per pass attempt to Beck's 64.5% and 7.2 yards per pass attempt. However, comparison of the two quarterback's two years under Anae shows the competition is basically a wash. Beck has slightly superior passing statistics (66.7% completion percentage/8.2 yards per pass attempt to 64.5% completion percentage/8.0 yards per pass attempt) than Hall, but they are not statistically significantly better, which reiterates the fact Beck was a product of the offensive scheme in which he was playing.

Anytime there are successive college quarterbacks who play under the same offensive coordinator and combine a large number of pass attempts per game with a high completion percentage with seemingly no drop-off no matter who the quarterback, it should scream to the observer that these are quarterbacks who are made by the system and probably would not have as much success if they play for someone else. The fact there is no drop-off in production from BYU quarterbacks demonstrates John Beck was probably not worthy of all the accolades with which I wanted to anoint him.

Quarterback Drafters Beware

A warning must be issued and restraint must be exercised. There are NFL draft pundits and experts who would have you believe that Matthew Stafford, Mark Sanchez, and Josh Freeman are all quarterback prospects who are worthy of first-round draft selections and first-round contracts. Ignore their words at all cost for they are sorely mistook. No quarterback this year deserves to be drafted in the first round because they have deficiencies that make investing so much money in them more risk than reward.

During this past college football season, every time I heard someone say Matthew Stafford of Georgia was a future first-round selection, I kept wondering who this other Matthew Stafford was who was so great since it was definitely not the one I saw suiting up for the Georgia Bulldogs. The one I saw was a mediocre college quarterback and to expect him to suddenly improve drastically and be a player a franchise can build around is ludicrous. For his career, he completed 57.1% of his passes in meaningful games (where he either attempted the most passes for his team or threw for the most amount of yardage). I have well documented how college completion percentages translate to the NFL stage and there is simply no place for a quarterback with such a low completion percentage. Even at Stafford's best, he will be a below average NFL quarterback, powerful arm strength or not. It does not matter if he can make all the throws if he will miss all the throws almost as often.

When it comes to Mark Sanchez, formerly of the USC Trojans, his is the story that is most tragic because he probably could have been a good NFL quarterback if he had just listened to head coach Pete Carroll who told him he is not ready for the NFL. Sanchez only attempted 476 meaningful passes in college with only one season as a full-time starter. While that may still be more than Vick threw during his years at Virginia Tech, it is not enough to determine what kind of quarterback a player will be at the highest level; his resume is lacking valuable experience and the NFL is not in the business of allowing first-round quarterbacks time to develop. Most likely, Sanchez will never get the repetitions he needs to be successful. Another year of completing 65.8% of his passes and Sanchez would have been worthy to be selected in the first round. As it stands now, he is unfortunately not.

Former Kansas State junior Josh Freeman's declaration for the draft is a head-scratcher by itself. The fact people are actually contemplating picking him in the first round is like a person taking a poison ivy bath followed by drying off with a poison oak towel. After one strips away his physical gifts and looks only at his quarterbacking numbers, what is left is someone with a 59.5% completion percentage, but with a completion percentage standard deviation of .130 so he is not a very consistent quarterback, either; to be inconsistent on top of being an erratic passer is the quarterback version of adding insult to injury. Consider Freeman another quarterback no franchise can depend upon to lead them anywhere but deep into mediocrity.

For Stafford and Freeman, the problem is their paltry completion percentages. For qualified NFL quarterbacks in 2008 (according to nfl.com), the median completion percentage was 61.3%. The league is moving in the direction where a quarterback needs to be incredibly accurate to carry an offense. Neither Stafford nor Freeman is a quarterback like that. Sanchez, on the other hand, simply lacks the experience necessary to make the transition to the NFL unless he is given three or fours years in the same system to improve himself as a quarterback. The pressure of being a first-round selection will not afford him that opportunity. Even though the reasons might be different, none of these quarterbacks should be taken with the first thirty-two picks of the NFL draft come April 25th.

