A week-long look at SMQ’s preseason ballot.
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20. Illinois
The Illini are a mixed bag: on one hand, they lose two of the best players in the conference, Mendenhall and Lehman, and carry the stigma of a one-hit wonder. But the Zook recruiting boost has dramatically upgraded the overall talent and depth, and this was still a pretty young team last year -- Juice Williams, while clearly improved from his abysmal freshman effort, was still a work in progress as a passer, sophomore Vontae Davis was rounding into first round material at cornerback, and future pros Arrelious Benn (freshman), Jeff Cumberland (sophomore), Xavier Fulton (junior, at a new position) and Will Davis (junior) were all just finding their footing as first-year starters. Add to that shirtless recruits Martez Wilson, a sophomore moving to linebacker after making minor waves at end, and D’Angelo McCray, who’ll start at defensive tackle after redshirting, [McCray has transferred; see comments -- ed.] and there’s no doubt last year’s surge was no fluke, physically.

Juice: All of a sudden, the man of the house.
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But doubt persists, largely because Mendenhall’s early exit is a potential back-breaker for the entire offense. Daniel Dufrene made something of a name for himself by busting the controversial 80-yarder at Ohio State, but actually had very few opportunities (50 touches, almost half against Western Illinois, Syracuse, Indiana, Ball State and Northwestern), and is a less reliable runner at this point than Williams. But Juice remained slightly below average as a passer, and his grasp of the offense at this point isn’t going to drastically improve, if it improves at all. Without at least a worthy complimentary threat in the backfield -- and Mendenhall, obviously, was much more than that -- it’s likely we’ve seen Juice’s ceiling, and the team’s.

19. Tennessee
Here is a victim of the format: I like the Vols, and in a power poll, they might rank among the top ten or twelve teams in the country. New offensive coordinator Dave Clawson has promised balance, but with a big, 1,000-yard back -- and a couple capable young ‘uns behind him -- and the most promising, experienced offensive line this side of Oklahoma (and maybe West Virginia), the personnel on offense bodes a welcome return to the straight-ahead, physical attack that defined the Vols in their late nineties hey day, as well as the last time they won a surprise division championship with a totally green quarterback, in 2004. The defense, as porous as it was for much of last year, would not seem to bear comparison to its usually fire-breathing predecessors, but the front seven remains as talented as ever (according to Phil Steele, probable starters on the line and at linebacker include PS#1, PS#6, PS#14, PS#5 and PS#8, for what it’s worth) and the equally talented secondary seemed to progress from flailing noobs to entrenched stalwarts after being torched by Alabama in October. There’s a dropoff to the new quarterback, maybe, but under normal circumstances the defending East champs should be right back in the thick of the race.

This particular edition of the SEC East, though, is not exactly normal. If Erik Ainge had another year (surely they would have redshirted the kid in 2005 if they had seen what was coming), UT would probably be considered a legitimate aspirant to the all-consuming Florida/Georgia debate. With Jonathan Crompton under center and Florida, Georgia and Auburn in the first three conference games -- to say nothing of the opening trip to UCLA and Alabama and South Carolina by the start of November -- the Vols are everywhere an afterthought, universally consigned to the usual New Year’s date in the Outback or Bowl Formerly Known as the Citrus with a minimum of three losses. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the conventional wisdom reigns here. As many potential contenders as there are in the SEC, even if Tennessee manages to upset UF or UGA early, the odds of surviving to even an at-large BCS bid are too long.

18. Virginia Tech
Here is a beneficiary of the format: I’m definitely down on the Hokies in general, and in a power poll, they probably wouldn’t rank in the top 25 at all. The quarterback is either a decidedly average, within-the-offense manager prone to making his own fans wail or a very young, probably one-dimensional sophomore; the running backs left spring either booted from the team or injured; the receivers are brand spanking new, and the only potentially viable option will miss the season; and any deference to the attrition-racked defense is out of respect for coordinator Bud Foster’s track record and its association with the dominant class of veterans that just graduated en masse. If the offensive line didn’t return almost intact, there’d be no hope of coherence on offense.

But Tech has won at least eight games every year for the last decade, and at least tean games all four years since joining the ACC. With the schedule, it’s hard to see short of an unprecedented collapse how it can possibly fall short of nine or ten wins again. Tech has survived for years without much explosiveness on offense, and most of the new starters on defense played a lot last year; the last three Hokie Ds have been so outrageously good, statistically, that the new edition can suffer some significant regression and still qualify as "good." Mainly, though, the unanimous opinion -- shared here -- is that whatever the Hokies lose, there’s still no other outfit in the ACC worth taking a flier on. Most teams in this conference -- all but Clemson, in fact, which Tech doesn’t play in the regular season -- still seem to be counting on winning games by dragging proceedings into the mud and grinding scoring to a halt, and none of them yet have matched Beamer Ball for that.

