2022 National Championship contenders: The SEC West
College football's most overpowered division gets their own column to cover all the possibilities.
At last we arrive at the toughest division in college football, the SEC West.
How much longer with the SEC West be the toughest division? Unclear. Whenever Texas and Oklahoma join the conference everything will shake up into pods or whatever they end up doing. The Big 10 will also change and no longer have the ridiculous East/West power imbalance, although perhaps they won't be able to avoid having some other lopsided new setup owing to the need to put Michigan, Ohio State, and Michigan State in the same group.
Anyways…
Over the course of this offseason we’ve compiled three different metrics for evaluating high level teams in college football.
Space force theory: The gist here is that elite athletes at left tackle, deep threat receiver, man cornerback, and Edge rusher can have an outsized impact on a game. Their matchups are routinely 1-on-1 battles in space with high stakes for winning or losing (touchdowns, turnovers, etc), so having elite athletes at those positions will matter more than other personnel, save perhaps for having really good decision-making at quarterback.
The rule of three in pass defense: To play elite, modern pass defense you need to be able to handle one of two requirements. To rush the quarterback with only three or to be able to cover a team’s top three receivers in man/match coverage without getting burned. Rushing with only three allows you to get help to defenders anywhere in the secondary, playing three capable man coverage defenders allows you to survive without needing help everywhere.
Pro-style passing wins titles: The most difficult level of college offense to master or to defend is a pro-style, spread passing game. Teams who can execute it with high level personnel will beat other high level teams executing a different style of offense.
Combine those three metrics with our currently limited but not useless sense of the rosters in the game and we can do some decent guesswork on who can really win the title this year. By the time the playoffs are settling into focus, we should have a decent idea of who can win the title.
The SEC West has a load of talented teams but the the sort of passing game continuity or space force athleticism which helps win titles is pretty dispersed. I’ve seen several different forecasts for how the division will shake out and they’re ALL different save for all featuring Alabama at the top. So let’s start with Alabama…
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