Oklahoma's Bowl Woes

The recipe for being an elite college football team is a simple one, which belies the fact that it is a difficult task to execute. First, a team wishing for the distinction of being called elite is helped immensely by having a tradition of winning or at least a reputation for getting a lot of national television coverage so that the cream of the crop of recruits is likely to attend there. Then the college will need to mix in actually developing their recruits in order to avoid a downward trend in play that can come about by the attrition of players who graduate or leave early. After that, the college must add a dash of demolishing those cupcake teams that fill up their win column without giving any nutritional value to their record and also dominate their conference opponents. Lastly, the wannabe elite college football squad must win their bowl games against the country's best other teams.

Unfortunately for Oklahoma and Bob Stoops in their quest to be taken seriously for both the regular and post-seasons and not become the butt of jokes, the school has failed in this last step of the recipe. Despite the fact that college football gives teams what seems like years to prepare for their bowl game, an advantage that one would think with Oklahoma's regular-season success and Big 12 supremacy would lead victories. Instead, Oklahoma has managed only four wins in nine bowl games.

What makes the losses troubling for a program headed up by the second-highest paid head football coach in the nation is how much of a precipitous drop the Oklahoma offense takes against its bowl opponents' defenses. For anyone who has ever done confidence testing, the fact that Oklahoma's offense has been statistically significantly inferior in bowl games versus other games when there have only been nine Oklahoma bowl games against one hundred ten other games demonstrates just how inept Oklahoma has been offensively in bowl games compared to how consistently great the Sooners are on other occasions.

In their nine bowl games, Oklahoma quarterbacks and wide receivers have combined for a 62.4% completion percentage on 6.4 yards per pass attempt while in the other one hundred ten contests, the passing battery is responsible for 61.9% completion percentage on 7.5 yards per pass attempt. Although there is a slight increase in the completion percentage, it is no match for the decline in yards per pass attempt, which correlates most highly with points scored. Alone, the inability to string together a passing attack would be enough to undo any team, but the Sooners add to that struggle an anemic running game, too. Carriers of the pigskin for the Sooners only get 3.0 yards per attempt in bowl games; compare that to 4.3 yards per carry in the other games and you will recognize why Oklahoma will never be able to be an elite team.

Stoops, as the head coach, will get the blame for Oklahoma's struggles and unless he does something to change his teams' fortunes in bowl games, there will come a day when it will not be enough for Sooner fans to win the Big 12 title. Sooner or later they will want Oklahoma football to be truly elite instead of just dominant in one area and that will all start with being able to perform better in bowl games.

What About Erik Ainge?

As I am writing this post, NFL Draft Scout has seven draft eligible quarterbacks ranked ahead of Erik Ainge in terms of which round they are projected to be drafted. Five of these quarterbacks (Matt Ryan, Brian Brohm, Andre Woodson, Chad Henne, and John David Booty) I will discuss here and the other two (Colt Brennan and Joe Flacco) I have already written about and do not want to rehash their quarterback statistics. Now, I do not think Ainge is a particularly exceptional quarterback and would not draft him if I were in charge of an NFL team's personnel acquisitions, but I am going to use him as an example to demonstrate there is so little difference between the quarterbacks in this draft, only one or maybe two quarterbacks even deserve to be drafted in the first or second round.

During his tenure at the University of Tennessee, in games where he either threw the most pass attempts or threw for the most passing yards for his team, Ainge completed 61.7% of his passes and 7.3 yards per pass attempt. These numbers are neither exceptional nor spectacular nor extraordinary nor even eye-opening, but for all the statistics' ordinary behavior, only one quarterback has numbers that are significantly better. That quarterback is Brian Brohm, who at Louisville, completed 65.8% of his passes for 9.2 yards per pass attempt and is really the only one of the quarterbacks I looked at who is worthy of a high draft pick. If Ainge has matched the other quarterbacks' production while not garnering any special attention for his exploits on the field, NFL teams would be wise to not spend large amounts of money to sign the other players.

After looking through the career statistics for the aforementioned quarterbacks, two stood out as being particularly unworthy of a high draft choice: Matt Ryan and Chad Henne. What scouts and the like see in Matt Ryan that makes him look like a first rounder confusticates me to no end. It surely cannot be his accuracy because his 59.6% is not indicative of any great talent in that department so it must be his intangibles, which are basically worthless outside of the mind of a scout or typical, cliche-loving sports analyst person. Chad Henne is equally inaccurate (59.7% completion percentage) and really his only distinction over the other quarterbacks is similar to the one Brady Quinn had, another quarterback with a career college completion percentage under 60%, which is he started for four years.