Johnson: Forgotten man, but not for long.
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17. Oregon
It’s encouraging that the Ducks pulled it together for a rousing bowl game, off the post-Dixon November that rivaled only the final months at Cal and Alabama for head-exploding frustration. Without that spark, I’m not sure I or anyone else could justify any faith in this team’s resiliency -- remember, the same team lost its last four and five of its last seven in 2006, mostly by wide margins, and the ‘04 Ducks missed a bowl by losing their last three. Three November collapses in four years = extreme caution, before you even begin to account for the departure of Dixon and Jonathan Stewart.

Everywhere but quarterback, though, the Ducks look alright. Assuming Jeremiah Johnson returns to ‘06/early ‘07 form after missing the last six games (he’s just shy of 1,000 yards on well over six per carry in essentially a year-and-a-half of splitting time with Stewart), or some combination of Johnson, Andre Crenshaw and incoming LaGarrette Blount adds up to Stewart’s Herculean junior production, UO already has very good talent at receiver (Jaison Williams, USC transfer/ex-blue chip Jamere Holland, tight end Ed Dickson) and on the offensive line (center Max Unger and tackle Fenuki Tupou were all-Pac Ten by the coaches). Patrick Chung and league sack leader Nick Reed were also all-conference on a defense that returns seven of its top nine tacklers; corner Walter Thurmond was snubbed despite a terriffic stat line for a DB (8 tackles for loss, 18 passes broken up, 5 INT) -- maybe that production is an indication that he was frequently picked on (the best corners are often invisible in the box score), but at least he made some plays, too.

Anyway, the point is, Oregon shouldn’t be significantly different -- except at quarterback. As the bowl game proved, the panicked decline that followed Dixon’s injury was a consequence of the circumstances of the moment and shouldn’t indicate the team will cease to function without a Heisman contender in the shotgun. That’s good news, because it won’t have anything close to that this time -- which, of course, is the bad news. The uncertainty of what to expect from Nate Costa or Justin Roper is probably the only thing keeping the Ducks from becoming a chic pick for the top ten and an at-large BCS spot behind USC. Despite my timid personal optimism for Costa’s potential -- itself based on nothing but the fact that the team apparently was much more confident with him in the No. 2 role before his own ACL injury kept him from replacing Dixon -- I’m not about to pull the trigger on that kind of expectation for any non-Trojan team in a league with so much parity.

16. Arizona State
The same holds for the Devils, who rank ahead of Oregon only because the two play in Tempe this year. ASU remains capable on offense, led by a durable, experienced quarterback who might turn out to be the conference’s offensive MVP, in spite of his line’s fundamental inability to keep him upright; when he has time, Rudy Carpenter has as many proven options to distribute the ball to as any QB in the league. They remain capable defensively, with a solid pass rush (via end Dexter Davis), long-in-the-tooth linebackers and a couple second-year guys in the secondary (Omar Bolden and Troy Nolan) generally assumed to have bright futures. The kicker, Thomas Weber, hit all seven field goal attempts beyond 40 yards as a freshman and comes back as everybody’s all-American (although -- and I have no empirical evidence whatsoever to back this up -- I’d be willing to bet that status is not the best indicator for previously on-target guys following the seasons that produced the accolades).

The real problem with Arizona State last year was its failure to stay within striking distance of the best teams it faced; taking it to Oregon State, Stanford and Washington is one thing, but Oregon, USC and Texas made quick work of the Devils in meaningful, hyped games that in reality were never in doubt. Again, that firing-on-all-cylinders version of Oregon doesn’t translate to the ‘08 edition, but with the addition of Georgia (a big step up in degree of difficulty from last year’s non-conference "heavy," Colorado) and a trip to Berkeley to play a non-foundering version of Cal, ASU will have to show some more big game fight to avoid another BCS snub.

Not that I actually expect them to be in the running -- the schedule is rather frontloaded, with Georgia, Cal, USC and Oregon coming back-to-back-to-back-to-back in one four-game, six-week stretch at midseason, so expect to lose track of the Devils before they hit a winning streak in the final month.

