Subtitle: How Much Of A Difference Can One Good Recruiting Class Make?

Intro
1992-93
1994-95
1996-97
1998-99

In the most recent piece in this series, we took a look at how the 1998 and 1999 seasons would have played out if Mizzou were in the SEC. Using my numbers to project the 1998 season, Mizzou fares very, very well. They go 10-1, missing out on an SEC East title thanks Tennessee, but heading to the Orange Bowl and taking out Syracuse. They finish 11-1, ranked somewhere around fourth or fifth in the country.

Because of the way we tend to treat the thought of breakthrough seasons, then, it wasn't a surprise that, when Mizzou still collapsed in 1999, the comments skewed toward the following sentiment: if 1998 were that much better, wouldn't that prevent as much of a collapse in 1999?

Some thoughts on that:

• In this experiment, I am projecting the results of 20 seasons. It is pretty time-consuming overall, and the thought of altering recruiting classes in addition to that is very intimidating. So I am sticking with out the actual Missouri teams would have fared.
• We often overestimate the impact of breakthrough seasons on recruiting. When Mizzou finished in the Top Five in 2007, they didn't suddenly end up with a Top 10 recruiting class. Nor did Kansas State after their 2003 Big 12 title season. Nor will Oklahoma State this season. Nor, actually, did Arizona when they finished in the Top Five in 1998. Good seasons give your recruiting a bump, just as bad seasons tend to result in a bit of a recruiting slump. But it only has so much impact.
• If Missouri goes 11-1 instead of 8-4, they perhaps land a couple more big-time players, maybe as many as 4-6. But for the most part, recruits have already narrowed their lists down by the time a good season happens in the first place, and not that many are going to necessarily change their minds and think "I'm going to pass up a chance at [Random National Power], which is definitely going to be good when I'm there, because [Random Up-And-Comer] might still be good when I'm there."

Really, I'm not altering the quality of Missouri teams in this exercise based on time and/or laziness. But using the 1999 recruiting class as a guide, let's see what the impact one class could have if Mizzou experienced a sudden, one-year recruiting boom.

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Intro
1992-93
1994-95
1996-97

Timing is everything. The success of your program's rise and/or fall is dependent on who else in your conference is rising or falling at the same time. Sometimes they are correlated, sometimes they are not. Kansas State's mid-2000s tumble was due at least in part to Mizzou's recruiting success in the Kansas City area; suddenly the Chase Coffmans and Tony Temples were choosing black and gold over purple. LSU's rise in the early-2000s was timed with the downfall of Ole Miss and Mississippi State; one could easily draw a similar conclusion there.

But often, timing is just timing. It is somewhat out of your hands. When you do or don't play a certain inter-division rival could make the difference of a couple of wins in a given year. When you play a chief rival at home or on the road could result in a division title (or lack thereof).

I bring this up for one simple reason: Larry Smith's timing was pretty bad. Both his high point (1998) and his low point (1999) came when the Big 12 was at the peak of its power. The Big 12 was the best conference in the country in these years, and I'm not sure it was close. Kansas State was at its peak; so was Texas A&M (in the Big 12 era, at least). The level at which Mizzou was playing wouldn't be matched for another decade. Nebraska wasn't quite Nebraska, but they were still excellent. Texas still had Ricky Williams. Oklahoma was about to bring in Bob Stoops. Colorado was still quite formidable. Dan McCarney was about to make Iowa State interesting. Texas Tech didn't have Mike Leach yet, but Spike Dykes was still pulling in winning seasons every year. Oklahoma State was taking a step backwards but was still a tough out.

The numbers I am using for this little What If... experiment back up this sentiment. Texas A&M ranks third in the country in 1998, Nebraska fifth, Kansas State sixth. Missouri ranked 12th ... and was the fourth-best team in the conference. Texas and Colorado also ranked in the Top 25. That's half the conference. Combined with Ohio State, then, Missouri played the No. 2, No. 3, No. 5 and No. 6 teams in the country (three on the road) and lost all four games, three by a touchdown or less. They beat everybody else on the schedule by an average score of 34-17. Their timing, in other words, was awful.

In the SEC East, however, things would have played out quite differently.

