I was interested in this look at run-pass balance in the SEC earlier this week, which found that a majority of teams in the conference passed more often than they ran in conference games last year, and five of the 12 passed at least 55 percent of the time. If that was true in the SEC, I wondered how the rest of the country would stack up along those same lines -- might we be approaching the point, passed years ago in the NFL, that teams are passing more often than they run, or at about the same rate?

Admittedly, I was kind of hoping that might be the case before I started running the numbers, because that's a finding: Pass has officially surpassed run in college football. But alas, long live the handoff:

Among the big conferences, only the supposedly pass-happy Big 12 comes close to "balance," and more than six times as many teams nationally fall into the category of "run-oriented" (55 percent runs or more) when you take into every game into account. In general, at 55 percent, you could say the entire country remains run-oriented.

There are two major factors that might mitigate that conclusion:

• Passing is a result of losing: Although certainly not the other way around. But it's no coincidence that six of the seven teams in the SEC that passed more often than they ran in conference games also finished with .500 or worse records in conference games -- and the only one that ended with a league mark above .500, Georgia, had the smallest margin (51 percent passes to 49 percent runs) and, you know, the No. 1 pick in the draft at quarterback. Where the national picture is concerned, this effect might explain most of the difference between "Big Six" conference teams and the mid-majors, since the former runs substantially more and the latter substantially less in lopsided non-conference games.
• Sacks: Because the NCAA counts sacks as running plays, some pass calls turn end up as runs, which can have a pretty significant impact on statistics. In the same way, a pass play can turn into a quarterback scramble, but (contrary to my protests for runners stuck for obvious losses to just throw the ball out of bounds) a run play is always just a run play.

If you take those factors into account, I think it's fair to say we're at a point of more or less equilibrium on the whole for probably the first time ever in college football, and the ratios probably aren't going to budge much for a while; I'm not sure if the pass is going to keep gaining ground, as the influence of "the spread" has always been as much about opening lanes to run as opening up the passing game. The right balance obviously varies from team to team, and game to game.

It does seem clear, though, that, given the opportunity, most coaches would still prefer to play the traditional odds. And given the average quarterback situation, I don't blame them.