FG kicker situation

[Prediction? Pain.]

Damn it, people. Now you've piqued my curiosity about FG stats, of all things.

Comparing Mullen's kickers' percentages to kickers of yesteryear is interesting stuff. (And I was especially interested to see that Hazelwood's numbers were so low.) But those raw stats don't give me any controls to compare them to.

So I looked at SEC-game-only FG% stats for all SEC teams during Mullen's tenure and lined them up to see where we landed. What I found was that, on average, SEC teams' FG kicking is all over the map.

Since 2009, every SEC team has finished in the Top 3 of the league in FG% as least once. In the same span, every SEC team but one (Auburn) has finished 10th or worse at least once. And 9 of the 14 teams in the SEC have finished 10th or worse multiple times in that span. (Most years -- with 2009 and 2011 being the only real exceptions -- the FG% of teams ranked 10th or worse started dropping below 70%.)

Really, there have been only five or six consistently average-or-better FG-kicking SEC teams since 2009: Auburn, U. Miss, LSU, UGA, Kentucky, and Missouri. Auburn and U. Miss. are the only teams whose average rank in the conference is 5th or higher in those years. (4.6 for Auburn, 4.8 for U. Miss.) LSU and UGA both average 6th or higher. And Kentucky's and Missouri's average rank was 7th or higher. For every other SEC team -- more than half the conference, in other words -- their average ranks were between 7.5 and 8.5 in the SEC.

So even though almost every team team in the league has had at least one stellar year of FG kicking to go along with at least one year of awful FG kicking, no SEC team has averaged a Top 3 finish in the league since 2009, and no SEC team has averaged 9th or lower either.

So in context, Mullen's kickers have been par for the course in the SEC, meaning that they've been up and down. Taking the jump from there to the consistency that Auburn, LSU, U.Miss, and UGA have shown is obviously the goal. (Note, though, that LSU's been struggling of late. Finishes of 10th and 12th in 2014 and 2015, and 8th in 2016.) But it looks like Mullen's not alone in being unable to figure out how to make that leap.

None of this addresses distance, of course. Those stats are available, but I'm gonna pass on crunching them and figuring out how to integrate them with the rest of this jibber jabber.

Here are MSU's SEC-game-only FG% ranks among SEC teams for each year of Mullen's tenure, if your interested:

2009 - 3rd
2010 - 7th
2011 - 7th
2012 - 11th
2013 - 14th
2014 - 7th
2015 - 6th
2016 - 13th