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Intro
1992-93
1994-95

I finished Part Three of this series by saying "it gets better." And it does! Following a pair of miserable campaigns (3-19-1) in Larry Smith's first two seasons, Corby Jones fully takes the reins in 1996, and eventually the tide (briefly) turns. Mizzou doesn't contend for a division title by any means, but you have to crawl before you can walk.

1996

Record: 5-6
Points: 250-300 (-50)

Record in Big 8: 5-6
Points: 278-376 (-98)

What Doesn't Happen: Mizzou no longer loses to Texas in a monsoon, knocks off a ranked Clemson team in September, or faces back-to-back whoopings at the hands of Colorado and Nebraska in November.

What Does Happen: They still go 5-6, with bowl eligibility prevented by a silly, three-point loss to Memphis. They take out both Arkansas and Kansas to end the season, leading to serious optimism for 1997.

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Intro
1992-93

So Bob Stull gets fired and gives way to Larry Smith in 1994. The transition from pass-pass-pass to run-run-run goes about as horribly as one would expect, be it in the Big 8 or SEC. In fact, it goes quite a bit worse in an impressively deep 1994 SEC.

1994

Record: 1-10-1
Points: 189-405 (-216)

Record in Big 8: 3-8-1
Points: 208-325 (-117)

What Doesn't Happen: Mizzou doesn't get the pleasure of beating 1-10 Houston, 0-10-1 Oklahoma State or 3-7-1 Iowa State. Meanwhile, two great opponents -- Colorado (11-1) and Nebraska (13-0) -- are replaced with Florida and a bunch of good-enough-to-beat-Mizzou teams.

What Does Happen: With a double-digit home loss to Kentucky, Mizzou only really has a chance to beat Tulsa (they don't), Vanderbilt (hooray!) and Hawaii (tie). Yeah, not a good start to the Larry Smith era.

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Yesterday, the "To Be Continued..." sign popped up just as Missouri was getting ready to play its first SEC game in the beautiful fall of 1992. The SEC had moved to 14 teams, reeling in not only Arkansas and South Carolina, but also a short-term powerhouse in Texas A&M and ... a good J-school in Missouri. Things aren't going to go well for the Tigers in their first years in the SEC, but they didn't go well in the real early-1990s either, did they?

(For the results below, I am using the Est. S&P+ measure you've probably seen me use before in these types of posts. Before 2005, I do not have a play-by-play database, so I used some of the same concepts in creating an estimated measure based simply on points scored and points allowed.)

(One other note: I tried to keep as many real results on the conference schedule as possible, so scheduling does not necessarily follow a perfect rotation. Occasionally you'll see back-to-back road games versus one team, or other little things like that. But since precise, perfect schedules really weren't the point of this exercise, I didn't mind doing that.)

1992

A quick refresher on what happened in the real 1992:

Best Win: Mizzou 22, Kansas (8-4) 17
Worst Loss: Because it was gross: Oklahoma (5-4-2) 51, Mizzou 17. Because it was a missed opportunity for vengeance: Colorado (9-2-1) 6, Mizzou 0.

We remember the early-'90s as a time when Bob Stull's offense was high-flying, but the defense was terrible. That's half-true. The defense truly was not good ... but neither was the offense. Both units ranked 58th in the country according to my Estimated S&P+ measure, and though Phil Johnson and Jeff Handy had good games in his time in black and gold, the mostly came against terrible defenses. In 1992, for instance, Mizzou scored 44 against 1-AA Marshall, 27 against 5-6 Kansas State, and 26 against 4-6-1 Oklahoma State. But against everybody else, they managed just 14.6 PPG. They did score 24 against Nebraska, mostly in a comeback effort, and they scored 22 against 8-4 Kansas, but ... not good.

The 1992 team did manage to create hope for 1993, however. They were young, with players like Steve Martin just beginning to thrive, and they managed to finish the season with back-to-back wins over Kansas State and Kansas, in which both the offense and defense took steps forward. But that didn't change the fact that the first nine games were, how to put it nicely ... awful.

