So today at the SB Nation mothership, you will find a profile for new, provisional FBS members, the South Alabama Jaguars.
South Alabama has gone about building a program from scratch exactly as you'd think one should. Joey Jones has hired good, local, young assistants with solid recruiting pedigrees, he will be employing an en vogue style on both offense (spread) and defense (3-4), and his program has slowly built confidence and increased its degree of difficulty with each passing year. But now we go from increments to leaps. Western Kentucky looked like they were going about things the right way, too, and then they lost 33 of their first 34 FBS games.
This is the first of 124 profiles you will find over the next five months, all at the SB Nation college football page. But for those who remember last year's profiles, we are going about them in a different way this time. Last year, you got one enormous profile, complete with words, tables, numbers, etc. This year we're breaking them out a bit. The profile posted at SBN will be mostly words, while each team will get a full-page, statistical profile here at Study Hall. (Here is USA's.) The idea here is that a) people who don't care about the nitty gritty details and stats can just focus on the words, and b) each team will have a nice reference page for you to visit and revisit, hopefully not unlike the incredibly useful reference pages Ken Pomeroy has created for NCAA basketball teams.
A few notes about the profiles:
- Use this page as an ongoing reference for what has and hasn't been completed to date. As you see, I cranked through the SEC teams while perfecting the format, and now I'm working from the bottom up. Expect these to be finished in the next month or so.
- The FBS newcomers (South Alabama, UT-San Antonio, Texas State, UMass) don't quite get the same level of statistics as everybody else, and for an obvious reason: the advanced stats don't exist for the FCS level. Still, you get a pretty large dose of the basic, raw stats, and hopefully a lovely reference point.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy these. This series is my favorite thing that I do here; hopefully others enjoy it too.
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