Pelini's defense poised to succeed?

Over the weekend on Yahoo! Sports, Terry Bowden released the aptly titled "Terry's Top 10 Analysis." I'll let former coach Bowden explain it in his own words:

"Basically, it is a chart of last year’s final top 10 teams and all of the various factors and statistics that I believe (sometimes mistakenly) are important in building a championship team. I want to see what exactly it is that the 10 best teams in college football are doing to be so successful."

Here's the chart(PDF here):

According to Bowden, any statistical category with seven or more teams finishing in the top 25 is deemed "critically important." In order of critical importance, that gives us: rushing defense, scoring defense, total defense, turnovers gained (i.e. takeaways) and turnover margin.

Feeling good about hiring a defensive head coach yet? It gets better.

In his five years as a collegiate coordinator, Bo Pelini has never had a defense finish lower than 20th (Neb. '03) in rushing defense. In terms of scoring defense, his worst performance--17th in the nation-- was actually last year at LSU. In 2003, his Blackshirts squad finished 6th in this category. Total defense? Pelini's never finished lower than 13th in that category and has spent the past three seasons with the 3rd-ranked unit in the nation each year.

Turnovers are a bit dicier. In his lone season as Nebraska's defensive coordinator, Bo set a school record with 47 takeaways, a total that lead the nation. Last year LSU had 36, good enough for third, but in the three seasons in between Pelini's defenses were merely average to below-average with 21, 14 and 22. Accordingly, turnover margin follows the same pattern. Two great seasons in '07 and '03 sandwiching three average years.

Overall, Pelini's track record looks pretty good when up against the metrics that won games last year. Based on his past performance, Pelini seems like he can consistently churn out defenses that will rank high in Bowden's "critically important" categories. That's the good news.

The bad news is that Pelini's never faced as vast a reclamation project as he does with this 2008 squad. In 2003, Bo made a college ball name for himself by taking Nebraska from the 55th ranked defense in '02 to the 13th best squad in '03. When he went to Oklahoma in 2004, his defense actually faired worse than the previous year, going from the best unit in '03 to the 13th in '04. From there it was on to LSU where he inherited the third-best defense and kept them there for the next three seasons.

Last year Nebraska ranked 116th in rushing defense, 114th in scoring defense, 112th in total defense, 118th in takeaways and 117th in turnover margin. It's a miracle we were 5-7.

For a conference comparison, here is Sunday Morning Quarterback's statistical analysis of Big 12 conference games last year. Teams that allowed fewer rushing yards in Big 12 games won 81% of the time, fewer total yards 77%. Turnover margin tops SMQ's list with the highest correlation to winning on a game-by-game basis so let's hope were getting one of Pelini's nasty, ball-hawking defenses rather than just one of his nasty defenses.

So what do we know? Defense wins football games and Bo knows defense but our defense has a long damn way to go.