And then there was the Thursday night ESPN game against Colorado where the wind and cold made for one of the most unpleasant experiences imaginable. Let's just agree to this right now: whether we're in the Big Ten or Big 12 in the future ... no more Thursday night ESPN home games. Ever. Ever, ever, ever.

And now, to alternate 1992.

Record: 3-7-1
Points: 235-309 (-74)

Record in Big 8: 3-8
Points: 214-269 (-55)

The 1992 season wasn't an amazing one for the Big 8 -- Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas were the only bowl-eligible teams -- so Mizzou's point differential is a little worse in the SEC, if just because of the blowout losses to Tennessee and Georgia.

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(It's What If season, evidently, as I'm unleashing a different kind of What If series at Football Study Hall today as well.)

If you are a long-time reader, you knew this series was coming. To gauge the impact of something on the future, I tend to look at how things would have been affected in the past. We've heard about how the SEC is a major step up in football competition, and we know it will represent a significant change for Mizzou in terms of both football culture and rivalry. So to get a read for just how much things might change, we are going to flash back. And since Mizzou's move to the SEC a) has actually happened (unlike certain old "What If ... Big Ten" pieces) and b) is a really, really big deal, we're going to take this thing back a long way.

In 1992, Arkansas and South Carolina began play in a 12-team SEC. It was the first conference with two divisions and a championship game. As we saw from the recent The Play That Changed College Football documentary, this was an enormous change. The SEC nearly lost a national title contender in its very first year with a championship game, and in general, quite a few people were incredibly resistant to this sort of change. For this series, however, we're going to pretend the change was even bigger. Instead of stopping at 12 teams, the SEC went ahead and added Texas A&M and Missouri as well.

Now, we know this probably wouldn't have played out this way. (After all, it didn't in real life.) Missouri's football program was in shambles, and in 1992, simply having TV markets in your state wasn't much of a draw. With football still the primary driver of change, Mizzou didn't exactly have much to offer. But in new, Alternate 1992, they were invited nonetheless. They just were.

The conference's new alignment represented an almost seminal moment in college football's history. Other 'super conferences' adopted the 12-team, divisional format, including the Big 12, ACC, MAC and, recently, the Big Ten and Pac-12. The point of this series will be to gauge how Mizzou may have fared over the years, but before we get to that, I can't help myself: let's think about what this move would have meant for the college football landscape as a whole.

• Instead of moving to 12 teams, the benchmark would have potentially been set at 14. The scheduling is messier, but there is no artificial barrier at 12 teams anymore.
• The SWC has now lost two major programs and fallen to seven teams overall, and the Big 8 is now the Big 7 again. Think about what this may have meant. There is the distinct possibility that these two conferences would have merged as whole entities. Big 14 North: the remaining Big 8 teams; Big 14 South: the remaining SWC teams. Rice, SMU, TCU and Houston: still major conference teams. Congratulations, Rice! (It's also possible that the Big 8 could have moved to bring in teams like BYU, Air Force and Colorado State and attempted to move to 10-12 teams. Same with the SWC and programs like UTEP or New Mexico.)
  
• Around this same time, eastern independents were jostling for position. Before Florida State agreed to join the ACC, there were rumors of a larger, more interesting Big East; plus, there was the specter of a potential Metro Conference for football that would include seemingly every major population base in the Eastern Time Zone. Though the 16-team proposal included South Carolina (and therefore was no longer realistic), it isn't hard to envision a 14-team Metro coming to fruition, even if Florida State were to still go to the ACC.
  
  Metro North: Boston College, Cincinnati, Pitt, Rutgers, Syracuse, Temple, West Virginia
  Metro South: East Carolina, Louisville, Memphis State, Miami, Southern Miss, Tulane, Virginia Tech
  
  Without FSU and South Carolina, this conference is lacking a bit; instead, it is basically what would become the Big East, plus a few more southern schools that would end up in Conference USA. With the SEC going all the way to 14 teams, it is quite possible that this may have come to fruition, with Miami and an emerging Virginia Tech team anchoring the South while a revolving door of interesting teams takes turns leading the North. (That, or the ACC may have been more aggressive and pursued programs like Miami, B.C. or Virginia Tech earlier than they eventually did.)
• When the WAC moved to 16 teams in the mid-1990s, it happened in part because of three SWC teams that became available -- Rice, SMU and TCU. With those three in a Big 14, the WAC potentially only moves to 12 or 14 teams. And without cultural differences like Rice-Fresno State, such a conference may have had a higher potential chance for survival.

