2013 SEC football previews, from the bottom to the top

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Over the last eight seasons, 961 teams have played FBS football. If you ranked all of them according to their F/+ rankings, Alabama’s last four teams have ranked sixth, 13th, first, and second, respectively. Only seven teams have finished with an F/+ rating better than plus-40.0 percent. Alabama has three of them. Only two have finished with an F/+ rating better than plus-50.0 percent: Alabama in each of the last two years.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Pop quiz: What’s an average season for LSU and Les Miles? Is there such a thing?

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Holland was a revelation on the soccer pitch. With a style created by coach (and former Dutch national team member) Rinus Michels and eventually known as Total Football, the Dutch unveiled a level of tactical flexibility never before seen, with players switching positions and creating new, innovative ways to use the space allotted to them. This new style, when matched with extremely talented players like Johan Cruyff, Rob Rensenbrink, and Ruud Krol, wreaked havoc for both the Dutch national team and the Dutch club Ajax. The squad could never quite reel in a World Cup title -- it was runner-up in both 1974 and 1978 -- but they still had an incredibly successful run of play with this style and these players. (David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, one of my favorite recent sports books, tells this story well.)

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

I have to update my examples. For a while now, one of my general truisms about college football has been that the way you eventually break through and win a national title is simply by continuously putting a strong product on the field and hoping the timing works out eventually. Sometimes it works out immediately and then stops (see: Bob Stoops). Sometimes it takes a while (Mack Brown). Sometimes it takes a long while (Tom Osborne, Bobby Bowden).

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

From last year’s Texas A&M preview:

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Clowney was not only incredible at his position in 2012, he was incredible in a human-highlight-reel kind of way. And he saved his best highlights for the end of the season, so that everybody in the college football universe would brightly remember them long into the offseason. First, he recorded 4.5 sacks versus Clemson...

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

These are all things I said in what was, I felt, a reasonably positive Ole Miss preview about ten months ago. I felt it was rather optimistic because I said it was “not impossible” to see the Rebels somehow reaching 6-6. I even talked about the potential for a quick turnaround under a coach who had already engineered a few of them.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

We hear a lot about how amazing the SEC is. The chatter goes above and beyond a lot, which both serves as a detriment to the argument (bad) and as a prompt for coaches of non-SEC programs to shoot their mouth off at times (good). But whether you come down on the “Pssh, the SEC isn’t that great” side of the argument or the “I, for one, welcome our SEC overlords” side, you have to admit one thing: It was one hell of a statement for the conference to bring in the reigning Big Ten (Bret Bielema), Big East* (Butch Jones), and Sun Belt (Gus Malzahn) champion coaches in a single offseason. That, to me, was a more impressive statement than the “seven straight national titles” thing.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

One of the reasons I was pretty high on Texas A&M last summer, despite the fact that starting a redshirt freshman at quarterback is usually a scary proposition (whoops), was because, from a blank-slate perspective, the Aggies were loaded with former star recruits and players who, in a vacuum, had produced at a high level at times. The 2011 Texas A&M team had a lot of both baggage and potential. It seemed the perfect time for a new head coach, with a new attitude and outlook, to take over in College Station. Sure enough, some of those underachieving pieces began to achieve at a higher level; throw in a new, exciting (to put it mildly) quarterback, and voila: an 11-2 season for Texas A&M.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Timing is a funny thing. Missouri fans have found themselves thinking about that a lot over the last nine months. Speaking in hypotheticals, it wasn’t difficult for fans to believe that their Tigers would be able to pretty quickly hold their own in the SEC East. After all, under Gary Pinkel Mizzou had played at a Top 30 level, according to the F/+ rankings, for five of six years heading into 2012. In 2007 and 2008, Missouri teams that ranked ninth and 14th respectively in F/+ would have each been the No. 2 team in the SEC East. Hell, in 2010, No. 13 Missouri would have been the highest-ranked SEC East team. And even in 2011, the No. 22 Tigers would have still been a respectable third.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

Yesterday, I called Mississippi State a hard job that seems to be getting harder for Dan Mullen. Well, Vanderbilt is the hard job of the SEC. At least, it was before the smart kids (Stanford, Northwestern, Vandy, Duke, hell, even Rice) all started to figure out the game of football. As the spread offense takes hold, and as speed becomes more and more of a prized commodity in college football, some schools are figuring out that you can also win games with strength, brains and toughness. And recruits have noticed.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

It happens to every successful coach at some point. Hell, it probably happened to Nick Saban when Alabama was only going 10-3 in 2010. You raise the bar for a given program higher than it has been for a while, but people get a little bit impatient when you fail to continue raising it. You could be a couple of 7-6 seasons away from full-fledged Glen Mason Territory.

Confused? Check out the glossary here.

There were 50,831 fans in attendance at Kentucky’s spring game. That’s more than Texas or Texas A&M drew, more than SEC East rivals Georgia and South Carolina drew, more than Ohio State drew, and way more than Notre Dame, Oklahoma, or LSU drew. Hell, that’s more than Kentucky drew for five of seven real home games in 2012. That many people came to watch not only a scrimmage, but a football scrimmage.