Skip Bayless; Michigan #1 defense, not Alabama
I wanted to pull my hair out listening to the Skip Bayless rant yesterday about Alabama's defense not being Nick Saban's calling card on his show on Fox 1 Sports. Bayless uses selective stats to try to win his argument and dismisses the total picture. Skip focuses on the games where Alabama has been involved in shootouts the last four years to try to drive home his point. Today I give Joel Klatt credit for taking his smart pill. Joel said last year he said the same thing and tells Skip not to fall for that trap. Joel goes on to say he was wrong and Skip is wrong also and gives some very sane reasons in his explanation. During the debate Skip says that Michigan has the best defense this year, they are ranked number one in total defense and scoring defense. Skip was wrong again. You can watch the video here. https://youtu.be/zhiDAsQyikI via @YouTube
Why is Skip wrong about Michigan having a better defense than Alabama despite the Wolverines being ranked #1 in total defense and #1 in scoring defense? Here are the statistical comparisons. Michigan is #1 in total defense allowing only 246 yards per game. Alabama is ranked #2 in total defense allowing 253 yards per game. Michigan is #1 in scoring defense allowing 10.9 points per game. Alabama is #2 in scoring defense allowing 11.4 points per game. So why is Michigan not the best defense?
Stats can be miss leading. How did Michigan compile the number one statistics defensively? Michigan as a whole has played bad offensive teams compared to what Alabama has faced. Here are the offensive rankings of the teams Michigan and Alabama has faced this year.
Michigan has only faced TWO top 50 offenses and they have faced FOUR of the worst offenses in college football. On the other hand Alabama has faced SIX top fifty offenses. I listed Chattanooga as 129th out of 128 FBS teams because we are trying to compare apples to oranges to slide their stats into the FBS rankings. Chattanooga has a better offense than many of the FBS teams, I would rank them somewhere between 80 to 100. But just for argument sake today I gave them the worst possible ranking of 129th. That gives Alabama just facing TWO offenses ranked worse than 100 compared to FOUR for Michigan. If we average all of the offenses Michigan has faced, they have an average offense ranking of 87.45 while Alabama has faced an average offense ranking of 58.45. The Alabama defense has faced much tougher competition than Michigan and there is very little difference statistically. If the Michigan defense had of faced the same schedule that Alabama has faced I doubt they would be a top twenty defense. Sometimes stats on the surface lie to us. Skip Bayless bought into the lie and did not look at how those stats were compiled. Michigan does not have a better defense than Alabama. The second layer of stats shows that and the eye test shows that. Alabama has strangled 9 out of 11 teams offenses this year despite facing six top fifty offenses. Alabama is the most talented defense and nobody has a smarter defense than Nick Saban coached defenses. Jeremy Pruitt has done a great job this year of being more aggressive and creating a.lot of negative plays and turnovers while crushing the run.
Alabama has the best defense in college football this year Skip, there is no debate.
