It happens again as Spencer Hall claims that the SEC is ‘getting faster’ without offering any real evidence to back it up.
One of the most grating sounds to my ears is to hear media types prattle on about SEC ‘speed’, which is at best a lazy substitute for serious analysis (to wit, when an SEC team wins a game, it’s always because of ‘speed’….when an SEC team loses, it’s because of…what? We never find out, do we?) and at worst a code word to let us know the racial make up of a roster.
In the article, Hall claims to have discovered some recent trend down South to explain why SEC players are so fast, courtesy of one strength coach:
The big Aussie casually framed one of the only rational explanations for the persistent and partially inaccurate perception of the SEC speed myth/Big Ten Sloth Legend: The emphasis on speed training, explosive Olympic-style movements in the weight room, and a noticeable bleedover between the disciplines of track and field and football.
The shift is not limited to the SEC, either.
“Miami’s only lifting twice a week now — the rest of the week they’re running,” Sutton says. “Twice a week — that’s it. Their skill players all run track in the offseason.”
Of course, those who follow Miami football will tell you that it wasn’t recently that the Canes put an emphasis on speed. Miami football players have been running track in the spring for a long time (page 3 of the link I gave details Miami track records held by football players). It’s nothing new. And the SEC has long been a power in track and field. The nexus between track and football has been around in the SEC for a while, even if some are just now discovering it.
Looking across the country, the fastest football programs are the ones that have historically worked side-by-side with track and field, no matter the conference. USC, Florida, Miami, LSU, Auburn, Texas….they all have legitimate sprint programs and training facilities that augment–or in some cases, correct–some of the snake oil that emerges from the strength and conditioning racket, which loves to claim that it can make a player ‘bigger, faster and stronger’. That is rarely the case.
The other important factor to the SEC’s speed is something Hall casually disposes of without so much as a thought: weather.
Now, consider if you will — as I did, in between gasping for my life and making the term “agility drill” an ironic joke — the rationale behind the “ESS-EEE-SEE” speed myth. Weather? Unlikely. A different caliber of athlete? The bell curve and years of measured athletic performance rule out this argument, especially since Big Ten athletes run times comparable to athletes from other conferences at the combine.
Why isn’t weather a likely explanation? All one has to do is have a basic understanding of track and field–something too much to ask for from this generation of writers, apparently–to understand that it is a quite valid explanation. If one looks at the Track and Field News list of top high school sprinters, one sees that the sprints are dominated by kids from warm weather states. Why do kids in warm weather states have faster times? It’s because they have better weather year-round in which to train and develop their speed during the critical teen growth years. And since one of the laws of recruiting is that kids want to play close to home, it’s no wonder that most warm-weather sprinters stay in their region to play for warm-weather schools.
Ted Ginn is a supremely fast human being. But his best senior year 200-meter time was just 21.25 (he also ran an outstanding 13.40 in the short hurdles) while prepping at Cleveland’s Glenville High. But let Ginn grow up in warm weather and his times would’ve been ridiculous. This is something track recruiters take into account when looking at cold-weather sprinters–if you can put up good times in the Midwest and Northeast, you are likely to blossom once you go somewhere warmer.
Instead of looking at the logic of warm weather sprinters staying close to home, Hall attributes the SEC speed to the development that goes on in SEC weight rooms. Naturally, after spending some time with a couple strength coaches, he gives them the credit.
In the SEC, the emphasis will be developing the player’s speed. According to some trainers, the top Big Ten programs focus more on adding muscle.
The difference a training program makes may be marginal when you compare the uniformly elite talent recruited by top college programs, but margins are where smallish teams like West Virginia beat teams like Oklahoma in bowl games, and where Ohio State might lose a crucial step on the edge in high-profile debacles against SEC teams.
West Virginia didn’t beat Oklahoma because it had more speed. It beat Oklahoma because it ran a very difficult offense to defend, one which Oklahoma doesn’t see very often. The same thing happened against Boise State and USC–the Sooners wilted against offenses that used the whole field and mixed it up with odd formations.
You can’t teach speed. I don’t care how much a strength coach emphasizes it. Speed is based on genetics, period. You can develop speed that already exists or that is nascent, but that’s about it.
Is the SEC faster than the Big Ten? Probably, though it isn’t quantifiable up and down the rosters. Is the SEC any faster than the Pac-10 and Big 12? Nah. Is every SEC school faster than every Big Ten school? No way. Is there an elite group of schools across the country that are generally faster than every other program? For sure. Are they all in the SEC? Not at all.
