2009 Offensive Projections

2009 player projections

As far as the team player projections for 2009 are concerned...it’s all over but the tweaking. We’ve spent countless man-hours scouring a litany of factors, and what will follow over the next couple of weeks will be an in-depth analysis of what we believe will transpire during the delirium that is the college football season. Do we think you can go all Rip Van Winkle and sleep through the season because we’ve told you what will take place from September – December? Of course not, but we do feel we have a damn good handle of which players and teams will emerge as fantasy leaders and which will disappoint with pedestrian offensive outputs.

College football fans are, for the most part, natural optimists. After all we’ve been bombarded with glowing spring reports, message board hyperbole and enough positive coach speak to get us through another decade of alumni-golf outings. And we do our best to combat those feelings that every offensive unit will show considerable improvement. Not every offensive line gels, not every new position coach clicks, and Ease of Schedule can be thrown out the window once the games begin. So our projections are very data-driven, and this helps to take emotion out of the process. And it often renders me useless.

You see I hold a degree in English while my colleagues each stumbled around the School of Engineering. I may not be very adept at solving problems, but dammit I can talk and write about the symbolism of said issues. And my comrades not only solve problems, they do so with enough charts, spreadsheets and formulas to make me want to reach across the table/Skype connection and choke the living daylights out of them both. At these times a beer or 12 was in order.

When I take a reflective look at the projections a few things become clear. We expect Big XII scoring to take a bit of a dip and expect the SEC to see a little spike. Prime factors are offensive line losses across the heartland and recent SEC coaching hires that place a definite premium on offense. Frankly we see an evening out effect. Some of the SEC offenses simply can't be as pathetic as they were last year, and it will be tough for the Big XII offensive units to maintain the torrid pace of a season ago.

A few teams were tougher than others to gauge, chief among them Missouri, Louisiana-Lafayette, even Georgia. Each loses considerable talent from the skill positions, but bring back veteran talent elsewhere, especially on the offensive line, and this could keep them humming right along.

Rather than ramble right along we'll present our team offensive rankings. Shortly following we'll have our individual player projections, updated ranking and previews.

The summer holiday is over. It's time to get down to business