Evaluating football culture in the SEC West - Five year trends
As Loretta Lynn said, “We’ve come a long way baby”, when it comes to how we can evaluate sports and particularly football. From recruiting evaluations, quarterbacks, projecting win totals and more - we have truly come a long way baby.
Across multiple platforms around the country, today you can find multiple people doing football analytics and I think that is a beautiful thing. Here, like other places we are constantly looking for angles to tell football stories and project how teams might respond or how successful they may or may not be in the near future.
Today we look at football culture. When we speak of football culture, we aren’t necessarily speaking of the general culture definition that states, “Culture is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.”. While some of this holds true, what we are speaking of is, culture in the form of a variable or number in college football, defined by over time, how a team performs relative to recruiting. It is also defined by how a team performs year to year, in relationship to postseason, no postseason, championships and no championships. Culture in football is more than just guys being good or bad, or their environment on a given campus or town. All of those variables eventually show up on the field, in the coaching booth and on the scoreboard.
Culture as we know it will rear it’s pretty or ugly head in a football community and normally does so on Saturday’s.
There are winning cultures and losing cultures. You talk to former players of successful programs and they will tell you, “we had a great football culture”; likewise to players who played for bad teams they will typically tell you down the road, “we had a horrible football culture”.
Today we look at the SEC West and show you what the last five years has shown us about their culture. We will be doing more culture studies as we head towards kickoff.
We quantify culture on a five year trend and will show you where every team in the SEC West ranks in our CFBHG Culture Rankings. Just like your kids color scheme; Gold is the standard, moving down to red is bad.
Five Year SEC West Culture Rankings:
These rankings will resemble a year eerily familiar to an SEC West football season as far as rankings go, but there is more here than meets the eye. For one, we label each team with what we call “Staying Power” , meaning, a percentage of a chance to maintain at least their current success over the next five years. As you can see, there are only two gold standard cultures in the SEC West by our definition.
We will show you trends of each team below and how each team has performed, relative to their recruiting as well. Teams like Ole Miss and Arkansas, while showing low success of staying power over the next five years; this also shows their programs are at a cross roads of sorts and we know that by new coaches and new administration.
While their numbers are low, they could be totally different in five years.
Alabama:
I don’t think I have broken any news here by calling Alabama the gold standard of the SEC. We already know what Alabama has accomplished and means to the SEC and you don’t need me regurgitating that.
However, what we see is while they are the gold standard, they are at a cross roads, or coming to one like the bottom teams.
The bottom line is the floor of being an even program; a team that lives around 6-6 on their record. Alabama has lived way above that mark the last decade, but with multiple coaching changes within the staff, players leaving early for the NFL and transferring out, we see Alabama with a slight dip in their trend.
However - you can see over time, Alabama has basically maximized their recruiting efforts, chose the right players and hasn’t whiffed on their evaluation.
Last year is somewhat exaggeration, but I think we can all say, even with the injuries to Tua, last year was not the same Alabama team of the past. Moving forward is crucial to seeing how much staying power Alabama truly has. Odds are, as long as Saban is in Tuscaloosa, the Tide will continue to live at the top of the SEC West.
LSU:
On the surface, it’s so easy to throw shade at Ed Orgeron, pull up a decade old Hummer commercial and laugh and proclaim, “this man can’t be a head football coach PAWLLL”.
However, the metrics show otherwise, as he is not only coach of the defending National Champions, he continues to show he knows how to run a program. He is our tenth best coach in the country in 2020, on our three year coaching metric and LSU has equally GOLD standard culture down in Baton Rouge.
We all know the frustrations LSU fans had with Les Miles on the back end of his tenor and how many felt this program was stagnant. You can see the constant climb under Orgeron and you hear it from the fans and players. He has built a culture that is truly a Gold Standard Culture.
Equally you can see how LSU has gradually gotten better in regards to their talent. LSU has always recruited well, but now they are meeting those expectations under Orgeron. The big key will be how will they look without Joe Brady and a new defensive coordinator and quarterback. All of these variables can either extend or derail a teams culture. So far, Orgeron has pushed all the right buttons.
Auburn:
The love/hate relationship Auburn fans have had with Gus Malzahn never became more clear, than when I started looking at the culture down on the Plains. Gus Malzahn runs a clean ship and rarely do you hear of any negativity out of the program. What you do hear is belly aching over missed opportunities and not being the best this team can be.