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During the gap between regular season and bowls, I tend to whip out a What If... post or two. The impetus for this and other posts in the next couple of weeks should be pretty obvious: after all the MIZZOUEXPANSIONAPALOOZA 2010™ talk this summer, we discussed many scenarios that might play out for Missouri's future, and it's probably about that time to start looking at how things might have unfolded given other scenarios.

We start with the 10-team Big 12.  In mid-June, I took a look at what the Big 12 landscape would have looked like if the 10-team Big 12 had always come into existence (i.e. if Nebraska and Colorado had ended up in their respective conferences in 1996 instead of 2011):

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Time to see how 2010 might have been similar or different with a ten-team league and nine-game conference schedules for everybody.

Instead of using the schedules as they will really exist in future seasons, I stayed loyal to the games that were actually played this season (and the locations in which they were played) and filled in the rest of the schedule from there.  For Mizzou, that meant home games against Oklahoma State and Baylor and a road trip to Texas (good year for that, eh?).  For Kansas, it meant trips to Oklahoma and Tech and a home game against Texas.  Et cetera.

Below is a week-to-week look at how the season would have played out.  I tried to stay as close as possible to the dates in which the real games were played, but in an effort to move some games around (both into September for TV purposes, and into Championship Week), I did have to make some adjustments.  I had to dump a non-conference game for each team -- my general approach was to dump the second-least impressive opponent.  I figure most teams will still play one FCS team each season, so I dumped the No. 3 game, which is typically a Sun Belt or MAC opponent.  For Missouri, that was Miami-OH.  For Kansas, New Mexico State.  You get the idea.

For the games that didn't actually take place, I simulated them using season-long F/+ numbers.  Obviously that's a rough tool, as some teams were completely different in September than they were in November, but it's what we have to work with.

(Conference games in bold.)

Week One (September 4)

The season begins with just two ranked league teams.  Texas Tech is breaking in new players and a new coach, and Oklahoma State has to replace Dez Bryant and Zac Robinson.  Those two teams, plus Missouri and Texas A&M are all receiving votes.

No. 5 Texas 34, Rice 17 (in Austin)
No. 7 Oklahoma 31, Utah State 24 (in Norman)
Baylor 34, Sam Houston 3 (in Waco)
Iowa State 27, Northern Iowa 0 (in Ames)
North Dakota State 6, Kansas 3 (in Lawrence)
Kansas State 31, UCLA 22 (in Manhattan)
Missouri 23, Illinois 13 (in St. Louis)
Oklahoma State 65, Washington State 17 (in Stillwater)
Texas A&M 48, Stephen F. Austin 7 (in College Station)
Texas Tech 35, SMU 27 (in Lubbock)

Nothing unusual here. The only change is that Iowa State begins with Northern Iowa instead of Northern Illinois.

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Fox Sports has been showing the hell out of the 2007 Missouri-Oklahoma game in recent days, and while I was resting from some housework/painting earlier, I finally broke down and watched it again.  Like I have in the past when this game was on, I turned it off immediately after That Play.  Missouri had just come back from a 23-10 deficit to take a 24-23 lead heading into the fourth quarter, and as Oklahoma was driving to take the lead again, Sam Bradford overthrew his man in the end zone.  Either it surprised Pig Brown that it was overthrown, or he lost it in the lights, but the ball hit Pig in both hands, and he dropped it.  Within ten plays, the Sooners had locked the game up for good.  They would go on to score the go-ahead touchdown, then take an insurmountable lead when Curtis Lofton scooped up a fumbled exchange between Chase Daniel and Jeremy Maclin and took it in for a touchdown.  I turned the game off after the near-pick because a) I know what happened after that, and b) I get to playing the same What If game in my head.

For newer readers who maybe weren't around two summers ago, I thought I would once again share a piece I wrote then, called simply, "What If ... Pig Had Caught That Ball?"  (SPOILER ALERT: there is no perfect, happy ending.)