The only quarterback besides Brohm who even completed over 63.0% of his pass attempts is John David Booty (63.2%) and even the shine off that completion percentage dulls when it is taken into account he only really threw 766 significant pass attempts at the University of Southern California, making him the only quarterback of the six who did not even attempt 1,000 passes during his college football days.

Projections mean very little at this time of year as no one can really be 100% certain a player will be drafted in a certain position, but one thing is for sure, and that is the fact this is a very weak quarterback class so teams would do well to avoid these quarterbacks unless the quarterback's name is Brian Brohm or Colt Brennan or Joe Flacco.

Mike Leach QBs

In the left-handed Mike Leach, college football has one of the most creative offensive minds, who has become both famous and successful for his passing-laden attack as an offensive coordinator and now head coach for the Texas Tech Red Raiders, a system that has turned almost every quarterback he's had under him into a prolific passing machine. Under Mike Leach's tenure in college football since 1997, he has had two kinds of quarterbacks. There are those quarterbacks who experienced only one season as a starter (Josh Heupel, B.J. Symons, Sonny Cumbie, and Cody Hodges) and then the college quarterbacks who spent at least two seasons under the tutelage of Mike Leach (Tim Couch, Kliff Kingsbury, and Graham Harrell).

Of the four players who only quarterbacked one season for Mike Leach, Cody Hodges edged out B.J. Symons and Sonny Cumbie for the most prolific passers. Hodges completed 66.5% of his 4,238 pass attempts in the 2005 season for 8.0 yards per pass attempt. He also receives the distinction of throwing the fewest pass attempts per game of any Mike Leach quarterback (44.3). Symons completed 65.4% of his passes for 7.8 yards per pass attempt and Cumbie completed 65.5% of his passes for 7.4 yards per pass attempt, which means Symons has the slight advantage to place second among the one-season starters. Surprisingly, it was Josh Heupel, who later quarterbacked the Oklahoma Sooners to a national championship, who proved himself least proficient in the Mike Leach system. Heupel only completed 63.0% of his passes for 7.0 yards per pass attempt.

As for the three quarterbacks who spent more than one year starting, it is the latest one, Graham Harrell who has been most prolific. In Harrell's two years as starter with a third on the way, he has completed an astounding 70.0% of his 10,260 pass attempts with 7.8 yards per pass attempt, superior to Tim Couch's 69.1% completion percentage for 7.4 yards per pass attempt and far surpassing Kliff Kingsbury's 65.8% completion percentage and 6.6 yards per pass attempt. Fortunately for Tim Couch, as the first Division I-A quarterback under Mike Leach, he was able to trick the Cleveland Browns into paying him at least $20 million dollars before everyone found out he was a product of the college system in which he played.

Like Aaron Rodgers of the Tedford quarterbacks and Colt Brennan over Timmy Chang, both Cody Hodges and Graham Harrell, provided Harrell maintains the Playstation-type numbers he has already put it, should feel proud of themselves for being the best of the Mike Leach quarterbacks in their respective categories as one-year starters and more than one-year starters.

Joe Flacco

During the Division I-AA semi-final and final games of the FCS playoffs, Delaware senior quarterback Joe Flacco was repeatedly compared to former Miami (Ohio) and current Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger based on the words of Todd McShay, ESPN's golden boy of football scouting. Of course, since scouts are notorious for overvaluing the physical tools of a player, the basis for the comparison between Flacco and Roethlisberger had everything to do with their physical presences and less to do with how effective they have been actually playing college football. Still, even in this limited sphere, saying these quarterbacks are similar is understandable. Each quarterback cuts an imposing figure on the football field: Flacco is 6'6 and 230 pounds while Roethlisberger is 6'5 and 241 pounds, both are proficient in evading the pass rush, and both are attributed with having strong throwing arms, though Roethlisberger may receive this claim in error.

