UPDATE: Dreams, Lullabies And The Auburn Tigers is now up at the mothership.
Pick something, anything at all, that I thought I knew at this point 12 months ago. Now throw it into a ceiling fan. Auburn destroyed pretty much every ounce of applicable logic I could conceive. They won the national title despite an offense that ranked 105th in 2008, a defense that ranked 48th in 2009, and the fact that they hadn't ranked in the F/+ Top 25 in three years. Cam Newton came in and almost single-handedly converted an offense from solid to transcendent, so good that Auburn ranked No. 1 in F/+ despite ranking 31st in Def. F/+. Auburn played in close games for literally half their season, and won every time. It was positively absurd.
And now they head into 2011 having lost two-thirds of their starting lineup and seemingly 95% of their difference-makers ... and chances are, they're going to wreck our projections (and my psyche) once again. It made no sense what they were able to do last year, and whatever is in store in the coming years, that probably isn't going to make sense either. Embrace the absurdity and uncertainty, Auburn fans. If you avoid both NCAA sanctions and some harsh regression to the mean in the Close Wins department, then you're doing pretty well.
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Auburn truly was the anti-Clemson in 2010, winning every close game they encountered (even beating Clemson in a close game). In all, they went 7-0 in one-possession games last year (which doesn't even count the Arkansas game, in which they trailed in the fourth quarter before surging to a 22-point win), which was both magnificent and foreboding. Unless you are Penn State, a glut of close wins does not tend to carry over from one season to the next.
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Teams Winning At Least Seven One-Possession Games In A Season |
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| Year | Team | Close Rec. | Overall Rec. | Next Yr Close Rec. |
Next Year Overall Rec. |
Change in Overall Rec. |
| 1967 | Indiana | 7-0 | 9-2 | 5-2 | 6-4 | -2.5 |
| 1979 | Houston | 7-1 | 11-1 | 3-2 | 7-5 | -4.0 |
| 1979 | McNeese State | 7-0 | 11-1 | 3-2 | 10-2 | -1.0 |
| 1979 | Purdue | 7-0 | 10-2 | 3-0 | 9-3 | -1.0 |
| 1979 | UNLV | 7-1-2 | 9-1-2 | 1-1 | 7-4 | -2.5 |
| 1979 | Wake Forest | 8-1 | 8-4 | 1-4 | 5-6 | -2.5 |
| 1985 | Penn State | 7-0 | 11-1 | 4-0 | 12-0 | +1.0 |
| 1986 | San Diego State | 7-2 | 8-4 | 1-3 | 5-7 | -3.0 |
| 1994 | Alabama | 7-1 | 12-1 | 4-2 | 8-3 | -3.0 |
| 1999 | Michigan | 7-2 | 10-2 | 3-3 | 9-3 | -1.0 |
| 2000 | Washington | 7-1 | 11-1 | 5-1 | 8-4 | -3.0 |
| 2002 | Colorado State | 7-2 | 10-4 | 2-4 | 7-6 | -2.5 |
| 2002 | Ohio State | 7-0 | 14-0 | 6-1 | 11-2 | -2.5 |
| 2003 | TCU | 7-1 | 11-2 | 3-2 | 5-6 | -5.0 |
| 2010 | Auburn | 7-0 | 14-0 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Joe Paterno bucked the trend, as he is wont to do, and some other teams were able to keep the close-game magic going, but virtually all of them slipped at least a bit. The ten teams who rode close-game magic to double-digit wins fell by an average of 2.2 games the next year. No word on which of those teams (other than Auburn) returned just seven starters the next year.
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