Nashville—Andy Ludwig knows that a good offense looks like. In 2013 he was the offensive coordinator at Wisconsin, where the Badgers set a school record for yards gained (480.8 ppg). In 2014 Wisconsin posted the third-best offensive season in school history with 468.9 yards per game. In the process Mevlin Gordon became a Heisman Trophy […]

  In Texas A&M’s three years of membership, head coach Kevin Sumlin has learned a lot about life in the SEC. Lesson No. 1: Despite the emergence of up-tempo offenses (including his) that spread the field, speed up the game and (hopefully) score a lot of points, the SEC is not a finesse league. Far […]

Knoxville, Tenn.—On Aug. 15 the University of Tennessee football team had a very good morning workout at the Haslam practice fields. The night time drills would be held under the lights at Neyland Stadium. The public was invited and head coach Butch Jones hoped for a good crowd. Over 40,000 fans showed up. That, ladies […]

Columbia, S.C.—As a high school player in Havelock, N.C., Pharoh Cooper proved that he could do special things with the ball in his hands. As a quarterback, running back, receiver, kick returner and defensive back, Cooper led Havelock to a pair of state championships and a 31-1 record in his final two seasons. As a […]

You can throw all the stats you want at Maty Mauk, but the Missouri quarterback is not going to flinch. You can point to a difficult stretch of games last fall—South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida—where nothing seemed to work for Mauk. In those SEC games he completed only 27 of 73 passes (36.9 percent) with […]

  Starkville, Miss.—It was a journey Manny Diaz thought he would never have to make when he left Mississippi State at the end of the 2010 season. At the time he was 37 years old and one of the hottest young defensive coordinators in the business. In his one and only season in Starkville, the […]

  Oxford, Miss.—In February of 2013 Ole Miss signed a recruiting class that, on paper, was the best in school history. There were 11 high school All-Americans in that group including the nation’s No. 1 overall recruit (DT Robert Nkemdiche), the nation’s No. 1 offensive tackle (Laremy Tunsil), the nation’s No. 1 receiver (Laquon Treadwell), […]

  In college football there are two kinds of trends: Anecdotal and Undeniable. Anecdotal trends are based on a few, isolated events. Let’s say a quarterback throws two consecutive interceptions in a game and he is labeled as a guy who can’t read defenses. That may ultimately prove to be true over the course of […]