Will the media continue to prattle on about SEC speed–at the expense of legitimate analysis–for the foreseeable future? Guaranteed.
Reading the article I dont think that Spencer Hall is trying to perpetuate the myth of SEC speed. What he is looking at is the differences in what certain programs emphasize in their strength and conditioning programs, and that trend in college football these days is towards speed and agility rather than pure strength.
If anything I think this was a more legitimate look at the myths that are flying around these days and he doesnt really focus on the SEC being faster than everyone else, more just differences in training regimes.
And while I agree to some extent that you cant teach speed you can refine it and you can certainly teach and train explosiveness within a ten yard box.
You hit the nail on the head HP. I rememmber running numbers on recruits between Purdue and Miami (FL) a few years back and Purdue’s recruits were actually faster on average than Miami.
Also I don’t remember seeing any LSU Tiger catch Chris Wells on the first score of the championship game last year.
The worst part of the “SEC speed” statement is that it has been exacerbated due solely to the performance of one team: Ohio State.
I have seen a lot of Ohio State games, and they were probably (OK, certainly) not the fastest team on the field in the 2002 National Title game against Miami, but they seemed to manage just fine. 2005 Ohio State lined up with Texas and looked pretty even, and quite frankly looked like they could have run circles around Texas in 2006. Those two OSU teams had speed to spare.
The honest truth is that speed really has little to do with it. Everybody has speed at every position today. It all starts up front, in the trenches, and the fact of the matter is OSU just so happened to get pushed around by both Florida and LSU in high profile games at the line of scrimmage: Games which OSU was unlucky enough to draw, because maybe only one or two other teams in the country would’ve beat either (or both) on those particular nights also.
OSU would’ve been a lot better off if they had the “speed” of some run stuffers up the middle, like Tim Anderson, Mike Doss, and Matt Wilhelm, who all carried them to the 2002 title. In other words, speed is overrated.
I’m guessing the reason mandel,dienhart, and feldman rave about your website is because you took them out to dinner or something because I don’t find your writing as indispensable.
First of all, on your topic of misunderstanding speed you bascially prove the that SEC is the fastest.I doubt any SEC homer could have done it any better.
You bring up the point about a schools track and field as being an indication of which football teams are the fastest. Looking at the list of indoor national champions I see Tennessee, Arkansas and LSU have all won outdoor track titles this decade. (0 for pac 10 schools,0 for big 12 schools, and of course, 0 for the slugs at big 10 schools)
Outdoor track is not much different as SEC schools Arkansas, Lsu and Tennessee have dominated that sport as well.(To be fair though Stanford has won a title during this decade.)Still 5 is greater than one. POINT SEC.
Your next point borders on the absurd as you try and use the weather in the south to discredit southern football players.
Do you think there is some sort of steroid in southern uv rays?
So the weather’s nicer big deal that doesn’t mean a kid has the guts to go out and play.
BTW, according to a USA football stutdy, the highest levels of football parcipation at the high school level are all in the south. MISSISSIPPI IS NO.1 while Georgia, Flordida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama are all in the top ten. (California is Just 25th!)
So your partially right,what seperates the southern athlete is not so much speed as it is Guts.
ALSO, back to the topic of weather for a moment.You neglect to mention that unlike the west coast, southern athletes have to deal with humdity. Humdity is the water level in the air, in case you did not know. During the night the water in the air settles on the ground esecially on grass. This moisture (or dew) makes it harder for runners, no matter how good an athlete they are, to gain traction and thus reduces their overall speed.
Ted Ginn didn’t have to worry about humdity for two reasons. ONE: he played in the north humdity levels are much less. Two: most big ten schools have artifical football surfaces which are the easiest to run on because they allow a runner to get traction eaiser.
SO by playing in the south, southern athletes have much more to overcome to be regared as fast compared to kids in west or north. The athletes have to overcome the heat (of course) and the dew caused by humdity, which slows them down during sprints.POINT SEC.
FINALLY, the clincher to the SEC’s speed superiority (and the most important) is a point you ignored.NFL DRAFT PICKS.
This year the SEC put six players in the first round continuing there overall dominance over the past 10 to 15 years. (according to USA TODAY)
(YES, southern cal had more overall players selected than any one school. But what does that really say. It say’s the rest of the pac 10 has inferior talent.It’s quite possible that southern cal’s players look good just because of the confrence that they are in. Reggie, Matt, Carson, and Lendale haven’t exactly taken over nfl.)
Unlike the pac 10 everyone in the SEC has talent not just one schooL. POINT, SET, MATCH.