1974

Rivals had posted some shots of what purported to be Michigan's road uniforms this season. They controversially(!) featured white pants, and they are a real thing:

Michigan had a brief period in the mid-70s in which they wore uniforms very similar to those. You can see what they looked like (and get your RDA recommended dosage of Keith Jackson) in the introductions to the 1974 OSU game. A wider shot of the pants comes at 1:15:

A better look at the uniforms is available to people willing to watch the infamous Mike Lantry "miss" in 1974:

These are legit throwbacks, so they've got that going for them. I'm not sure how I feel about them yet; it'll be hard to tell until I see the modernized version actually on a person. I think I'll like the jerseys but wish we were going with maize pants.

It is interesting that the instant Harbaugh comes in Michigan wears a clean, actual throwback. One of the many revelations in Endzone—sorry, BRANDON'S LASTING LESSONS—is that a large number of the uniformz folly can be traced directly to the AD, down to the goofy numbers against South Carolina.

Adidas remains responsible for delivering jerseys that tore as soon as the opponents looked at 'em, though.

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scoreboard

Last week I did the thing you're not supposed to do: I got into an argument with a Tennessee fan about conference strength. Actually it started as a conversation about how cute my 1-year-old dog is but all conversations with SEC fans are really conference strength conversations. Before the inevitable deterioration into Woodson-Manning (which is particularly impossible with him because he knew Peyton in school and has an incredible story about how nice of a guy Peyton Manning was) I thought to test his assertion that the SEC has been dominant, except for 2005, since Bear Bryant's day.

Attempting to debate this, I stumbled onto sports-reference.com's SRS statistic. It stands for "Simple Rating System" and was borrowed from the NFL guys. What it represents is how much that team should beat an average team:

So every team's rating is their average point margin, adjusted up or down depending on the strength of their opponents.

This generally works for the NFL because of relative schedule parity. But it proved useless for comparing college football teams and conferences over history because they lacked that. I'll explain why, but first lets apply SRS averages of the conferences since 1964 to our debate, which demonstrates… that I just totally screwed myself:

b1gsec

Cliggens embicking.

Well yeah, but we admitted this: until Penn State joined and some of the dreks got their acts together it really was the Big Two-Little 8. Let's see mostly Michigan-Ohio State against Alabama et al.:

Big2

It stayed pretty even except when Michigan wasn't good. There's a reason for that: Michigan (35 times) and Ohio State (33) teams account for over two thirds of Big Ten's 100 representatives from the last 50 years. Alabama teams are counted 28 times, with Florida (18), Tennessee (15), Georgia (12), Auburn (11) and LSU (11) all ahead of the next Big Ten team, which is Penn State (8). Until the '90s, the bottom half of the Big Ten sucked way worse than the bottom half of the SEC, according to SRS:

thedreks

What really happened here: the SEC teams were playing easier schedules until the Big Ten caught on and started scheduling bodybags, and then things were even until the Big Ten started actually sucking. I explain, after the jump.

[The jump, after which I explain, as I just explained]