College Football Predictions – Georgia Southern Eagles 2017 NCAA Football Preview
2016 Recap
2016 Record – 5-7
2016 ATS – 3-9
If it ain’t broke – don’t fix it.
The Eagles abandoned their DEVASTATING mostly run-focused attack last season and were rewarded with a crappy 5-7 season and no bowl appearance. To be fair, the Eagles lost a lot of close games, but the fact remains that they had a stretch of seven losses in eight games before their upset win over Troy in the season finale.
2017 MEGALOCKS Opening Power Rating
Sun Belt – TBD
OFFENSE
The Eagles were ranked #1 in rushing in the FBS in 2014 AND 2015. Last year ? 29th. The Eagles are determined to get back to their unstoppable selves this season and new OC Bryan Cook has the Georgia Tech pedigree to make it happen.
QB is the key to this offense (monster HOT TAKE) and we worry about the lack of experience at the position. MEGALOCKS SUN BELT INSIDERS are still unclear as to how the QB battle will unfold, but one thing is clear, we should expect a learning curve and some mistakes to go along with the big plays on the ground. The RB group looks pretty solid even with the departure of Matt Breida. The offensive line returns three starters and we expect the running game to average over 300 yards per game in 2017. The passing game ? Hard to say (see the QB analysis) how this group will do but they just need to supply one or two big hits per game for this offense to roll. Stay tuned.
DEFENSE
The defense has a streak of FOUR consecutive seasons of increased points-per-game allowed. Not good. The Eagles return just five starters on defense this season, lose their top-2 leading tacklers and need to rebuild the starting linebacker group. All is not lost as they bring back excellent DT Darrius Sapp and one of the best secondaries in the conference. We do worry, however, that the Eagles will be abused by teams that are effective at running the football. They also need to get more PENETRATION (11 sacks in 2016 – 2nd last Sun Belt).
Our overall opinion is that this defense is good enough to help the Eagles contend for a Sun Belt title but the running game needs to be LIGHTS OUT.
SPECIAL TEAMS
Georgia Southern is really going to miss ace PK Younghoe Koo who nailed 28/29 XP and 19/20 FGs in 2016. That was a 3rd Team AA (!) performance. The rest of the unit looks average.
Potential ATS Trouble Spot
November 9 – at Appalachian St. This will be their 3rd road game in four weeks against a team that has destroyed them the past two seasons.
MEGAmazing Tidbits
We are yuuuge fans of the PHIL STEELE experience chart and the Eagles rank #129.
MEGALOCKS ATS Value Rating (10) 4.0
MEGALOCKS says:
Overall, we give the EAGLES a 4.0 ATS Value Rating (Below Average) this season.
Disclaimer. Check out our prediction for Georgia Southern last season. We gave them an 8.0 ATS Value Rating. What a COLD TAKE.
The Eagles are 16-9 ATS (64%) the past two seasons and there is no reason to think that they will not have a winning record against the number again in 2016.
We did not fully appreciate the negative impact of moving to a more pass-focused attack.
2017 ?
This is a tough call. A case can be made for the Eagles to dominate with the ground game and getting back to winning games and covering the spread. Our gut feel is that they may be a year away from getting back to being a true Sun Belt powerhouse due to the inexperience on defense and at LB. HC Tyson Summers also needs to show us that he can get this team to overachieve from time-to-time. We will be watching with interest but are hitting the ‘pause button’ for now.
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