Auburn has recruited well and has on most years, the talent to compete not only for the SEC Title, but also the National Title. What we see though, is Auburn again, some years lives up to the talent; some years they do not.
Peaks and valleys is what we see with Auburn, and look - any team can miss on a recruit or two, hire a dud coordinator or two; but Auburn has been arguably the most herk and jerk team in the west. Having said every bit of that, Auburn is still the only SILVER team in the West and each year we watch pause as to what Gus Malzahn will do the next year. Like this year with Chad Morris at the helm of the offense; that will truly be a test on the Auburn culture and could affect drastically the next five years.
Texas A&M:
All eyes will be on College Station, Texas this fall as year three of the Jimbo Fisher project will be upon us. Fisher, who is transitioning the Aggies from a culture that seemed to be very mediocre under Kevin Sumlin, has in some ways stayed the same.
Much like Auburn, Texas A&M is a team that has had ups and downs. As a matter of fact, only two points separate Auburn and A&M on our culture scale. The Aggies have continued to recruit well enough to compete in the SEC, particularly the West, but they have yet to put it all together. Each year, and for decades, people have referred to A&M as “the sleeping giant”, referring to the recruiting footprint, endowment and dollars the university has and more.
But, the Aggies for decades have show a culture of above; one that is up and down, much like a SIN graph in math. Their culture issues could stem from far more than inside the locker room or coaching office; as this could be a booster issue or a university leadership issue. There is no reason this program should not annually compete for the West.
Again, you can see, the Aggies are as apt to stray away from their roster talent and play well below it, as they are to play up to it like Alabama and LSU recently.
The Aggies have improved their recruiting profile recently under Fisher, as you can see above; now the Aggies need to see the culture meter meet the talent meter moving forward.
Miss. State:
When I started toying with culture metrics four years ago, this team was much different than today; which is why I look at a teams culture in five year increments.
Under Dan Mullen, this teams culture was rock solid and trending up. They had a silver rated culture and pound for pound the best one in the SEC. Today is much different and after seeing two years of trending down football under Joe Moorhead, you can see first year head coach Mike Leach has entered a program that is at a cross roads of sorts on the field and with their culture.
This graph tells you everything you need to know about the Bulldogs the last five years. Post Dak Prescott, this team started diving on the field, but Mullen continued to recruit well. Moorhead recruited well for the Bulldogs equally, but once Mullen bolted after a 9-4 season in 2017, this team started a nose dive.
Rumors swirled the last few years of the team being softer in the weight room and some discipline issues, all things that make up culture and it showed on the field. You can see based on recruiting, the Bulldogs did not live up to their talent the last several years, none more evident than Moorhead’s first year.
Mike Leach will have a task of rebuilding the Bulldogs in his image and remaking the culture in Starkville.
Ole Miss:
The last five years have been a whirlwind in Oxford, from the highest of highs under Hugh Freeze, to the lowest of lows with Matt Luke, the NCAA probe and trying to restart the program.
You can see the drastic drop from the end of the Freeze era until now. We know the stories now of off the field issues with some, the Laremy Tunsil situation and then the recruiting probe. The Rebs have lived under the mean line needed to have a good to great football culture, and much like Leach, Lane Kiffin will be looking to remake Ole Miss in his image and fix a broken football culture.
Again, you can see, how close the Rebels were five years ago to living up to their recruiting, but when things crashed, they crashed. The talent level tapered, but the program fell off a cliff.
Kiffin will be responsible for stabilizing the roster and recruiting with quality players and changing the mindset on campus.
Arkansas:
How about rinse and repeat from above, but with an exclamation point. Arkansas resembles Ole Miss, without the NCAA probe, but is worse off than anyone in the West.
Change was called for while Brett Bielema wasn’t making massive traction in Fayetteville, and that change led to even worse decisions and results under Chad Morris.
Arkansas was already on the way down when Bielema was headed out the door and you can see that Chad Morris, Mr. Left Lane Hit the Gas, hit it alright; he drove the program and the culture into the basement.
Not only that, the talent on campus started going down as well. Sam Pittman will have a huge chore on his hands to not only change recruiting, but change the culture of this program.
This program hasn’t really been the same since the Bobby Petrino incident and the program was given to John L. Smith for a year. Bielema had the right idea, and a nice culture, but just couldn’t get to the next level for the program. Now, Pittman will have major work to do, a program he is very familiar with, but one that will have to crawl out of the depths of the SEC and they will have to fight the best fight to achieve that over the next five years.
NOTE: All photos are courtesy of 247sports.com
