Antonio Williams, as a first-team WR, is insane. He's a Clemson player, so not surprising, as you will soon see. They seem to get the benefit of the doubt despite their performance.
If you look at the rushing numbers, the first, second, and third teams consist of the RBs with the most rushing yards. LeQuint was 7th.
They should have looked at something other than straight rushing numbers, but that would have taken some time and research. A lot of sports reporters these days seem to lack the whole "research" phase of the job. So I've done the work for them. And I've brought receipts.
Here are all the players who made all-conference 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or Honorable Mention for RBs. I looked at the most important statistics for a running back. How much yardage they gain, how efficiently they do it on the ground, and how often they were used. Touchdowns is also a metric because scoring is the main goal, after all.
So what does this chart show? It obviously shows that Omarion Hampton is a clear 1st-teamer. Brashard Smith was pretty good at everything. LeQuint had poor YPC, which hurt him in one metric. As you can see though, he stacks up pretty well in all the others. Lots of categories where he's 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in the league.
Since another way to look at all-conference teams is to pick people who were the very best at certain things, I further broke down this info.In the below graph I took a look at all the categories players were 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in. I simply gave them points for the categories they "won," and took away points for categories they "lost".
As you can see, Hampton and Smith are still tops on the list. It seems they may be clear 1st teamers. What's interesting though is who shows up as a potential 2nd teamer. LeQuint. He was the clear third best running back in the league.
And finally I decided to take all categories and add up the total 1sts, 2nds, 3rds, etc. The lowest point total would be the RB who was the most solid across all categories.
LeQuint is a clear second-teamer. Phil Mafah (our Clemson guy) - who received third team honors is barely an honorable mention. By any metric LeQuint should have garnered second team all conference. He is one of the most complete backs in the league, and if not for a YPC that was pretty low, he would have probably had an opportunity for first team honors.
As usual, people who get paid to do this believe that their innate "sense" of the best players is always correct. They don't factor in their own biases (watched more games from one team than another, etc.). So they very often tend to get a lot wrong when picking all-conference teams. A little bit of very basic analysis ends up showing the same thing over and over again. It doesn't take long and it takes the bias out of the process.