As for the unspoken driving reason for drawing similarities with Flacco and Roethlisberger, my guess is it derives from their matriculating at colleges not known for producing NFL-caliber players. Despite having to play with less glamour, Flacco and Roethlisberger excelled during their time. In his three years at a starting quarterback, Roethlisberger completed 65.4% of his 1,305 pass attempts for 8.2 yards per pass attempt. Flacco is no match for Roethlisberger in experience because he only started for two seasons and threw a little less than 400 fewer passes in meaningful time (938), but his completion percentage of 63.4% and 7.5 yards per pass attempt keep him in the same class as Roethlisberger, if a little behind. When taking into account strength of schedule, Roethlisberger gets the nod over Flacco again. He played nine BCS conference opponents during thirty-eight contests; Flacco opposed zero BCS conference foes in twenty-six games.

A more apt comparison for Flacco to a current NFL quarterback, even if it does eschew physical attributes, is to Tony Romo. Romo, like Flacco, played on the Division I-AA level (Eastern Illinois in the case of Romo) and his success quarterbacking the Dallas Cowboys shows the jump from I-AA to stardom for a quarterback is not beyond the realm of possibilities. Like Roethlisberger, Romo started three seasons for his university so he, too, has an advantage in experience over Flacco, which seems like an anomaly since Romo attempted fewer passes as a starter than Flacco, but Romo played in less of a pass-happy offense. In addition, during his collegiate career, Romo's 9.0 yards per pass attempt far outpaces Flacco's 7.5; Romo's completion percentage of 62.7% in his starting quarterback tenure is all but identical to Flacco's 63.4%.

Though Flacco's collegiate statistics compare favorably to Roethlisberger and Romo, his inexperience as a starter should raise red flags in front of anyone who projects him as a full-time starter. This is not to say that I am predicting Flacco will be a failure because I am not, but there is nothing mind-blowing about what Flacco did as a Delaware Blue Hen. Flacco will probably succeed with an NFL team, but it will not be right away as Roethlisberger did. He will most likely have to sit on the bench for a few years as Romo did and there's still no guarantee he will be as good as Romo.

Kirk Ferentz? Really?

When current University of Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz was listed by ESPN's SportsCenter as a possible replacement for Lloyd Carr, former head coach of the Michigan Wolverines, my immediate thought was that there goes ESPN again, choosing lowest common denominator jokes and gimmicks in favor of intelligent analysis. Then I read in another publication that Ferentz really was on the short-list of candidates for Carr's replacement and again I got the impression I was on the outside of a private joke because surely anyone who wants to replace Carr with Ferentz surely jests. Mind you, once upon a time, after Iowa's 2002,2003, and 2004 seasons, Ferentz was a hot coaching prospect, one who would have made sense for all the high-profile coaching jobs he was linked to.

In Ferentz's fourth through his seventh seasons during his tenure as the Hawkeye head coach, when his teams amassed a win-loss record of 31-7, it looked like he had established Iowa as one of the elite programs in the country and in the Big Ten. That record was leaps and bounds above the 11-24 record he led the Hawkeyes to in his first three seasons. However, since Iowa's 2004 season ended, Iowa has regressed over the past three seasons (2005-2007) to a state somewhere between the 1999-2001 seasons when they were horrible and the 2002-2004 seasons when they were excellent. In other words, they are now a mediocre team as their 19-18 record declares them to be.

Despite how their record regressed, it is hard to point out exactly why Iowa has struggled using the slightly advanced football statistics that I do. Outside of points scored per game, when from 2002-2004 Iowa scored 30.3 points per game and 24.4 points per game from 2005-2007, there was no other statistically significant difference between the two eras, offensively speaking. It is almost as if Iowa was lucky from 2002-2004 to score as many points as they did, maybe they had better field position due to special teams and defense, and from 2005-2007 the Hawkeyes are merely regressing to the mean or not converting the highest leveraged down and yardage situations.

On the defensive side of the ball, there was more of an advantage for the 2002-2004 Hawkeyes, but not exactly a decisive one. Those Hawkeyes held opponents to only 2.6 yards per rush, significantly better than the 3.4 yards per rush the 2005-2007 Hawkeyes did. Also, they held opponents to 6.2 yards per pass attempt to the 2005-2007 teams who held opponents to 6.6 yards per pass attempt and a significantly lower completion percentage (55.7% to 59.2%). However, since yards per pass attempt are more highly correlated to points than either completion percentage of yards per rush, that explains why the 2002-2004 Hawkeyes only allowed 2.1 less points per game than the 2005-2007 Hawkeyes (17.8 to 19.9). That point difference was enough to make it less likely for the Hawkeyes to win games since they were averaging 5.9 points less per game, which means the total point shift was a total of 8.0 points per game. Hence, mediocrity.

