Skull Session: Thayer Munford Was Quietly Awesome, Ohio State Lost to the Greatest Team of All-Time, and Mike Hart is Back at Michigan

By Kevin Harrish on January 14, 2021 at 4:59 am
O-H.
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The Buckeyes gave us a warm welcome to football-less basketball season last night.

Final Four? Final Four.

Word of the Day: Stupefy.

 HE'S STILL GOING. In my innocent naivety, I must admit that I foolishly expected Dabo Swinney to at least somewhat walk back his No. 11 ranking for the Buckeyes after Ohio State stuffed his team down a garbage disposal on national television.

Not only did Dabo decline to do that, but he's still talking about it two weeks later.

I'd argue the most pressing question in our nation at this very moment in time is where Dabo ranked Ohio State in his final coaches poll. We need our sharpest minds on the case.

 THAYER OF THE YEAR? With Wyatt Davis eating up all of the headlines – as a unanimous All-American is known to do, to be fair – Thayer Munford had one of the quietest incredible seasons I've ever witnessed.

But the folks who watch and grade every snap – they've taken notice.

Here's hoping next season is even better!

 WELL IF YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE TO SOMEONE... It may as well be the best college football team of all time. And according to Bill Connelly's SP+ ratings, that's exactly what this Alabama squad was.

SP+ grades 2020 Alabama as the greatest team ever

I'm not here to tell you which stats or algorithms to believe. There are plenty of good systems out there, and they all tell interesting stories. I like my SP+ ratings, because of the depth of the stories I can tell with them. I've run them with complete play-by-play data going back to 2005, and I've created estimated versions of them from 1883 to 2004 based on game results and scores. It provides solid predictive accuracy in the present and contributes wonderful historical context for a lot of the writing I do.

I say all of this for one specific reason: SP+ thinks more highly of Alabama's 2020 team -- which just wrapped up a perfect 13-0 campaign with a 28-point thumping of Ohio State in the College Football Playoff National Championship -- than any other team in the history of the sport.

Best teams since 1883, according to SP+ percentile ratings:

2020 Alabama (99.718)

1959 Syracuse (99.692)

1956 Oklahoma (99.691)

1959 Ole Miss (99.651)

1974 Oklahoma (99.612)

I'm not sure this makes me feel any better about what transpired, but it certainly doesn't make me feel any worse, either.

 FOUR MORE YEARS! Mike Hart will earn his 10th-consecutive loss to Ohio State this season, and to celebrate the momentous occasion, he's going back to where it all began.

Currently, Hart has four losses to the Buckeyes as a player, one loss at Western Michigan and four losses at Indiana, making him just one defeat shy of that elusive 0-10 mark.

It's absolutely poetic that he and Jim Harbaugh will be on the same Wolverine coaching staff. Harbaugh couldn't beat the Buckeyes in five tries, so he hired a dude who couldn't beat them in nine. Incredible.

And if you don't think I'm gonna have a plaque made and sent to Mr. Hart's office when he pulls off this unprecedented feat...

 SONG OF THE DAY. "Carry the Zero" by Built To Spill.

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