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Nos. 21-25: The Wildcards

A too-soon look at next fall, sans the inevitable injuries, suspensions and other pratfalls of the long offseason. By popular demand.
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What’s Changed. Mike Pollack was all-conference and the only center picked on the first day of the draft, and tackles Brandon Rodd, Julius Orieukwu and Mike Gustavis were fifth-year seniors with a couple dozen career starts between them, but it’s hard to say the Devils will miss three-fifths of last year’s starting offensive line -- whatever he says publicly, Rudy Carpenter certainly won’t, for reasons best expressed by USC on Thanksgiving night:

The Trojans had six sacks, four by Lawrence Jackson alone, and that was hardly out of the blue: prior to that debacle, the Devil line had allowed three sacks to Colorado, four to Oregon State, six to Stanford (!), five to Washington State, eight to Oregon and six to UCLA, then finished the year by giving up four sacks to Texas in the Holiday Bowl. Carpenter was sacked more times per game than any quarterback in school history, more than any Pac Ten quarterback since the NCAA began keeping the stat in 2004, and more than any quarterback in the country last year except beleaguered Andrew Robinson at Syracuse. Anyone who watched ASU’s marquee, nationally-televised games against top ten-ish opponents -- Oregon, USC and Texas -- knows the high sack totals were only one symptom of the line’s inability to keep rushers off Carpenter, who was constantly hounded, hit and forced to throw the ball away in those games (all lopsided ASU losses) even when not actually sacked. How they managed to win ten while often allowing similar pressure in the late night FSN ghetto is a mystery, and a testament to just what a gamer Carpenter is.

This year’s group is not as experienced or talented on paper -- massive right guard Paul Fanaika is a two-year starter who’s been honorable mention all-Pac Ten both years, but the newbies are unheralded third and fourth-year players who couldn’t supplant the turnstile guys on the front line last year, and one of them, projected right tackle Jon Hargis, spent all of ‘07 on the defensive line -- but the law of averages says there’s nowhere to go but up. If they’re as easily overcome as that group, the problems here go much deeper than talent.

What’s the Same. If they get any blocking at all, the Devils’ returning skill talent is the most productive of any set of backs and receivers in the Pac Ten, including the thousand-starred menagerie at USC. This is to be expected from such a young group here: the Devils have had three different head coaches this decade, but have almost always managed to produce a good degree of balance by spreading the ball around among a lot of solid non-stars:

Outside of the quarterbacks, the only names from any of those seasons that really transcended regional notice and forced their way into the national consciousness were receivers Shaun McDonald and Derek Hagan (well, and Loren Wade, but for different reasons); otherwise, the Devils have just plugged in the best they can find and achieved pretty consistent results, which should be the case again this year. Carpenter will get (and should get) most of the attention, but ASU returns two of the three running backs who went over 500 yards rushing last year (Keegan Herring and Dmitri Nance) and both of the receivers who went over 40 catches/700 yards (Chris McGaha and Michael Jones, who averaged 16.7 yards and had ten touchdowns on 46 grabs). To that, you can also add Kyle Williams (6 TDs on just 29 catches) and incoming Ryan Bass, a must-have prospect rated as Rivals’ No. 2 "all-purpose" running back despite his iffy size (5’10", 186), who might be the best bet on the offense -- including Carpenter -- to break out of the confines of ‘role player.’

The Great Divide. The defense might have been somewhat overlooked in last year’s success, since the overall numbers obscure how well it played in the majority ASU’s wins. It was really a tale of two seasons, and the Devil D was borderline dominant in one of them:

The least you should know about Arizona State...
2007 Record • Past Five Years
2007: 10-3 (7-2 Pac Ten; T-1st)
2003-07: 38-24 (22-20 Pac Ten)
Five-Year Recruiting Rankings*
2004-08: 31 • 32 • 28 • 45 • 21
Returning Starters, Roughly
14 (7 Offense, 7 Defense)
Best Player
Given how often he was hit last year, there’s a good case to be made for Rudy Carpenter as the most underrated player in the country, or at least the toughest. He easily led the nation in pass efficiency as a freshman, and returned from the broken throwing hand that slowed him in 2006 to post a very good 145.1 rating (147.2 in Pac Ten games) in ‘07 behind the most porous line in the conference. Since taking over for Sam Keller midway through 2005, Carpenter’s 21-10 as a starter and somehow hasn’t missed a significant snap.
Completely Unsubstantiated Rumor
Before he put his head on ice, Walt Disney reportedly took time out to design the new logo for Arizona State College, which was scrapping the generic moniker "Bulldogs" for the more demonic and geographically appropriate "Sun Devils" in the early fifties. At least, Disney had the commission -- but the actual drawing may have been done by an underling who, in true disgruntled underling fashion, designed Sparky after Walt himself. Hey, if they can hide a boner in the Little Mermaid, subliminal messages in the Lion King and pedophilial suggestion in Aladdin, surely spinning the boss as a grinning devil is, uh, child’s play.
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* According to Rivals.

