The most basic way to view difference between Alabama, Auburn

By Michael Casagrande |
One’s almost boring.
The other, pure chaos.
In a state where football’s everything and the differences between its two warring factions are so accepted, sometimes it takes a new perspective. Sometimes it takes something as basic as a line chart to visualize the generational contrasts between Alabama and Auburn football over the past 16 years.
We’re talking primitive stuff, just with advanced analytics.
And that’s where a longtime employee of Notre Dame somehow enters the conversation. Welcome Brian Fremeau to the chat because his data helped paint the jagged charts that illustrate the chasm of consistency.
Since 2007, Fremeau’s website has tracked the efficiency of every meaningful college football possession. That site, bcftoys.com, is a side project from his role as senior director of facilities and operations on the iconic South Bend, Indiana campus.
It was last summer on bcftoys.com that Fremeau posted a line chart tracking the ups and downs for each school’s performance in his FEI rating. Basically, it measures the efficiency of each team’s ability to score per possession on offense and stop the opposition on defense.
“The things you’re supposed to do show up in that data,” Fremeau said. “You’re supposed to score when you have the ball if you’re good and you’re supposed to stop the opponent when they have the ball. It’s a way to smooth out the edges of all that noise.”
And that’s where the boring versus chaos came into play.
Alabama’s FEI since 2008 hasn’t moved much -- practically one long plateau after the growing pains of Saban’s debut a year earlier.
What went up hasn’t yet come down.
Auburn, meanwhile … insanity.
Peaks and valleys are the visual representations of championship runs followed by 1929-level crashes. It doesn’t take a detective to spot each of the four coaching ousters in this span.
Just take a look at the rudimentary reproduction of Fremeau’s artistic chart crafted on Google Sheets.
Though Fremeau isn’t specifically interested in SEC action, he’s always been fascinated by Auburn’s ability to keep it interesting.
“Auburn has always stuck out as a wild swing year to year,” Fremeau said, “or even game to game sometimes that those charts sometimes helped illustrate.”
From a FEI high of 1.09 during the Cam Newton national title run in 2010 to the -0.25 crater of 2012′s winless SEC season, the Tigers are the opposite of mundane.
And that cycle only figures to repeat itself with offensive wiz Hugh Freeze already stockpiling recruiting talent for the future.
Just look at the offensive FEI chart from the same span.
The second and final year of the Bryan Harsin mistake pushed Auburn’s rating into negative territory for the fifth time in the 16 years Fremeau charted. Tommy Tuberville (-1.18) and Gene Chizik (-0.83) were also out following sub-zero years while Gus Malzahn’s final Tiger team’s offensive FEI was 0.02.
“Alabama,” Fremeau, “is fundamentally the opposite of that for as long as I’ve been doing this work.”
There was a clear jump in the offensive efficiency when the 2017 class of QBs and skill players hit the scene. From Tua Tagovailoa to Mac Jones and the star power in between, Alabama’s offensive FEI got all the way to 2.23 in 2020 after winning a national title at 0.44 in 2015. Those figures dropped the last two seasons but without falling out of the top three nationally.
Overall, Alabama’s been in the top two of the FEI 11 times -- No. 1 on eight occasions.
“It’s kind of wild to think, yes they have some downs and they aren’t always the clear top team, but the fact their dips are so shallow is kind of remarkable,” Fremeau said. “Not only is it unprecedented, it’s hard to even imagine another program cruising at that same altitude -- like Georgia -- matching that over that length of time. It’s an unfathomable stretch, it feels like.”
The Bulldogs topped the FEI the last two seasons but the highest rating in the last 16 years was achieved by a team that didn’t even make the CFP title game. The 2019 Ohio State team had a 1.66 FEI though 2021 Georgia and 2018 Alabama were right behind at 1.65.
Fremeau admits there are a few blind spots in his algorithm.
“There’s a lot of missing data too,” Fremeau said. “My numbers don’t know the QB was injured in the middle of the third quarter. It just knows what happened in the third quarter, for example.”
But he’s also been collaborating with Bill Connelly’s SP+ ratings, now on ESPN, for years. That produces an even more comprehensive F+ rating.
No surprise there.
Does any of this reveal any great, unknown truth about the two kings of in-state college football? Of course not. It’s just interesting sometimes to step back and look at the most basic way of illustrating a well-documented reality typically viewed through a microscope instead of a telescope. Also, recall Auburn beat Alabama five times in the course of this data collection so there’s nuance in what looks like a landslide.
Questions for the future remain, too.
When will those line charts again intersect? How much of a jolt can Freeze bring this year? Next fall?
And how long can Saban maintain this assembly-line level of efficiency?
The next set of data points will begin filling Fremeau’s insane spreadsheets on Sunday when he spends a few hours manually inputting Saturday’s data, one drive at a time, into the computer.
With it, the art of the line chart will continue its dance.