Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Ranking the Alabama Crimson Tide Under Head Coach Saban

The USA Today recently had an article ranking Alabama over the last ten seasons during Saban's tenure as head coach with the Crimson Tide.  So that prompted me to do the same, except that the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model that I use starts in 2008, so that I will not have anything to say specifically about the 2007 season.  The author of the article (Paul Myerberg) ranks the Crimson Tide teams [by season] as listed below.  I encourage you to read his thoughts in the article linked at the beginning of this blog, and here I will share mine.

Myerberg
2011
2009
2015
2012
2016
2013
2014
2008
2010
2007

First, let me briefly discuss the process about how I came up with the rankings.  To do this, I grabbed all the offense and defense data for all the FBS teams that I use for the Complex Invasion College Football Production Model from 2008 to 2016 and then I ran an offense regression and a defense regression.  I used the coefficient's from the offense and defense (which were all statistically significant and of the correct sign) and multiplied the actual on-field production to get a offense total value and a defense total value.  The higher the value for offense is a better offense and a lower value for defense is a better defense.  Then I subtracted the defense value from the offense value to get the total value.  The advantage here is that we are comparing those nine Crimson Tide seasons using the same "weights" for each season.

Second, I ranked offense, defense and total values since 2008.  Below is my rankings of the Alabama Crimson Tide (in terms of production) overall, with just offense and with just defense.

Total
Offense
Defense
2016
2016
2011
2012
2012
2009
2011
2014
2016
2009
2015
2012
2015
2013
2010
2010
2010
2008
2014
2009
2015
2013
2011
2013
2008
2008
2014

As you can see since 2008, last season's Crimson Tide was the most productive, and the 2008 team was the least productive (excluding 2007 since I don't have that data).  As you can see of the four national championships during Saban's tenure (2009, 2011, 2012 & 2015) that the 2016 team was actually more productive than the others and last year's team would have won except for that last exceptional drive by Clemson, that the 2016 team would also fit in that group.

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