Still, the 2005-2007 Hawkeyes have solidified themselves as the second of the three three-year data sets I have by beating out the 1999-2001 Hawkeyes on defensive categories and also point difference. The 2005-2007 Hawkeyes have been significantly superior to the 1999-2001 Hawkeyes yards per pass attempt allowed (6.6 to 7.6), yards per rush (3.4 to 4.3), and yards per catch (11.2 to 13.5). Those differences go a long way into explaining why the 1999-2001 Hawkeyes were outscored 6.5 points per game and the 2005-2007 Hawkeyes have outscored opponents by 4.5 points per game.

Michigan football have already rid themselves of one coach who was unable to maintain an elite football program, despite having all the advantages needed to buy a dynasty program in college football. There is no reason why they should want to replace one coach who is only good enough to lead mediocre teams with another one, even if Ferentz did have three oustanding seasons as the Iowa head football coach. Remember, those three seasons were three seasons ago and his successive teams have yet to have a stretch that good.

Note: Statistical data do not include Iowa's 2001 game against Minnesota, which they won 59-16.

Imitated and Duplicated

A poorly kept secret in college football is there are very few innovators among the coaching ranks. The rest of the coaches are glorified copycats, taking note of what works for other teams and then implementing them in their own programs in the following seasons. One need not even squint to see the widespread use of the spread offense, allowing teams to put up more points and also turn their quarterbacks into even riskier professional prospects. Coaches are even known to copy ineffectual strategies, as evidenced by the puzzling popularity of unorthodox kickoffs and rugby-style punts instead of simply trusting their coverage teams. This season, the most noticeable act of plagiarizing has come from head coaches imitating what Urban Meyer and the Florida Gators did with Tim Tebow last year and utilizing their own back-up running quarterbacks in the same way.

Due to the fact the LSU Tigers are in the SEC conference with Florida, I will focus on Ryan Perrilloux and compare what he has done so far this season to what Tebow did last year on the championship Gators team. Surprisingly, since I consider Tim Tebow to be a singular talent (most likely because I have a natural affinity for left-handed athletes being left-handed myself) I predicted before I started compiling data from the play-by-play of both teams' games available on ESPN.com that Perrilloux would have no chance of equaling Tebow's success. However, my thinking was not exactly accurate.

As far as running the ball, Tebow has a slight edge over Perrilloux, only because he has a higher success rate (58.4% to 51.3%). Other than the fact Tebow did a better job of gaining a successful amount of yardage, Perrilloux has been just as explosive a runner as Tebow. Tebow gained 4.8 extra yards per successful run while Perrilloux has amassed 4.6 extra yards per successful run so far this season. It is also worth noting that Tebow failed by an average of 3.7 yards and Perrilloux has done so by an average of 3.5 yards.

Ryan Perrilloux knocks Tebow of the 2006 season off his pedestal a bit by having had better passing statistics in his back-up role. A lot of the credit for his superiority is due to 20/25, 298 yards, three touchdown game against Middle Tennessee when he started in lieu of Matt Flynn, LSU's regular starter. Because of that performance, Perrillou has a passing success rate of 72.5% with 11.0 extra yards per successful pass and 5.7 yards needed per failed pass. Tebow's 2006 passing stats of a 64.9% passing success rate with 12.3 yards per successful pass and 5.2 yards per failed pass are not shabby, but are no equal for what Perrilloux has done for the Bayou Bengals.

They are also equal in scoring touchdowns. Tebow scored thirteen touchdowns in fourteen games last year and Perrilloux is a little ahead of that pace with nine touchdowns in nine games played.

On the field, Perrilloux has every shot to be as good with LSU as Tebow currently is at Florida, but talent will mean nothing if he is unable to change his attitude and find a way to stay out of further trouble.

Note: Successful runs gain 40% of yardage on first down, 60% of yardage on second down, and 100% of yardage on third/fourth downs. Successful passes gain 45% of yardage on first down, 60% of yardage on second down, and 100% of yardage on third/fourth downs.