2011 vs. 2019

Throughout this year, I've found myself thinking back to the 2011 season. At the time, our 12-0 run was widely discussed as potentially the "best college football regular season of all time". This year felt pretty similar so I thought it would be interesting to look at the two seasons side by side (I'm clearly not accomplishing shite at work today..):



I'm just looking at the regular season since we don't really know how the postseason will shake out beyond the SECCG. I listed two AP rankings. The first is the ranking at the time the game was played. The second is either the final regular season rankings (for 2011) or the current regular season rankings (for 2019).

A few of things struck me here. The first thing that jumps out is that I forgot badly we were mauling teams in 2011. Even with our dysfunctional offense and quarterback controversy, we only had ONE game (Alabama) decided by less than 13 points. We won 9 games by 24+ points. That's without counting the absolute pounding we gave UGA in the SEC Championship.

The second thing that jumps out at me is.. man, that was a legit schedule. I thought this year's schedule compared, but it really doesn't. If Texas had turned out to be as good as we thought they were, then maybe it would be close.

When you look at the final rankings from 2011 - after the BCS championship game - our schedule looks even more legit. During that season, we beat the teams that finished #1, #4, #5, #17, and #19 in the final AP rankings. That said, winning out this year would mean we tacked on a few more top 5 wins between the SECCG and CFP.

The third thing that struck me is that during the 2011 season, I always felt like we were scraping by to win tough-fought games. But the scores don't reflect that. This year it's the exact opposite - I feel like we have pretty much dominated in every game we've played, but the scores show that games have been much closer than they were in 2011.

The last thing I wanted to look at were some of the offensive/defensive stats from the two seasons:





As pretty much everyone would expect, the 2011 defense was elite, while the 2019 offense has been elite. The thing that surprised me the most is that our scoring efficiency in points per play was so high in 2011. My suspicion is that this is mostly due to defensive and special teams scores. I didn't go through each game to manually split out offensive points, and I know we had multiple defensive touchdowns in 2011.

Regardless, I thought this was worth sharing for anyone else trying to figure out where this season stands in the history of LSU football - overall, it's been almost equal to our best regular season ever, and if we win out we will certainly be in the conversation of best overall seasons ever.