Those are outstanding, top ten-type numbers in the former category, but the fact that the dropoff was so steep, and especially because it occurred against the three toughest teams on the schedule, is not very encouraging for this unit’s ceiling when teams like Georgia, USC and Oregon come around again. In fact, among those ten victims, none finished in the top 50 nationally in scoring offense, and only Washington State was in the top 50 in total offense (Cal was No. 50 in both categories, but mostly because of its outstanding production prior to the injury to Nate Longshore; the Devils caught the Bears in the middle of their second half tailspin). Overall, there’s little doubt it was the best ASU defense of the decade, but when actually challenged by competent offenses, it was still very average, at best.

It doesn’t help that the two best players, linebacker Robert James (fifth round pick) and cornerback Justin Tryon (fourth round), were seniors, as was the best athlete on the defense, safety Josh Barrett, who disappointed on the field after leading the team in tackles in 2006 but still went in the seventh round and would certainly be welcomed back in the secondary if he could regain his junior form. This is an experienced group, and pretty talented in spots -- end Luis Vasquez, linebacker Travis Goethel and corner Omar Bolden were all four-star recruits who have played a lot, and less heralded prospects Dexter Davis and Troy Nolan might be better pro prospects; they’ve been more productive so far (Davis, in particular, was a terror with four multi-sack games as a sophomore, albeit against Stanford, Washington, UCLA and Arizona, some of the worst offenses on the schedule, which tracks with the defense as a whole). Given that potential, though, and a good track record under normal conditions, there’s no slack for being so overwhelmed again by any similarly talented attack with a pulse.

Overly Optimistic Post-Spring Chatter. For a guy three years into the system, Carpenter was undergoing a lot of work in April, voluntary and involuntary: he spent much of the spring session reworking his throwing motion ("trying to hold it a little higher and get it out of my hands a little bit faster"), with limited success ("sometimes in the heat of things I revert to my old throwing style"), and undergoing more surgery to remove scar tissue from his throwing hand after practices had ended. But the bigger change was a greater emphasis on more four and five-receiver sets to take advantage of the depth at receiver and more screens to get the ball out of Carpenter’s hands before he can be pummelled as mercilessly as he’s been the last two years. ASU was without Mike Jones, who was playing baseball, and ended up missing McGaha by the end of practice, no doubt to the lament of observers anxious to see the bubble screen that has big play written all over it. I.e., more thrilla, less vanilla: the four quarterbacks threw 80 passes in the spring game.

But the quote of the spring came from Dennis Erickson after a scuffle between linemen Jonathan English and Shaun Lauvao on a day when Miami’s coaching staff was visiting ASU practice, which left the old coach unimpressed:

"They couldn't hurt each other," Erickson joked. "I wish it would have been a little more vicious if you're going to do it. I was thinking about making them run afterwards. Give me a fight before I do that. That one was like it was almost planned. We've got to do something (for the visiting coaches). Let's show we're tough. That's about how exciting it was to me. I almost fell asleep."
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Considering Erickson struggled to keep his eyes open when Russell Maryland and Cortez Kennedy executed a tag-team powerbomb on Carlos Huerta in 1989, I wouldn’t take it personally, guys. After six years of earnest chest-thumping and semi-regular brawling in Miami, it takes a lot to move the old man.

Arizona State on You Tube. ASU’s done a very charming, well-edited little video series the last couple years called "Sun Devil Stories," the best of which, from just before the 2005 season, might be in need of a post-Katrina sequel -- some guys just can’t catch a break:

The rest of the clips follow Herb Sendek into the student section, unfairly cute kids, Devils fans on daytime game shows and maybe the only more or less hot teacher willing to teach third graders the shocker.

See Also: A recap of the dramatic 1996/7 Rose Bowl and the ghost of nine-year-old quarterback Joe Germaine, one of only two ASU trips to Pasadena since it started going to bowl games in 1939. ... UCLA fans converted to Sun Devils outside the Rose Bowl. ... And an impromptu rap battle between a bunch of lame white kids walking down the street on campus.

