I'm going to post this over at TOOS to poke at the morons......so my text below is not directed at you all. It's directed at the morons. But I did find these stats interesting. Total Winning Percentage by Year (for all games) SEC East 2011 - 58% 2012 - 62% 2013 - 58% 2014 - 54% 2015 - 53% The East is barely above .500 this season across the board. Another interesting stat (East vs West) - East winning percentage by year: 2011 - 32% 2012 - 47% 2013 - 40% 2014 - 27% 2015 - 9% (1-11 so far this year vs the SEC West) You can twist stats into being whatever you want them to be. I know you can make it look good the other way somehow. In my eyes all this does is show that the SEC East is getting much worse overall as a division. Yes, we have better players and people are going to scream progress from the highest rooftops. But at the end of the day the pack is also coming back to us. The only SEC East vs West win this year is Florida over Ole Miss. Everyone gets so wrapped up in the snowflakes and star ratings and this and that but this stat shows to me that we are playing in a pretty weak division that was ripe for the pickings this year and we blew it. How much worse can the East get? There should be absolutely zero reasons that Tennessee doesn't win the East next season.
It's as simple as this: stop Florida on 4th down even once, and we're locking up the division right now. The opportunity was right there.
Because someone on TOOS decided to throw out the stats at Tennessee's offensive explosion this year compared to year's past I slapped together this chart: SEC East 2014 to 2015 PPG Differences: Florida -1.7 Georgia -12.20 Kentucky -7.30 Missouri -13.1 South Carolina -10.90 Tennessee +6.20 Vandy -2.40 That's an average of -5.92 PPG across the board. From 06 to now Missouri is having it's worst scoring offensive season PPG. Previous low 25.8 now 14.7. Vanderbilt's previous low PPG was 16.3 PPG in 2009 and now it's down to 14.8 this year. This is South Carolina's second worst scoring year in that stretch.
It's a giant pile of suck, but in fairness, the difference between this year and the last two is that Georgia, who didn't win it any of the three years, isn't as good.