I pride myself on thinking past knee-jerk reactions, and not accepting lazy generalizations.

When I heard what Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley said that Georgia’s defense wouldn’t be a top-5 unit if it played in the Big 12, I tried to stick to both of those rules.

The knee-jerk reaction for someone who watched Georgia all of last season was, “who is Riley to say something like that? The Bulldogs were absolutely loaded, and just because they allowed 48 points to Riley’s Oklahoma team doesn’t mean that would have been the norm vs. the Big 12.”

Then, of course, I saw the full quote about what Riley actually said and how it really wasn’t meant to be a dig at Georgia at all. In case you missed it, here was the full exchange he had with Danny Kanell on ESPNU Sirius XM Radio on Tuesday:

And just in case that wasn’t enough, Riley doubled down on why he wasn’t taking a jab at Georgia:

Ok, so we can agree that it was more about Riley talking about the different styles of the Big 12 compared to the SEC, and not him saying “Georgia’s defense couldn’t last in our league.”

Let me preface the following by saying I would have taken Georgia’s defense to play with anyone at any time last year. The Dawgs were a force.

But let’s not pretend like Georgia was immortal against teams that could stretch the field. Oklahoma put up 48, Auburn dropped 40 and Mizzou lit up the Dawgs for 28 in Athens. Even a Tua Tagovailoa-led Alabama offense gave Georgia problems.

The Dawgs had a clear defensive weakness last year, and if they had faced more teams who could stretch them out like they would have in the Big 12, I definitely think their defensive numbers would have taken a hit (their offensive numbers would probably spike in the Big 12).

Riley said that the root of the comment was a compliment to the Big 12, and not a diss to Georgia or the SEC. I’m not sure if he knew the numbers when he made the comment, but I was certainly curious about them. So I looked them up. I found every game that the Big 12 played against the SEC during the Playoff era. If Big 12 offenses were stymied by SEC defenses, obviously Riley’s claim would have lost credibility.

That wasn’t the case. At all.

Credit: Robert Hanashiro-USA TODAY Sports

Including the 48 points that Oklahoma scored against Georgia in the 2017 Rose Bowl, the Big 12 averaged 28.2 points vs. SEC defenses in 21 games during the Playoff era. Only 3 times did a Big 12 team fail to reach 20 points in those Playoff-era matchups.

If you want to limit the sample size to just Alabama, Auburn, Georgia and LSU — AKA the elite SEC defenses — Big 12 teams still averaged 25.7 points per contest. That number would have ranked No. 56 in scoring defense among FBS teams.

You see, Riley’s point wasn’t that SEC teams would have any less success in the Big 12 (the SEC has the 12-9 matchup advantage during the Playoff era). He just knows how rare it is to have a top 5 scoring defense in a conference full of teams that stretch the field and run a ton of plays. In fact, the last time a Big 12 team had a top 5 scoring defense was when Ndamukong Suh-led Nebraska had the No. 1 unit in America in 2009. Since then, however, it’s been ugly.

Here are the top Big 12 scoring defenses by year from 2010-17:

  • 2017 — No. 15 TCU
  • 2016 — No. 25 Kansas State
  • 2015 — No. 28 Oklahoma
  • 2014 — No. 8 TCU
  • 2013 — No. 19 Oklahoma State
  • 2012 — No. 28 Kansas State
  • 2011 — No. 31 Oklahoma
  • 2010 — No. 6 Mizzou

That’s not an accident. It’s like how SEC teams rarely produce the nation’s top passing attacks.

A lot of those top-ranked Big 12 defenses had success against the SEC, too. That 2014 TCU squad held Hugh Freeze’s high-powered Ole Miss offense to 3 points. That 2015 Oklahoma team went into Knoxville and held the nation’s No. 29 offense to 17 points in regulation.

I don’t know if Riley had all of those exact numbers in the back of his mind when he made the Georgia comment. Maybe he just drew on his 15 years of coaching experience. And yeah, only one of them was as a head coach and 10 of them were spent in the Big 12. But he’s not just making a lazy generalization here.

Riley might have ruffled some SEC feathers for his comment. Perhaps subconsciously it didn’t sit right because it came from a 34-year-old with a year of head coaching experience. It probably didn’t come off well to Georgia fans because it was Riley’s team who lost the Rose Bowl.

We can debate those things until we’re blue in the face, just like how we can debate Georgia’s defensive ranking if it played in the Big 12. We won’t get any definite answers, though.

All I know is that I’m not about to declare Riley an enemy of the SEC for saying something that made even more sense after digging into the numbers.

And if Georgia and Oklahoma could schedule a home-and-home series ASAP, that’d be greatly appreciated.