Best-Case: I’m not sure whether Georgia is really vulnerable or not -- ASU has faced three top 20 non-conference teams in Tempe in the last eleven years, destroying Nebraska in 1996 and Iowa in 2004 and taking LSU past the wire in the narrowest possible loss in 2005, but given last year’s flops against good teams, UGA at home and USC on the road look like extremely probable losses. They’re the only two in that category, though, and if the Devils can take five of six again against Cal, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, UCLA and Arizona -- they enter the season a tentative favorite in all of those games, and as the presumed runner-up to the Trojans -- another 9-3, Holiday/Sun Bowl kind of season is in order. A lateral step in this case is progress: ASU hasn’t finished two years in a row in the final polls since 1996-97, or for many years before that, and with a rising talent level, another second place or co-championship season would go a long way to establishing the program’s staying power.

Just one year to go, Rudy. One year to go.
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Worst-Case: The schedule is very unkind in one respect: ASU gets Georgia, a highly probable loss, and then the toughest road tests of the season, at Cal and at USC, in consecutive games in late September/early October. A three-game slide over that span could lead to big problems with Oregon, Oregon State and Washington on tap; a loss during that stretch, and possibly another against UCLA or Arizona to close the season, could leave the Devils staring at the Emerald or Las Vegas Bowl, and without much momentum going forward.

Non-Binding Forecast: The New Status Quo or Bust. There’s not much wiggle room in those scenarios: 7-5 on the low end to 9-3 on the high end. ASU is virtually assured two non-conference wins and realistically should not regress beyond 5-4 in league games; at the same time, they’re almost assured to lose to USC and Georgia, but no one else. The difference will be whether the team can maintain the same consistency it showed last year against its peers in the conference -- again, 5-1 against teams as closely matched as Cal, Oregon, Oregon State, UCLA, Arizona and even Washington, which gets ASU in Seattle this year, is a tremendous effort, and will be difficult to repeat. For now, progress is best measured by holding the line in those games and closing the gap against the elite portion of the slate, because neither the record nor postseason prospects are likely to improve. No matter what Phil Steele thinks of Cal, I’ll still take this bunch over the relatively depleted Bears, as well as UCLA and Oregon State; along with Oregon, this does look like a good bet for second place in the conference. Again.

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A quick review after a couple days since the last edition:

• Part One (ACC)
• Part Two (Big 12)
• Part Three (Big East)
• Part Four (Big Ten)
• Part Five (SEC and Pac Ten)

The working hypothesis, rather than the conventional wisdom of steady improvement, is that most quarterbacks are who they are from the beginning: initially good passers tend to decline or level off after a strong start, mediocre players tend to stay mediocre, and bad debuts are followed with some improvement, but generally level off. The exceptions are the really physically gifted, probably draft-bound players, like Philip Rivers, Vince Young and Chad Henne, who might (or, in Henne's case, might not) look bad or mediocre to begin but evolve quickly into much stronger players.

With this sample size, I don’t think that prediction held up under much scrutiny. It seems pretty clear most teams are starting a freshman quarterback out of necessity, not because he’s destined for stardom, and since even the most hyped freshmen sit a majority of the time, young ‘uns who do play immediately don’t have much greater eventual success than guys who don’t start until later in their careers. But as far as an identifiable trend goes, there’s this among the 41 guys with qualifying numbers as freshmen and sophomores:

The path of both lines is based on freshman passer rating, so follow the invisible vertical lines from year one (red) to the fluctuation in year two (blue). The two lines don’t show much relationship to each other, sequentially –– you could bet that a kid who started out with a rating below 100 would not explode as a sophomore, or that a guy who was over 150 as a freshman would not completely collapse, but for the great majority of quarterbacks in the middle, better numbers as a freshman did not correlate at all to better numbers as a sophomore.

In fact, the most obvious trend in year two is a movement toward the mean, in both directions. Bad and mediocre passers improved, sometimes greatly, but guys who were hot out of the gate almost universally regressed. And it just so happens that the point of departure for diminishing returns is right at last year’s national average for pass efficiency: 136.6. Of the 31 guys performing below that mark as freshmen, 26 improved as sophomores, most of them substantially, although the majority remained below average. Of the ten players who outperformed the average as freshmen, eight regressed in their second year, six of them falling below the average. To paraphrase Big Ten Wonk, the lesson here would be: whatever you think of him, for predictive purposes, regress your view of your young quarterback to the mean.

But as far as who’s progressing and who’s regressing, there are no great insights. Among the guys who improved their efficiency by 15 points or more from year one to year two:

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