NFL Starters By College Conference: Now With Division!

In a past (and basically present) life I was an engineer, so things like the inability to comprehend even the simplest ideas about math depress me. This article depresses me, sort of. It compiles the various starters across the NFL and reaches this conclusion:

When you break it all down, the SEC leads the way with 137 projected starters for the 2008 NFL season. The ACC finished second with 121 projected starters.

The Big Ten finished third with 105 starters and the Big 12 was fourth with 72 projected starters.

The Pac-10 finished with 70 starters, the Big East has 33 starters and Conference USA and the Mountain West each have 22 starters.

Yeoman work by one Mike Detiller of Houma Today, but he forgot the last step: division. Not all conferences have the same number of teams in them. Your conference leaders by average:

SEC: 11.4
ACC: 10.1
Big Ten: 9.5
Pac-10: 7
Big 12: 6
Big East: 4.1

The major difference is the Pac-10 hopping above the Big 12. The Big Ten also inches pretty close to the ACC, and the Big East isn't quite so despicably sad. Don't know why anyone is surprised the ACC is second, since "NFL starters" is pretty close to "how good was your conference 4-8 years ago" and the ACC's total includes Miami.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

7-07-2008 @ 6:50PM

Adam Jacobi said...

Wait, though. Didn't Miami and BC play in the Big East until 2003? Shouldn't there be a bit of a, ahem, realignment for the older NFL players?

7-08-2008 @ 1:11PM

T Kyle King said...

Drat! When I saw the headline, I thought you were going to tell us how many of the S.E.C. players were from the East and how many were from the West so we could subdivide our "S.E.C. speed!" taunting on an even more provincial basis!

Seriously, good work as always, Brian. Adam, you're right. It's silly to count a former Miami Hurricane whose entire college career was spent in the Big East as a former A.C.C. player. If you're ranking the states by how many presidents each of them has produced, you credit New York with F.D.R. but not with Bill Clinton, no matter where the latter happens to call home currently.