SWC75
Bored Historian
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- Aug 26, 2011
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From the Idle Hands are the Devil's Tool Department:
I was perusing the Media Guide, (in the room where I do my perusing), and looking at SU's historical scores, which are also available here:
I decided to do a "best ball" version of the Donovan McNabb Era: Take the best score we achieved against each opponent in his four years here and see what the resulting season would look like. For the non-conference opponents, use the teams we played the most and the best scores we had against them. That fit perfectly because there were four teams that we played twice: all the other non-conference teams we played once. We were in an 8 team conference so we had 7 conference games for a total of 11 games, which is what we played then. The hone-road thing worked out fine for the non-conference opponents but I had to finagle the conference games because our best performances there were all home games. I put the ones I remembered the least on the road. Then I took our best performance in a bowl game. Here was the result:
at North Carolina 20-9
East Carolina 56-0
Minnesota 27-17
at Tulane 31-7
Rutgers 70-14
at Temple 60-7
at West Virginia 40-10
Virginia Tech 52-21
at Pittsburgh 55-7
Boston College 58-29
U of Miami 66-13
11-0-0 535-134
Bowl Game:
Clemson 41-0
12-0-0 576-134 (48.0-11.2 +36.8)
What does that prove? Nothing. And any school could take a good four year period and condense it in that manner and come up with something similar. Some schools, like the current Clemson program have a year something like that, (perhaps not quite that spectacular), every year. It's just a bit of fun. But the thought did occur that our problem in that era was not a lack of talent or depth but rather a lack of consistency.
Back to reality...
I was perusing the Media Guide, (in the room where I do my perusing), and looking at SU's historical scores, which are also available here:
I decided to do a "best ball" version of the Donovan McNabb Era: Take the best score we achieved against each opponent in his four years here and see what the resulting season would look like. For the non-conference opponents, use the teams we played the most and the best scores we had against them. That fit perfectly because there were four teams that we played twice: all the other non-conference teams we played once. We were in an 8 team conference so we had 7 conference games for a total of 11 games, which is what we played then. The hone-road thing worked out fine for the non-conference opponents but I had to finagle the conference games because our best performances there were all home games. I put the ones I remembered the least on the road. Then I took our best performance in a bowl game. Here was the result:
at North Carolina 20-9
East Carolina 56-0
Minnesota 27-17
at Tulane 31-7
Rutgers 70-14
at Temple 60-7
at West Virginia 40-10
Virginia Tech 52-21
at Pittsburgh 55-7
Boston College 58-29
U of Miami 66-13
11-0-0 535-134
Bowl Game:
Clemson 41-0
12-0-0 576-134 (48.0-11.2 +36.8)
What does that prove? Nothing. And any school could take a good four year period and condense it in that manner and come up with something similar. Some schools, like the current Clemson program have a year something like that, (perhaps not quite that spectacular), every year. It's just a bit of fun. But the thought did occur that our problem in that era was not a lack of talent or depth but rather a lack of consistency.
Back to reality...