Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops caused a bit of a stir recently with his criticism of the depth of the SEC, challenging the popular opinion that it is the best league in college football. Stoops pointed to a lack of parity in the SEC, noting that the bottom portion of the conference didn’t fare so well in league play last season.
Charlie Weis defends Bob Stoops on SEC strength
Context is important. Charlie Weis ignored it entirely in his defense of Bob Stoops.
Cooper Neill
“Again, you can look at the top two, three, four, five, six teams, and you can look at the bottom six, seven, eight, whatever they are. How well are they all doing?” Stoops told the Tulsa World. (Bob Stoops apparently has no idea how many teams are in the SEC at this point, which is understandable given all the recent conference reshuffling.)
The SEC’s bottom eight finished 2012 0-30 against the league’s top six teams, and Kansas head coach Charlie Weis believes that’s evidence enough that Stoops has a point:
“I’m just sayin’, you look at the bottom of our league and the bottom of their league, just going based off the numbers, there’s validity in what he said,” Weis said. “I’m just going based off the numbers, I mean, I’m a numbers guy. Just based off the numbers, you’d have to say he’s got a point.”
That statement is disingenuous, though. While it’s true that the SEC’s “bad guys,” as Weis terms them, fared terribly against the upper echelon of the league, the raw win-loss totals cannot be interpreted without also considering league context. The SEC is home to talent-rich football machines to a depth and breadth that most conferences can only dream about, which means the futility of the league’s second- and third-tier teams isn’t necessarily an indictment of the overall strength of the conference.
How well would those bottom eight have fared in the Big 12 last season? I’m gonna go ahead and guess they’d have managed more than zero conference wins between them.
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