Nick Saban, Lane Kiffin changed SEC, but offense dominated league even before them
OXFORD, Miss. — The SEC is an offensive league.
Defense is the past. The days of Reggie White, Derrick Thomas, Champ Bailey and Glenn Dorsey are over. Now it's normal to see Joe Burrow throw 60 touchdowns or Alabama have four first-round receivers on the same team. It's the league where you hire Mike Leach, Josh Heupel, Bryan Harsin and Eliah Drinkwitz to try and win championships.
SEC teams are averaging 34.2 points per game, 441.4 yards per game and 6.34 yards per play through the first month of the season. No. 1 Alabama (4-0, 1-0 SEC) hosts No. 12 Ole Miss (3-0) Saturday (2:30 p.m., CBS) with the two teams averaging 46.5 and 52.7 points per game, the fourth-most and most in college football.
The two coaches, Alabama's Nick Saban and Ole Miss' Lane Kiffin, get a lot of credit for the SEC's offensive transformation. Saban's choice to employ Kiffin as Alabama's offensive coordinator from 2014-16 unleashed the mighty Crimson Tide offenses of today and left everyone else playing catch-up.
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But Alabama's evolution post-2014 didn't cause the SEC to embrace all things offense. It's the culmination.
"This was notoriously a traditional offensive conference," Kiffin said. "Guys came in and started to change that. This was an I-formation conference. I think that's where you see the change. And I also think the best players now come to the SEC. It was never like this."
What college football became
On Sept. 30, 2012, Alabama beat Ole Miss 33-14. The Crimson Tide were on their way to their third championship in four years. Ole Miss was barely a speed bump. But there was something about first-year Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze's gameplan that rubbed Saban the wrong way.
Ole Miss ran 68 plays in 25:01 of possession. That's one snap every 22.1 seconds. On the Rebels' two scoring drives, they ran 29 plays and snapped the ball every 19.4 seconds.
"I just think there's got to be some sense of fairness in terms of asking is this what we want football to be?" Saban asked the following week.
Bo Wallace, Ole Miss' quarterback that Saturday, thinks back with a laugh.
"If you looked at our offense back in 2012, it would be looked at as almost conservative these days in SEC football," Wallace said.
The problem with Saban's assertion wasn't that he was resisting the SEC's future. It's that he was ignoring the SEC's present.
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SEC teams averaged more than 30 points per game and more than 400 yards per game in 2010 and 2012, boosted by a pair of Heisman Trophy quarterbacks, Cam Newton of Auburn and Johnny Manziel on Texas A&M.
Then in 2013, offense took off even further. SEC teams averaged 31.7 points per game and 432.5 yards per game. They ran 388 more plays than they did the year before. Quarterbacks Manziel, Wallace, Aaron Murray, Zach Mettenberger, Connor Shaw and A.J. McCarron put up gigantic numbers. So did running backs Tre Mason, Jeremy Hill, T.J. Yeldon and Todd Gurley.
Most importantly, coaches brought new types of offenses to the once-stale SEC. Freeze was installing run-pass options before anyone called them RPOs. Kevin Sumlin brought Air Raid principles to the SEC years before Leach and Heupel. And in his first year as Auburn coach, Gus Malzahn was proving how effective it was to ride playmaking quarterbacks instead of game managers.
"Historically prior to that, it had kind of been three yards, I won't say 'and a cloud of dust,' but the pro-style offenses that Alabama and LSU were doing back then," said Alex Kozan, Auburn's left guard in 2013. "Having something where you're making the defense think more, you're giving them more reads. If you have quarterbacks capable of doing everything like we had that year, it puts more stress on the defense."
Auburn rode Malzahn's offense to the BCS Championship in 2013. Ole Miss won eight games, Texas A&M won nine and Missouri won 12 and the SEC East by running more than 74 plays per game.
All this before Saban and Kiffin united in 2014.
"I think that actually some other schools in the SEC did it before us," Saban told the Clarion Ledger in 2020. "Ole Miss actually had this kind of an offense which is what we struggled against and they scored a lot of points against us and actually beat us a few times. That's what sort of made us start thinking about 'Hey, we're not taking advantage of the rules in college football if we don't throw RPOs and do some of the things other people are doing.'"
Then Alabama did it
The SEC wasn't the first league to evolve. When you're on top, it's not your job to innovate. While the SEC was busy winning championships, other conferences embraced tempo and the spread.
Apply the same principle within the SEC. There's a reason why Missouri, Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Mississippi State experimented with non-traditional attacks while Alabama, LSU and Georgia toss-sweeped their way to double-digit wins.
But change trickles up. Enter 2018.
Alabama and Georgia met in the SEC Championship game with the league's two best offenses. Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa set the SEC's passer efficiency record and finished second in the Heisman voting. The league set a new record with its teams averaging 32.2 points per game.
A year later, LSU embraced modern offense. Burrow broke Tagovailoa's year-old record by playing arguably the best season in college football history.
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The year after that, Alabama quarterback Mac Jones took the record from Burrow. The Crimson Tide scored 48.5 points per game and cruised to an undefeated season.
Now Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral and Alabama's Bryce Young are jockeying for their own shot at a record poised to be broken every season.
"I'm really happy with where the offense is now as far as the schematics of it," Young said. "So, obviously there's a lot that myself and us as a unit has to improve on to execute at a higher level, but I'm really excited to be here and really like our scheme."
Where things are headed
In 2020, SEC teams averaged 29.4 points per game when playing each other. In 2009, Kiffin's only year at Tennessee, teams averaged 23.2 points per SEC game. That's a difference of one touchdown per team per game.
The simple reason why? Everyone is better.
From 2005-08, SEC teams signed 115 players who ranked in the top 100 of the 247Sports Composite rankings their recruiting year. By 2018-21, that number ballooned to 172, including 50 each in 2019 and 2020.
Now the league is hiring coaches to maximize that talent. Mississippi State hired Leach, a forefather of the Air Raid. Ole Miss and Arkansas hired offensive coordinators who were assistants on Baylor's early 2010s offenses, among the most productive ever. Alabama, LSU, Vanderbilt and Kentucky have offensive coordinators plucked from the NFL.
Whatever faux-outrage existed a decade ago about up-tempo offenses causing injuries and destroying football passed. Offense is thriving in the South and everyone's benefitting.
As Wallace pointed out, even — or especially — Saban.
"I think if you look at the business of football, it's done nothing but great things," Wallace said. "I'm sure Coach Saban and all the other coaches are enjoying the TV deals and all the other stuff so they can get their big-time contracts. I love where football's at right now and I hope it keeps evolving."
Follow Nick Suss: @nicksuss on Twitter.