Ranking the Best Returning SEC West Offenses
Most of the time preseason projections are largely centered around how many starters a team has coming back. Sometimes who those starters are is figured in, then maybe how much production is coming back, etc. But has there ever been a formula devised to measure how much is returning from one year to the next?
That’s what I’m going to set out to do today.
This isn’t an attempt to rank who will be the best offense in 2015, it’s just a formula I’ve devised to determine who has the best returning offense.
Every team is different each new year for every program in the SEC and around the country. New players will mesh in with the old, and a new story will be written. But for now, all we really know is what we’ve seen in the past. So let’s take a look…
The formula will have three separate parts. A perfect score would be 100.
I. 2014 Stats (perfect score: 33.6 points)
We’ve got to incorporate last year’s numbers to get some type of picture of how good the offense was. So I’m taking two numbers: scoring offense (PPG) and total offense (YPG)….and only in SEC games.
I’ve added all these numbers up and graded on a curve. Auburn had the best offense in both categories so they are the standard, and each team after that has a score based on their percentage of what Auburn produced.
1. Auburn – 33.6
2. Mississippi State – 32.4
3. Alabama – 30.9
4. Texas A&M – 27.2
5. Ole Miss – 25.4
6. Arkansas – 21.5
7. LSU – 20.3
II. Returning Starters (perfect score: 33 points)
Yes, returning starters. While it isn’t the end all be all, they do matter. One of the main reasons I wanted this score in here and weighted so much is due to the leadership and experience a team loses.
Within this category I’ve weighted the positions differently:
- QB: 5 points
- RB/WR: 4 points
- TE/OL: 2 points
The results..
1. LSU – 29
2. Arkansas – 27
3. Texas A&M – 25
4. Ole Miss – 24
5. Mississippi State – 13
6. Auburn – 10
7. Alabama – 8
Pretty interesting that all the teams at the bottom in 2014 return the most starters and vice versa.
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III. Returning Production (perfect score: 33.3 points)
I felt the best way to do this was take the percentage of returning yards and percentage of returning starts on the O-Line (so that’s everyone who started, not just starters). The offensive lineman did get a little under appreciated when talking about returning starters but this should more than make up for it. Considering it’s a “line of scrimmage” league I feel like I’ve got to place a premium on experience at OL.
1. Arkansas – 28.2
2. LSU – 24.8
3. Ole Miss – 24.2
4. Texas A&M – 20
5. Mississippi State – 19
6. Auburn – 14.5
7. Alabama – 11.5
BONUS
Who you lose and who you return can mean a great deal. Elite players who rise above the rest speak to the heart of this. So I wanted to add up how many All-SEC players were lost or return for each team and add them to their score. I weighted them by position as described above in section II and by whether they were 1st or 2nd team.
1. Ole Miss +8
2. Arkansas +4
3. Mississippi State +2
3. Texas A&M +2
5. LSU -4
6. Auburn -16
7. Alabama -19
Final Rankings
1. Ole Miss: 81.6
2. Arkansas: 80.7
3. Texas A&M: 74.2
4. LSU: 70.1
5. Mississippi State: 66.4
6. Auburn: 42.1
7. Alabama: 31.4
Final Thoughts
I came up with this formula as fairly as I thought it could be, and these were the results. I’m sure since this is a MSU site there will be those who discredit the findings based simply on OM being #1. They do lose their QB, and because of it only have 23% of their offensive production returning, but with nine starters coming back including some really high level talent and their entire offensive line they end up on top here.
It’s interesting just how much Auburn and Alabama lost, specifically Alabama. Lane Kiffin will have to pull a rabbit out of his hat to replicate last year’s big time numbers. Gus Malzahn will probably be able to do it, however, because he’s Gus Malzahn and he always does.
Texas A&M was pretty much the only team who had solid numbers in 2014 and had solid numbers coming back. It seems every one else who had poor numbers in 2014 had a lot coming back and every one who had good numbers in 2014 had far less coming back. That could speak to how even the West will be – everyone is being pulled closer to the middle.