Evaluating culture in the SEC East - five year trends
Last week we began dissecting football culture in the Southeastern Conference and started with the SEC West. You can read all about the five year culture study on the West by clicking here.
Today we continue with the SEC East and take a look at culture and culture of each team versus their roster talent, ala recruiting.
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”.
Here is the overall analysis of the East, with team capsules below.
These rankings will resemble a year eerily familiar to an SEC East 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 is only one gold standard culture in the SEC East by our definition.
We will show you trends of each team below and how each team has performed, relative to their recruiting as well.
Georgia:
The Georgia Bulldogs are a household name in college football, but a program with only one National Championship; back in 1980. The Georgia Dogs almost had their second a few years ago in the College Football Playoff Championship, but fell just short. Even though Georgia has lived in the SEC Title game and around playoff chatter come November, many are of the opinion that Kirby Smart just can’t quite get it done and many feel he is the second coming of Mark Richt.
Kirby might be Richt, but he might not.
Out the gate, there was a dip for this program with Smart, then a spike on the National Title game run; followed by a dip and a climb back. Sure Georgia hasn’t won it all (yet), but overall today, they are in much better shape than when Richt walked out the door.
Conversely, while Georgia has always been on most years an elite recruiter, you can see how over the last five years, Smart's team has closed the gap, getting their teams to play more in line with their talent.
Yes there have been moments, like getting upset last year by South Carolina, but overall, Smart’s club looks to have better culture and a better nucleus than five years ago and they are trending in the right direction.
Florida:
The last two decades Florida has changed shirts in a variety of ways, from the super successful Spurrier - to the Meyer years, and through the dreadful Zook, Muschamp and McElwain years. Which leaves us with Dan Mullen now and while Mullen doesn’t look to be Zook esk, we still aren’t sure he can echo his old boss, Meyer or Spurrier.
It’s no surprise folks in Gainesville were not happy with McElwain, and as you see above, their team was being power driven into the SEC East abyss. Since Mullen has taken over, you do see a massive positive gain in culture in Gainesville. The big question will be how high can Mullen take the Gators and can he recruit at a level that is annually comparable or close to Georgia and Alabama?
While Mullen and his staff are moving the needle upwards in recruiting ever so slightly, what we have seen is a closing of the gap, on the talent and culture. Mullen has his team playing closer to their talent level; indicative of back to back New Years Day Six games.
If this continues, Mullen will have Florida back in Atlanta and maybe in the College Football Playoff in the future.
Tennessee:
If there is one team in the SEC East that needed a cultural healing it was the University of Tennessee. After the Volunteers won the first ever BCS National Title, while there were years of success, Tennessee slipped off into the SEC football abyss and much of it was to do about culture. Tennessee is one of the reasons I started studying culture by numbers, because it just never made sense, with the recruiting classes the Volunteers roll in, for them to be as bad and as inconsistent as they have been.
What you see over the last five years, is a microcosm of the last fifteen for Tennessee. You see the two 9-4 years under Butch Jones and then the massive dive of the program, even into the first year for Jeremy Pruitt. However, it looks to be an upward culture shift now heading into year three of the Pruitt campaign.
Likewise, while it looked like Butch Jones had Tennessee in the right direction, as far as culture matching talent, you can see the great divide and now a merging of the two again under Pruitt.
Make no mistake, Pruitt has a long way to go to catch Georgia and Florida, but he seems to have the program trending in the right direction.
South Carolina:
Nobody really wants to say it so I will. Will Muschamp may not be cut out to be a head coach in the Power Five, but is one hell of a defensive coordinator. Muschamp’s tenure at Carolina has been one of highs, lows and lots of what the what moments.
The program was already on the way down when he took over for Steve Spurrier in 2016, and while we saw a gradual climb, we have seen another decent. We still aren’t sure if it’s culture, or maybe scheduling. Carolina after all does have to play Georgia, Florida, Texas A&M and Clemson annually.
However, Carolina has recruited inside the top 25 on most years and has a roster full of guys who can play ball, so you do have to pose the question, “why hasn’t Muschamp gotten more out of this bunch”?
You can see from the graph above, there is a massive swell in the middle and a settling of the talent and culture. To me this tells me, the program has missed as far as wins and losses based on recruiting. This is a team that upset Georgia for goodness sakes last year, then got beat by Tennessee by 20 and lost to Appalachian State.
Muschamp needs more consistency in the program or he is going to lose the fans, the team and leave the culture in shambles for the next head football coach.
Kentucky:
Mark Stoops has Kentucky going in the right direction. While it’s a slow build in the Blue Grass state, he does have the Wildcats believing they can compete and win on most weekends and that’s half the battle.
Coming off Joker Phillips 2-10 season, and then one of his own, you can see Stoops slowly helped this team climb out of the culture abyss. It is amazing how much different this team plays now than five years ago. The Cats did take a slight step back a year ago, with the loss of Benny Snell and Josh Allen and their quarterback Terry Wilson going down with an injury. But Stoops has shown he has the formula to make Kentucky competitive on most weekends.
What we see with Kentucky, who is a high 20’s to low 30’s recruiter is consistency. Don’t let the wide margin fool you with the lines in this graph. We are showing consistency and stoops maintaining a trend in recruiting and in culture. If these two lines start to converge on each other in the coming years, look out as the Cats could be more trouble for their Eastern Division counterparts.
Missouri:
Gary Pinkel took Missouri above the threshold and kept them there; Barry Odom stabilized the program, but never got it back where Pinkel did. Now first year head coach Eliah Drinkwitz has the task of not only continued stabilization, but not letting the program slip off into the SEC abyss.
The last five years have been a shell of what Pinkel did for the program during their first few years of the SEC, taking the Tigers to multiple SEC title game appearances. Pinkel’s tenor finished on a downward trend and you can see Odom, had the program on a yoyo of sorts.
The Tigers are one of the worst recruiters in the SEC, with a three year average of 45th - so what you are seeing, without a high end quarterback or coaching staff, they are mirroring their talent. Pinkel’s teams worked with finding playmakers on the edge that could go and getting quality quarterbacks. For Drinkwitz to succeed he will again need the recipe of an elite signal caller and improving their recruiting profile cannot hurt the process.
Vanderbilt:
Let’s be honest - we know Vanderbilt is the hardest place to win in the SEC and we know why. Vanderbilt football saw their hay day under James Franklin and Derek Mason hasn’t been able to muster the same mojo Franklin had.
I know Mason has the backing of new athletics director Candice Storey Lee, but when you look above and see that Vanderbilt is LIVING under the mainline on football culture, you have to wonder how much faith Lee, the team and coaches have in this process.
Much like Missouri, Vanderbilt is getting about all they can out of the talent they have on the roster. You can see the talent mirrors the same movement as the culture. Vanderbilt has fallen off into the mid to low 50’s in recruiting and you aren’t beating many SEC teams with this talent.
For Mason to succeed he is going to have to find a way to recruit better, be it the transfer portal or better evaluation, or Storey Lee will be looking for a reboot in the coming years.
